KNOWLEDGE OF CONTENT

Knowledge of Content Framing Statement

Eva Sanchez

ED 698 Master’s Portfolio Spring 2022

University of Alaska Southeast

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KNOWLEDGE OF CONTENT

Knowledge of Content

A teacher knows the teacher’s content area and how to teach it (Design of curriculum and
instruction.)
Candidates demonstrate their ability to plan and design instruction that supports every
student in meeting rigorous learning goals by drawing upon knowledge of content areas,
cross-disciplinary skills, and pedagogy, as well as knowledge of learners and the
community context. The Candidate demonstrates the understanding and use of a variety of
instructional strategies to encourage learners to develop a deep understanding of content
areas and their connections, and to build skills to apply knowledge in meaningful ways.
This paper will focus on the principles of curriculum design and instruction. The artifact

that I chose is my final Understanding by Design (UBD) lesson that I wrote for a curriculum

development class in the Fall of 2019. This lesson focused on teaching students the qualities of a

good digital citizen. Technology, in the form of computers and tablets, has become a mainstay in

many of our classrooms. While this has opened up an entirely new world for differentiation and

learning, it has also exposed our students to a completely new level of social and behavioral

expectations that many 5th-graders are developmentally or emotionally unprepared to tackle. This

unit was designed to help students build a solid foundation on the concepts of both appropriate

and inappropriate online behavior and how technology has changed the world in which we live.

This is especially important in a digital world where students are under the false impression that

what they say and do while online carries no consequences. The artifact can be found at

http://sanchezmp.weebly.com/knowledge-of-content-artifact.html.

The driving question behind this framing statement is: If you don’t know where you’re

going, how will you know if you get there? The key to designing effective instruction for

students is to start with the end in mind, hence the idea behind the concept UBD-Backward

Design.

UBD represents a shift in educator thinking. Before, teachers focused on what Wiggins

and McTighe (2005) coined ‘hands-on without being minds-on’. Teachers were focused on the
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activities of teaching rather than the thinking involved in learning. Often students would finish a

fun, activity-filled lesson without ever understanding the point of the lesson or what they should

have understood at the end. UBD changed this paradigm and asked teachers to first stop and

think about their goals for the lesson, then consider how they would assess those goals, and last,

how would they teach that lesson (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005).

When I sat down to plan this unit, I thought about what my goals for this unit were. In

this case, I designed a unit on the subject of digital citizenship that included several different

content areas including art, language arts, math, and social studies (geography). Each of these

content areas was taught as a lesson that spanned one to several days of instruction. In planning,

I took into consideration standards from each content area. The goal for the art section was to use

imaginative ways to visually represent the important qualities of a good digital citizen. In

language arts, students were challenged to create a podcast on the importance of digital

citizenship. In math, students collected data from surveys and then used that data to create

graphs. Last, in geography, students created maps and globes to illustrate how technology has

impacted society. I chose each of these goals purposefully to help develop students'

understanding of digital citizenship. I designed this unit so that concepts learned in one content

area deepened and enriched understanding in others. For example, as students collected data in

the math unit, they would better understand how pervasive cyberbullying is. This concept is then

expanded upon in the geography lesson as they realize how technology has allowed people to

interact with each other around the world.

In UBD, these goals are derived from our standards. The problem with standards is that

they are sometimes difficult to interpret-some are incredibly broad and left open to interpretation,

others are too narrow and leave little room for creative license on the part of the teacher. An
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important aspect of UBD is learning to ‘unpack’ those standards. A fundamental aspect to

unpacking those standards is to “identify the big ideas and core tasks contained within” (Wiggins

& McTighe, 2005, p. 62). One question that I ask myself as a plan a lesson is, ‘What big ideas do

I want my students to remember two or three years from now?” Of course, by then they would

have forgotten the minutia of a lesson, but hopefully, they remember and understand the

overarching ideas behind that lesson. For this unit, I wanted my students to understand that good

digital citizenship can be expressed through art, orally through podcasts, mathematically through

data collection and analysis, and finally geographically, realizing that technology has created a

global society that is connected if not physically, then socially, economically, and morally.

The next step in UBD is determining how students can demonstrate their understanding

of the goal through assessment. A primary tenet to creating successful assessments is to let the

assessment fit the student and not force the student to fit the assessment. Tomlinson and

McTighe (2006) note that “when a teacher is clear about the enduring understandings of a lesson

or unit, that teacher is more likely to be at ease in offering students options to explore and

express learning in a mode appropriate for the student’s learning profile” (42).

In this UbD unit, I employed several pre-assessments, formative assessments, and

summative assessments as a means of documenting student understanding of the topic of digital

citizenship throughout the unit.

I used pre-assessments to determine where each of my students was so that I can meet

them and go from there. The pre-assessments included brainstorm sessions to activate students’

schema on the topic of digital citizenship. I started the lesson with a topic that was more familiar

to students, ‘what qualities make a good community member?’ I then expanded this thinking to

include what that means in the digital world. In this way I was anchoring new learning to prior
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knowledge, thus making this new learning more accessible and memorable. “If readers have

nothing to hook new information to, it’s pretty hard to construct new meaning” (Harvey &

Goudvis, 2007, p. 92). Lessons are more authentic when we can anchor them to our students’

lives. What we teach becomes more relatable, therefore more enduring.

Throughout a unit, I also integrated formative assessments. These are designed to allow

students to demonstrate their understanding of information up to that point in the unit. Debbie

Miller (2008) believes that of the three assessments, formative is the most important. Miller sees

formative assessments as authentic assessments where students show us what they know and

from which we, as teachers, can make adjustments not only in the way we are teaching but also

in what we are teaching. The formative assessments that I used in this unit ranged from graphic

organizers to help students outline their understanding of digital citizenship; to collaborative

discussion not only with me, but more importantly, with each other; and finally, to more

traditional assessments that included multiple-choice and short answer questions.

At the end of a unit, summative assessments were used to determine student

understanding of the key ideas that were taught throughout the unit. As a culminating summative

assessment, students were asked to create a webpage that included their artwork, their podcasts,

their graphs from the mathematical data they collected, and the maps they created to represent

their understanding of the global society in which we live. For this culminating assessment, I

ensured that I explicitly showed students their paths to success by using a unit grading rubric. In

this way, students understand what is expected of them for the unit. Rubrics are especially

important in performance assessments such as with artwork, podcasts, or open-ended questions

where there is no single correct answer (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). “Clear and appropriate

criteria specify what we should look at to determine the degree of understanding and serve us in
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making a judgment-based process consistent and fair” (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005, p. 172). The

rubric that I designed had four criteria to prevent confusion – 4: exceeds the standards (Wow!),

3: meets the standards (Yes!), 2: approaching the standard (Almost), and finally 1: below

standard (Oops). The wording of each criterion was consistent from one to the next and was

easily comprehensible to the student using language that was appropriate for their grade level.

In all cases, I tried to be flexible in the way that students could demonstrate their learning

and understanding. “Students must show understanding of essential big ideas does not vary, but

the ‘degree of difficulty’ of the assessment task can vary to appropriately address variety in

learner readiness” (Tomlinson & McTighe, 2006, p. 69). As a means of differentiation, students

were allowed to submit alternative expressions of their learning. For example, if students did not

have the gross motor skills to create a collage or infographic for the art lesson, they had the

option of using a computer to copy and paste a digital version of a collage. As another example,

if students had difficulty writing in the ELA lesson, they could dictate text using speech

recognition in Microsoft Word.

The final step of UBD is designing the path that students will take to achieve that

understanding and learning. A key aspect in creating lessons is scaffolding students through the

gradual release of responsibility model. Miller (2008) notes that there are five elements in this

model. Step one is teacher modeling (I do). When I first introduced the concept of how to find

the mean, median, and mode, I used a series of problems and numbers that were easy for students

to understand. In this step, I modeled how to perform and complete a mathematical operation

several times over as students followed along. Next was guided practice within the lesson.

During this stage, students and I worked together on problems (we do). Again, using the math

lesson as an example, the students and I worked on problems together. Then we moved on to
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guided practice beyond the lesson. At this point, I allowed students to work together to complete

a few problems using the numbers from their survey data collection on cyberbullying. In this

step, students support each other’s thinking and learning (we do). Last in the process was

independent practice where students can sit and finish problems on their own (you do). Here,

students continued to work on the data that they collected from their surveys using the unique

numbers that they collected themselves. There is no set progression to the gradual release of

responsibility model. In fact, during this lesson, students and I regularly moved into and out of

these different elements several times over during a single lesson.

Understanding by Design is not simply a set of steps that teachers follow to create

engaging lessons, rather it is a way of thinking. By having a clear understanding of what you

want your students to know and understand, then you can make deliberate, focused steps to take

them there. As teachers, we wear many hats over the day – nurse, counselor, teacher, advocate,

and cheerleader. One of the most important roles though, as pointed out by Tomlinson and

McTighe (2006) is that teachers are that bridge between the curriculum (standards,

administrations, standardized tests) and those living, breathing, complex humans we call

students.

References
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Harvey, S., & Goudvis, A. (2007). Strategies that work: Teaching comprehension for

understanding and engagement. Stenhouse Publishers.

Miller, D. (2005). Teaching with intention: Defining beliefs, aligning practice, taking action.

Stenhouse Publishers.

Tomlinson, C.A., & McTighe, J. (2006). Integrating differentiated instruction: Understanding

by design. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD).

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). Association for

Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD).