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Understanding by Design (2nd Edition). Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe

Article  in  TESOL Quarterly · March 2008

DOI: 10.1002/j.1545-7249.2008.tb00220.x

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Understanding by Design (2nd Edition).
Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe. Alexandria, VA: Association for
Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2005. Pp. xi + 371.

! Since it first appeared in 2000, UbD—Wiggins and McTighe’s short-

hand for Understanding by Design—has been gaining popularity as a pro-
fessional development and teacher-education resource for teaching cur-
ricular content, including within the field of TESOL. We offer a review
of the new and much expanded second edition of this textbook to those
who conduct TESOL teacher-education programs, and to English as a
second language practitioners generally. We feel that UbD has much to
offer the field in terms of illuminating and explicating major issues in
curricular and unit planning, complex and important areas often glossed
over in pre and in-service courses.
According to the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Devel-
opment (ASCD), UbD is a “framework for designing curriculum units,
performance assessments, and instruction that lead . . . students to deep
understanding” (ASCD, 2006). Designing implies that teachers think of
themselves as conscious engineers of experiences that maximize,
deepen, and verify student learning. The importance of UbD lies in this
notion of teacher agency, as opposed to the all-too-common view of the
teacher as “nothing but a technician trained to transmit a fixed canon of

162 TESOL QUARTERLY

knowledge” (Pennycook, 1989, p. 612). The ambition of UbD, therefore,
is to be not another teaching resource but a tool in the struggle for
professionalization, an issue of particular resonance in TESOL.
The book presents UbD’s three-stage approach to curricular develop-
ment, called backward design. Wiggins and McTighe argue that deriving
lessons, units, and syllabi from instructional goals helps avoid the twin
pitfalls of activity-oriented and coverage-oriented instruction. Activity-
oriented instruction can be seen as a distortion of a constructivist ap-
proach to teaching, in which the student-centered and cooperative-
learning activities that characterize this approach become disconnected
from meaningful learning goals in any systematic and accountable way.
The teacher, rather than being a facilitator of learner autonomy, as the
approach would have it, becomes a mere stage manager of student ac-
tivities. Similarly, coverage-oriented instruction can be seen as an ex-
treme form of direct instruction, which is predominately teacher-
centered and typically highlights lecturing or explanation of facts. In
coverage-oriented instruction, a textbook or syllabus governs the class-
room, with teachers mentioning each point, frequently to an unclear
pedagogical end. Wiggins and McTighe see themselves as constructivists,
but they do not mandate specific pedagogical methods or techniques.
UbD is not a God’s-truth instructional philosophy or bag-of-tricks eclec-
ticism, but a results-driven framework for curricular and instructional
unit design.
Backward design begins with the selection and analysis of desired re-
sults, which consist of subcomponents such as established goals (including
but not limited to mandated standards), understandings (deep concep-
tual knowledge), and essential questions (long-standing, inquiry-
motivating problems). Once goals are more or less determined, the
teacher-designer continues to the second stage, assessment. Assessments
may be formal or informal, must be linked to the stage-one goals, and
must include redundancy to ameliorate measurement error. Finally, the
teacher-designer comes to stage three, the designing of learning expe-
riences. This sequencing is not rigid; a teacher may enter the design
process at any point, and recursion inevitably ensues as teacher-designers
revise objectives and assessments. Still, the resultant stages or compo-
nents must reflect the logic of the backward sequence. The backward-
design tools are clearly explained, chapter by chapter, with helpful dia-
grams, templates, and well-defined terminology, all applicable to any
English language instructional setting, although the fit is easiest in con-
tent-based instruction.
This last strength reflects the text’s primary drawback for ESOL:
Treatment of skills, essential in language learning, is somewhat wanting.
This lack is partly inherent in any program designed around understand-
ings, which is focused by definition on conceptual knowledge. Proce-

REVIEWS 163
dural knowledge, such as basic grammatical development and reading
and writing processes, is inevitably backgrounded. Wiggins and McTighe
compound this problem by discussing reading as an issue and enabling
skills in general, but they mention English language learners only inci-
dentally. Examples consequently focus almost entirely on concepts, and
when skills and strategies are discussed, the result is sometimes uncon-
vincing and rarely focused on language. We chose UbD for our student-
teaching seminars because of the difficulties our pre and in-service
teacher candidates had with curricular and unit planning, particularly
integrating language teaching with content and themes. Some of our
students took to the book instantly, but it took considerable work and
supplementation to get others to see the relevance.
Our suggestion is therefore that ESOL teacher educators, particularly
those with a K–12 or academic focus, seriously consider adopting UbD
because the the text is excellent at addressing the issues of curriculum
and unit planning. However, if they do so, they must take special care in
addressing both sides of the language-content equation. On the one
hand, teacher educators will need to emphasize the role of content in
developing language and literacy skills; that is, they need to emphasize
that achieving understandings is necessary for linguistic growth. Of
course, the advantages of doing this go beyond motivating reluctant
ESOL teachers to take an assigned text seriously; such an effort should
help them reconceive their roles. In particular, the goal should be to
combat the inertia in academic ESOL teaching that permits language
instruction isolated from content (e.g., the widespread practice of using
grammar-in-situation type textbooks).
On the other hand, teacher educators using UbD should make ex-
plicit the various language and literacy skills that learners need for con-
tent-area learning and particularly how they can fit those skills into the
UbD framework. We suggest the following (nonexhaustive) list of skills
that could be incorporated into stage one of backward-designed, English
language teaching curricula: metacognitive, cognitive, socioaffective,
and communication strategies; reading and listening skills; the writing
process; phonetic–phonemic discrimination; attention to lexical and
grammatical form; and note-taking. Such areas need not be covered
exhaustively, as in a methods class; however, mentioning them in their
role in accessing content knowledge allows present and future English
language teachers to make the connection to classroom practice.
A lesser problem that needs addressing is that Wiggins and McTighe
sometimes assume knowledge that is not widespread, always a danger in
a multidisciplinary resource. For instance, a discussion of non-Euclidean
geometry used to exemplify the recursive nature of scientific knowledge
confused our teacher candidates. Thus, we recommend that teacher
educators explain such examples.

164 TESOL QUARTERLY

 In sum, despite its occasional and correctable shortcomings, this text
can help fill a gap often found in TESOL programs and in English
language teaching practice. It is a hands-on model of curricular design
that provides a framework for coherent review and integration of mate-
rial previously learned in core TESOL-programmatic areas such as lesson
planning, methods, L2 acquisition, and language assessment. We are
aware of no other comparable method that deals as well with the issues
of designing learning. More broadly, it has the potential to deepen the
professionalism in English language teaching specifically and teaching
generally.

REFERENCES
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. (2006). Understanding by
design: Resources. Retrieved July 14, 2006, from http://www.ascd.org/portal/site/
ascd/menuitem.6a270a3015fcac8d0987af19e3108a0c/
Pennycook, A. (1989). The concept of method, interested knowledge, and the poli-
tics of language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 23, 589–618.

F. SCOTT WALTERS AND MICHAEL NEWMAN

Queens College
Flushing, New York, United States

REVIEWS 165

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