UBD in public school math
(First of three parts)
The principles behind Understanding by Design (UBD) are not new. Backward planning, where teachers start with desired outcomes and plan lessons around them, reminds us of the psychologist Stephen Covey’s second habit, “Begin with the end in mind.”
Teaching for understanding has been a goal of many reforms that reject “surface” in favor of “deep” understanding.
In the 1990s, American educators Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe developed a framework they called UBD, which was based on the principles in a book of the same name. The second edition appeared in 2005.
In June 2010, many Philippine public, and some private, high schools adopted UBD, starting with first year. This school year, UBD was also implemented in second year.
I will only discuss mathematics, and only as done in public high schools.
Deluged by problems
My colleagues in the Ateneo de Manila University math department and I have been deluged with complaints from teachers, administrators, coordinators about how UBD allegedly hampered teaching and learning high school math.
We were (and still are) also involved in designing the K-12 math curriculum, so these reactions caused us concern.
After talking with colleagues in other institutions, we all agreed on one thing:
UBD in math has been implemented poorly in public high schools.
I consulted UBD trainer Rita Atienza, who teaches at the Ateneo education department. As part of the team of Authentic Education, run by Wiggins, Atienza also helped in the math portion of the Mississippi Curriculum Design Project.
My conclusion: UBD in math, as it is being done so far in public high schools, may be going against the tenets of the UBD authors themselves.
No more lesson plans?
According to several teachers, they were promised that with UBD, they would no longer write lesson plans. They would instead get manuals prepared by the Curriculum Development Division of the Department of Education’s Bureau of Secondary Education, such as the “2010 Secondary Education Curriculum Math Teaching Guides,” for the first two years of high school.
I am certain the guides were written with good intentions, but when teachers tried to follow them, they ran into trouble.
“A teacher cannot teach math with the guides alone,” says Ian Garces, former coach of the Philippine team to the International Math Olympiad. Garces talked with teachers in at least ten schools nationwide—more than four in the National Capital Region, three in the rest of Luzon, and three in Mindanao.
“All the teachers I talked to still have to write their own lesson plans,” he says. “Poor UBD implementation doubled their burden.”
Wiggins and McTighe use UBD for designing unit plans, not individual lessons. But they never said teachers no longer had to do lesson plans, or that the same manual should be followed.
“UBD is not a rigid template,” says Wiggins. “It is not a step-by-step recipe. You need to figure out what the first and the next steps are. UBD is more like the recipe creation than the recipe following.”
“UBD is a design tool,” says Atienza. “It takes much thought, effort, deliberation, as anything we design and craft purposefully, with a clear goal. UBD is a planning framework, not a curriculum.”
“The key ideas in math have remained stable, and have already been recognized internationally for decades,” says Catherine Vistro-Yu, who teaches a graduate-level curriculum course in the Ateneo. “There is no need to overhaul the curriculum.”
Other public school teachers were told that, instead of doing a lesson plan daily, they would be doing one for every two to five sessions. Thinking they would have fewer things to do, they were at first enthusiastic until they ran into trouble.
Faulty guides
When Sr. Iluminada Coronel, F.M.M., president of the Mathematics Teachers Association of the Philippines, the largest network of math teachers in the country, analyzed the math guides, she saw glaring flaws, starting from the first page.
“There is no specificity in what a book has to contain,” she says. “In the First Year Guide, for the first quarter, the set of real numbers, measurement, and scientific notation are to be taken. What exactly from real numbers must be taken, one cannot say from the manual. I could not find any mention of operations with integers, decimals, fractions, which are integral to the topic.”
In the Second Year Guide, the first topic (special products) lists this Essential Understanding: “Patterns in finding special products facilitate the analysis of real-life situations.”
“What can possibly be analyzed using special product patterns?” Sr. Coronel says. “Throughout the guide, statements such as this are glibly made, without thought.”
In several cases, math concepts are just plain wrong.
“For Second Year, in Measurement, an Essential Question is ‘How does one know if the measurement is precise?’” Sr. Coronel says. “Considering the instruments in the guide, such as rulers and similar devices, one knows none of them can possibly be precise. There is no need to discuss it, much less make it an Essential Question.”
(To be continued next week.)
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