Understanding by Design

"Understanding by Design is an incredibly influential book. Its premise is that you have to start curriculum design with an end in mind. You figure out what your goal is first and plan backwards from there, building your curriculum around what you want to achieve. It sounds very simple but for a long time people weren’t doing that. They were covering units or textbooks without clear priorities or purposes in mind. Backwards design helps teachers to focus on the endgame and hold themselves to account for meeting their goals. Curriculum is not something that we want every individual teacher to determine for his or her own classroom. There has to be a standardised curriculum. When people hear about a standardised curriculum some assume that teachers are stymied or stifled, which is absolutely wrong. When you have a set of standards and a set curriculum a tremendous among of creativity goes into determining the instructional strategies teachers use to convey and reinforce the curriculum."