Understanding by Design¶

Design Process · All design processes
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

Choosing what to teach starts with choosing goals, and goal statements are properly written from the learner's point of view — "learners will acquire the ability to construct a convincing argument," not "the teacher will show students examples of logical arguments." Before any specific framework, Tyler (1974) offered an early, still-influential account of where such goals should come from: subject-matter mastery, societal concerns, and student interests/abilities, refined further against the school/community's educational philosophy and what instructional theory and research say can actually be taught. As the range of things worth learning keeps expanding while instructional time does not, some deliberate basis for choosing among candidate goals becomes necessary rather than optional.

Understanding by Design (UbD), Wiggins and McTighe's (1998) backward design process, provides a widely used three-stage method for turning chosen goals into an actual course or unit design — a genuine shift in thinking, not just a checklist: "we must grasp the key idea that we are coaches of [students'] ability to play the 'game' of performing with understanding, not tellers of our understanding to them on the sidelines." The shift means thinking hard about the specific learning sought and the evidence for it before deciding what activities or materials to use — the reverse of the common practice of picking familiar activities first and only then explaining how they relate to a goal.

Stage One: Identify Desired Results. Wiggins and McTighe recommend progressively focusing curricular priorities through three questions, visualized as concentric circles from largest (lowest priority) to smallest (highest priority): (1) What should participants hear, read, view, explore, or otherwise encounter? — content merely "worth being familiar with," the lowest priority. (2) What knowledge and skills should participants master? — facts, concepts, principles, processes, strategies, and methods considered "important to know and do." (3) What are the big ideas and understandings participants should retain? — the enduring understandings instructors want students to still carry long after the course ends, and the basis for the course's actual, concrete learning goals.

Stage Two: Determine Acceptable Evidence. Before choosing any activities, decide how you'll know whether students actually achieved the desired results — what evidence of understanding and proficiency you will accept (term papers, short-answer quizzes, free-response questions, lab projects, practice problems, group projects, among many others). Doing this before Stage Three prevents a common failure mode: assessments that don't actually match the stated learning goals, which is frustrating for students and instructors alike once discovered.

Stage Three: Plan Learning Experiences and Instruction. Only now do specific instructional strategies and activities get chosen, guided by four questions: What enabling knowledge and skills will students need to perform effectively and achieve the desired results? What activities will equip them with that knowledge and skill? What should be explicitly taught or coached, and how, given the performance goals? What materials and resources best serve these goals? Candidate strategies include large/small-group discussion, interactive lecturing and think-pair-share, Flipped Learning, cooperative learning (including Team-Based Learning and project-based learning), guided note-taking, and guided inquiry for problem-solving — the point of the preceding two stages is that this menu gets filtered by what Stage One and Two actually require, not chosen first.

A free, structured UbD Template 2.0 (Wiggins & McTighe) walks designers through all three stages with prompts for each section, and is widely used as a practical planning document rather than just a conceptual model.

Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

Willingness to defer instructional-activity choices until desired results and acceptable evidence are both settled, resisting the pull to start planning from a favorite activity or existing material
A workable process (Tyler's factors, or another) for choosing which candidate goals are actually worth the limited instructional time available

Constraints¶

Grain Size¶

[unit / course]

Target Goals¶

Enduring understandings that persist well beyond the course, distinguished explicitly from merely-familiar content and important-to-know-and-do content
Assessment genuinely aligned to stated learning goals, rather than assessing what happens to be easy to test

Target Learners¶

Any learner population; the pattern operates at the level of instructional design process, not learner characteristics

Theory¶

Supporting¶

Learning Objectives [+M] — UbD's Stage One is a structured method for prioritizing and specifying the learning objectives an activity should serve

Design¶

Sequence¶

Stage One: Apply the three progressively-focusing questions to identify enduring understandings, important-to-know-and-do knowledge, and merely-familiar content, in that priority order.
Stage Two: Decide what evidence (assessment types) would demonstrate the Stage One results, before choosing any teaching activity.
Stage Three: Select instructional strategies and materials that equip students with exactly the enabling knowledge and skills Stages One and Two require.

Affordances¶

Personalization¶

The same three-stage sequence applies whether planning a single unit or a full course; only the scope of Stage One's goals changes with grain size

Just-In-Time Teaching (JiTT) — a complementary in-the-moment adaptation layer that can operate within a UbD-designed unit's Stage Three activities
Team-Based Learning — one of the cooperative-learning strategies UbD's Stage Three might select

Examples¶

Career-centric reverse academic planning: start from a career aspiration and map backward to courses, credentials, and experiences using skills taxonomies

Key Sources¶

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (1998). Understanding by design. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Tyler, R. W. (1974). Basic principles of curriculum and instruction. University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1949)
Bowen, R. S. (n.d.). Understanding by design. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/understanding-by-design/
Arduini-Van Hoose, N. (2020). Understanding by design; Instructional planning. In Educational psychology. Retrieved from https://edpsych.pressbooks.sunycreate.cloud. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Page metadata

Field	Value
`type`	`process`
`id`	`understanding-by-design`
`title`	`Understanding by Design`
`description`	`Wiggins and McTighe's backward design process plans a course or unit in three stages — identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence, then plan learning experiences — so that activities and assessments are derived from the learning goals rather than chosen first and justified afterward.`
`status`	`review`
`grain_size`	`unit`
`author`	`Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe`
`generated`	by `claude/unspecified` on `2026-08-29`
`trust`	unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content

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