UBD Chapter 7

    This chapter of UBD/DI really emphasizes on the teachers approach to "assessing" students. It's crucial that the essential questions teachers pose engages students in the process of "understanding." It's important for teachers to teach in a way that helps students understand the content and really absorb and learn the material. The question that struck me right from the beginning that really made me take a step back and think about how I would handle the situation if I were the teacher is: "What about those students who haven't mastered the basics?" (108). Then what? Do we go back to the beginning and explain the missing pieces, well of course. Students can't gain new knowledge, or they can't understand new knowledge if they don't even know the basics. This brings us to the title of the chapter, "Teaching for Understanding in Academically Diverse Classrooms." So what do you do as a teacher if some of your students are way behind the other students? Do you split them up and give them different tasks? And how would that make the dynamic of your classroom? And wouldn't that cause the students to always be in different "levels" the whole year. These are all factors that are important in teaching to diverse learners. Students are all encouraged to learn, question, grow and expand, but as the teacher it's important to figure out how to do that effectively without holding anyone back or leaving anyone behind, maybe that's where the idea of differentiated instruction derived from.