Understanding by Design Wiggins, Introduction to the book

 The book introduction gives us some clues about the contest covered by the authors.
It starts presenting 4 educational situations in different context and subjects. Based on these is the authors present some sins when educators or planners design their curricula, focusing mainly on activity-focused teaching and coverage-focused teaching, both concepts will be explain in Chapter 1.

The principal subject matter of the book is to create/design curricula to accomplish students understanding, seen not just a single ability, and knowing that an educational project or curricula has to have in consideration the development of a family of interrelated abilities. To achieve this aim is necesary to answer some questions, being the most important, in my point of view, How realistic is teaching for understandig in a world of content standards and high-stakes tests?

Trying to answer the questions presented this is the proposal:

• Design a curricula to engage students to their learning process.
• Order the methods to assess our students understanding, knowledge and skills.
• Predict students misunderstandings, through curriculum, assessments and clear instructions.
• Predict all the students problem by backward design.
• Six facets of understanding and explore its implication.
• Unit template in the design of curricula focusing on students understanding.

The book audience are all educators interested on design a more effective curricula. This book is an invitation to improve the pedagogical work inside and outside the classroom as professional developement.