This book should be required reading for educators at all levels. Like all great ideas, Understanding by Design presents a process that seems like common sense, is surprisingly difficult to implement properly, but could have astounding results. The premise behind Understanding by Design is that learning doesn't happen by accident, or merely by hard work on the part of students and teachers, but from the deliberate mastery of skills in pursuit of hard questions. Understanding by Design doesn't require much more work on the part of teachers than other approaches, but requires great courage and clarity in describing what is being learned, and why.

UbD centers around understanding, and the idea that when students really get something, they're able to perform effectively with knowledge and wisely transfer what they've learned across domains, rather than simply reciting facts or plugging through the steps of an algorithm. "Understanding" is a slippery phrase that is somewhat unfashionable. For example it's not in the original 1956 Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and is relegated to a basic level in subsequent revisions, but the word serves better than any other to mark the difference between someone who gets it, and someone who has not yet. The common enemies of understanding are 'coverage without context', textbook driven learning akin to reading the encyclopedia A-Z, and 'activities without purpose', hands-on activities that do not connect back to a larger point. Rather, the goal is to help students uncover Big Questions for themselves; the eternal scholarly and humanistic debates that link back to individual life experience and mastery over specialized skills.

Desired understanding must be linked to a proper assessment of that understanding. Here, Wiggins and McTighe make their single strongest pedagogic claim, that understanding can only truly be measured by authentic performance-based tasks, typically complex and realistic and built around creating reasoned and supported answers, so that a student may be successfully proven to have learned something. Assessment is a also a continuous process, and UbD recommends a continuous feedback loop of practice and evaluation, as well as 'one-minute essays' at the close of class about what students have learned and what they are confused about. The book supports realistic assessment over teaching to the test with a survey of major research that shows that better performing countries have realistic problem-based assessment, and that this method when used in America, leads to improvements in all schools, with the greatest improvements in deprived under-performing schools.

The final step, planning for learning, connects understandings and assessments to the daily practice of what is done in the classroom. This section is the least developed, introducing the WHERETO heuristic, but mostly leaving it up to educators to decided what in their box of tools is appropriate for the situation. It's a fair trade-off, given that they need to supply advice for teachers in every topic from K-16, but it annoyed me that just when we're about to get our hands dirty, the book backs off to a level of abstraction.

Good teachers will know everything in this book intuitively. Hesitant, or less well-prepared teachers (ahem, junior faculty) will benefit from having some wise words to justify what they know is right. Organizations will benefit from a common plan and language for building up binders full of good classes. This is a wonderfully crafted, action-oriented, theoretically grounded, guide for creating classes that matter, rather than classes that merely have to be completed. If you're going to read one book about teaching and curriculum make it Understanding by Design.