Teaching Strategies from The Google Infused Classroom: Understanding by Design

By Zainab Cheema 

How do you blend together technology and learning design in the 21st century classroom? That’s the question that Clark and Avrith try to answer in their bestseller, The Google Infused Classroom: A Guidebook to Making Thinking Visible and Amplifying Student Voice. As educators have been pointing out, you can’t use ed-tech without strong pedagogy; and pedagogy can’t afford to ignore all the potential opened by technology. In this blog post, I’ll cover their chapter on Understanding by Design and introduce you to a concept map that you can use with your students in your classroom. I’ll close by explaining how I use it in my Shakespeare and Film undergraduate seminar.  

A few words about the cutting edge format of The Google Infused Classroom. Clark and Avrith are Google and Apple certified instructors and ED-Tech learning designers, which shows in their book design. While you can buy a paperback version, The Google Infused Classroom is mostly created as a Kindle or online book: it is hyperlinked to the cutting edge online resources and books that Clark and Avrith refer to throughout their text. On the fast-track to becoming a pedagogical classic, The Google Infused Classroom is a must-have resource for the 21st century educator AND learner.

Understanding By Design

One of the teaching approaches that Clark and Avrith summarize is Understanding by Design (UbD), the educational philosophy that advocates that teachers design their courses (and lessons) backwards from the desired learning outcomes. This approach was developed by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins, the authors of Understanding by Design, from which Google Infused Classroom quotes. While educators generally know that it’s important to plan backwards, this approach helps them become more reflective and intentional in planning, teaching and assessing towards evidence of students’ learning (McTighe and Wiggins, 2005). In this approach, assessment is important—it is vital for the educator to see that the students are on track to mastering the goals. In UbD, students must show evidence of their progress towards the established learning goal through six steps:

1. They can explain the learning goal
2. They can interpret it.
3. They apply it.
4. They can understand different perspectives.
5. They show empathy.
6. They display a metacognitive approach to their learning (Clark and Avrith 2015)

Reading Google Infused Classroom helped me to assess how I was effectively using learning goals in my classroom. Not only is it important to go over the day’s learning goals at the beginning of teach class (not to mention the course-wide learning goals at the beginning of each semester), it’s important to integrate the keywords of your goals in your daily activities and major assignments reinforce for students their purpose and how that connects with the learning objectives introduced to them. 

The 3-2-1 Bridge Template for Student Reflection 

Metacognitive activities can also help students absorb what they are learning and why. A good metacognitive activity that can be incorporated in your daily lesson plan is the 3-2-1 Bridge template developed by Harvard University’s Project Zero. Here is how to use it:

1. Introduce your learning goals for the day and ask your students to reflect on the topic. Encourage them to make their thinking associative rather than summative – in other words, it’s not a quiz or a test. It’s more about mapping the concept that they have regarding that topic.
2. Give your students the form. Ask them to jot down 3 thoughts or ideas, 2 questions and 1 metaphor or simile that they have associated with that topic. 
3. At the end of the lesson, ask them to return to that form and once again, jot down 3 Thoughts/Ideas, 3 Questions and 1 Simile. 
4. Finally, they do a reflection write-up on the bridge between their initial response and the final response. This helps them to solidify the concept they have covered; reflect on what they have learned; and to figure out where they want to deepen their understanding and work out 

Applying UbD and the Bridge Template to a Literature Seminar

In my Shakespeare and Film Class, I pair Richard II with the Introductory Chapter on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. The learning goal is to get students to think about how nations emerged as a concept in Shakespeare’s time, and how they are different/similar to today. A key part of this exercise is to reflect upon how nation formation always requires an “other,” and to reflect on the ethics of that. I begin by broadcasting my learning goals: where do we see the nation as an imagined community in Richard II? How is this sense of community similar to or different from ours’?” Next, students jot their ideas on the 3-2-1 Bridge Form. We then launch into our day’s activities, which includes multimedia viewings, close readings, discussion and more. I leave 20 minutes at the end of class for them to return to the form and fill out their responses once again. Ten minutes or so is sufficient for filling out the form—the rest of the time, we have a reflective conversation on the past and present entanglements of our imagined community and inclusion. 

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