Evaluating Activity-Oriented Curricula

In Understanding by Design Wiggins and McTighe present a fictitious unit on apples with an activity-oriented curriculum—in which students participate in a variety of hands-on activities. Although such units are often engaging for students questions about their value remain. To what ends is the teaching directed? What are the big ideas and important skills to be developed during the unit? Do the students understand what the learning targets are? To what extent does the evidence of learning from the unit (e.g. the leaf-print collage the creative-writing stories the completed word searches) reflect worthwhile content standards? What understandings will emerge from all this and endure?

By desired results the authors mean what has often been termed intended outcomes achievement targets or performance standards. All four terms are meant to shift focus away from the inputs to the output: what the student should be able to know do and understand upon leaving expressed in performance and product terms. Desired result reminds us also that as "coaches" teachers will likely have to adjust course design and performance en route if feedback shows that there is a danger of not achieving the successes sought by the instruction.

As typified by the apples vignette in the Introduction of Understanding by Design such activity-oriented curricula lack an explicit focus on important ideas and appropriate evidence of learning especially in the minds of the learners. They think their job is merely to engage; they are led to think the learning is the activity instead of seeing that the learning comes from being asked to consider the meaning of the activity.