Understanding by Design Chapter 1

Chapter one of Differentiated Instruction/Understanding by Design focuses on explaining why they are important concepts for educators to understand. It also explains why the two should be taken as a pair, rather than on their own, for most effective implementation. Interestingly enough, I didn’t feel like enough time was taken to defining these concepts on a practical level. Examples were given as part of a list of axioms and corollaries, but if definitions of “Understanding by Design” and “Differentiated Instruction” were ever provided, they were embedded so deep in the text that they bypassed me completely. If I were writing a shiny book about my educational theory, I wouldn’t bury the lead, but I digress. From chapter one, I learned the most from the example, featuring Mr. Axelt’s efforts to teach his class about the United States constitution. Perhaps by necessity, the axioms and corollaries themselves tended to be wordy, and the narrative style of the scenario helped me to work out what the authors were really trying to say. The examples, especially of the application of differentiated instruction, will help me to apply those ideas in my own classroom.