Chapter 1: UbD and DI: An Essential Partnership

The aim of the first chapter of “Integrating Differentiated Instruction & Understanding by Design,” works to explain the necessity of pulling together the learning methods of understanding by design and differentiated instruction as students are increasingly diverse in both background as well as learning style. While this may feel intimidating to many teachers, they must collaborate in order to effectively teach all students. Teachers must always keep in mind the standards of the district, the objective of their curriculum, and the learning needs of each individual student, thus this chapter helps teachers to combine each of these needs. This chapter discusses the way in which the most organized curriculum means nothing if students are not learning. At the same time, if the teacher attempts to focus upon each student’s individual needs but applies no organized curriculum, the teacher does not assist the student as he will learn nothing, therefore this chapter is helpful in explaining the way in which a teacher may incorporate both an organized curriculum and teach to each student’s needs. A great aspect of this chapter was that it provided realistic explanations of axioms and their corollaries, making it much easier to understand the application of axioms.