The Template that Almost Broke Me - and Then Changed Everything

If you're a teacher, you already know the energy of back-to-school PD week. The enthusiasm is... palpable. 😄

Nobody is thinking about PD. We are thinking about our classrooms, our lesson plans, our students, the actual work waiting for us on the other side of whatever PowerPoint we're about to sit through. But there we were, the entire district, filing into a rented venue for what would become two of the most chaotic professional development days of my career.

Nobody warned us. At least not the people most affected by what was coming. The teachers.

That was the week we were introduced to Understanding by Design — UbD for short - developed by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe is a framework for unit planning built around the idea of starting with the end in mind: what do you want students to understand, and how will you know they got there? On paper, it's brilliant. In practice — at least the way it was rolled out to us — it was an absolute disaster.

We were encouraged to dive in from our own devices. Explore. Engage. Only problem? That same summer, a system update had been pushed through that somehow locked us out of our own laptops. So there we sat — expected to embrace a brand new instructional framework — while nobody could get into their technology. The irony was not lost on anyone.

Day two was at a separte location, broken out by certification level. Secondary teachers together, trying once again to make sense of something that had been introduced so poorly the day before. Some of us could log in briefly — just long enough to get a glimpse of what we were supposed to be learning — before getting kicked back out. The site simply didn't have the bandwidth to support us. And nobody had checked that before putting an entire group of secondary educators in the building with devices and expectations. So we sat. Disconnected. Literally and figuratively.

It was during day two that one of our new teachers — a grown man, a professional — walked out in the middle of the session in tears. Real ones. Literal tears.

I disassociated completely by day two. Checked out. Done. I had zero intention of ever using UbD to plan anything. I didn't even fully understand that it was a unit planning template. That is how far gone your girl was. 😄

That young man never made it to the first day of school. He quit before the year even started. And I don't blame him one bit.

Fast forward to November of that same year.

Another new teacher in our department left mid-year. She had been tasked — as a brand new, less than ten years experience educator — with planning units for the entire 8th grade. When she left, my principal asked me to step in and take over.

And that is how I ended up doing the very thing I swore I would never do.

But here's where the story turns.

This time it was different. No auditorium. No laptop login failures. No overwhelmed colleagues crying in the hallway. Just two department members, our Instructional Partner, and our Curriculum Specialist — sitting together in a focused environment, actually dedicated to planning. Someone to answer questions. Space to think. Room to make mistakes without an audience of the entire district watching.

That is how UbD should have been introduced from the beginning.

And that is how I fell in love with it.

What I discovered on the other side of that forced dive — the one I absolutely did not volunteer for — was that I had a gift for unit design I didn't know existed. The backward design process made sense to me in a way that felt almost instinctive once someone actually walked me through it with patience and intention. I found myself not just completing the template but enjoying it. Thinking ahead. Anticipating student needs. Building something cohesive instead of planning lesson to lesson and hoping it added up to something meaningful.

The room gave me back my joy.

The UbD gave me back my confidence.

And together — they gave me back my purpose.

If you've been handed a framework that felt impossible and walked away convinced it wasn't for you — I understand. I lived that. But sometimes the thing that almost breaks us is the very thing that builds us into something we didn't know we could become.

That template didn't just change how I plan units.

It changed what I believed I was capable of.

And that — right there — is Teaching: The Real.

💜💚