DIGEST - Volume 9, Issue 2

1 TPC Digest 1 | TPC Digest Hilary Dack, Clare Merlin-Knoblich Improving Classroom Guidance Curriculum With Understanding by Design n comprehensive school counseling programs, school counselors use a range of approaches to support tudents’ academic achievement, social and emotional growth, and career development. Classroom guidance is one delivery method of such approaches, advantageous in part because it allows school counselors to reach all students. In systematically delivering classroom guidance, school counselors use developmentally responsive lessons crafted to ensure students acquire desired knowledge, skills, and attitudes. These lessons comprise critical time school counselors spend in direct service to students, and multiple studies have highlighted the value of classroom guidance for student outcomes, including academic achievement and self-efficacy. The American School Counselor Association (ASCA) recommends that school counselors spend 15%–45% of their time delivering classroom guidance. The ASCA National Model also reflects the importance of classroom guidance in a comprehensive school counseling program, as designing a curriculum action plan is a key task in the model’s management quadrant that warrants careful consideration and intentionality. Despite these recommendations, school counselors appear hindered in designing effective lessons because of limited training in curriculum design. For instance, in a recent study that involved reviewing over 100 classroom guidance lesson plans on the ASCA Scene website, researchers concluded that school counselors need more extensive instruction on lesson design. This may be due in part to counselor educators not teaching methods of developing a classroom guidance curriculum consistently. Standards of the Council for the Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP) reflect this lack of emphasis. Of the 33 CACREP school counseling specialty-area standards, only one standard relates to curriculum development. Our conceptual paper seeks to address this need by introducing Understanding by Design ( UbD ), a research- based approach to curriculum development, to strengthen the classroom guidance planning process. UbD presents a curriculum design framework for purposeful planning for teaching. The goal of this framework is teaching for understanding, which goes beyond simply recalling facts or information. It involves a student coming to own an idea for himself by deeply grasping how and why something works. The UbD framework also advocates the “backward design” of curriculum through a three-stage sequence of clarifying the goals of learning, determining needed evidence of learning, and planning corresponding learning experiences. UbD offers a way of thinking about curriculum design, not a recipe or prescription. It presents guidelines for planning for teaching that apply to teaching any topic from any field to any learner. Because existing research has examined the effects of teaching for understanding in diverse content areas with diverse learners, its application to classroom guidance is a logical extension of an approach that is widely accepted as best practice in K–12 schools. Our paper outlines UbD ’s three design stages as applied to the development of a classroom guidance unit and offers an example of a school counselor’s application of the UbD framework to the revision of a classroom guidance curriculum. We offer school counselors principles for developing a classroom guidance curriculum that yields more meaningful and powerful lessons, makes instruction more cohesive, and focuses on what is critical for student success. Hilary Dack is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Clare Merlin-Knoblich, NCC, is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Correspondence can be addressed to Hilary Dack, Department of MDSK, Cato College of Education, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 9201 University City Blvd., Charlotte, NC 28223, hdack@uncc.edu. I