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This approach to curriculum and lesson planning prioritizes learning objectives, resulting in more effective and purposeful teaching and more student-centered and engaging learning experiences. In contrast, the backward design approach has instructors consider the learning goals of the course first. These learning goals embody the knowledge and skills instructors want their students to have learned when they leave the course.
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Like I did, you probably also have some favorite lessons and activities. Some of these might turn out to be not just fun to teach, but also solid in terms of equipping students with knowledge and skills that will last. In their book Understanding by Design, which was originally published in 1998, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe introduced us to backward design, an approach to instructional planning that starts with the end goal, then works backward from there. The “full” version of Wiggins and McTighe’s original approach is pretty complex and can be time-consuming to implement. For now, though, I’m just going to share the most basic version of backward design.
Qualities of effective intended learning outcomes
While we have little control over the demands placed on our students outside of the educational environment, we can take steps to reduce the extraneous load placed on students during the learning process. A 3-unit, online, self-paced course for K–12 educators interested in planning customized curriculum and/or lesson plans. The following examples are simply suggestions for what creating backward design lesson plans might look like. When creating your own lesson plans, please refer to your state’s or school’s specific academic standards. Using a process like backward design helps us get better at making these decisions. By making this approach part of our regular practice, we’ll be able to look back on a day, a week, or a year of teaching and say with a lot more certainty that when they were under our care, our students learned.
What are the three stages of backward design?
There are two major categories of assessments- formative and summative assessment. Aligning assessment to the learning objective ensures that you are assessing what students have learned. Maybe you want to use a clipboard to track students’ use of the skill. However you decide, make sure there’s a formal component to it for your own sake. Just like you would with content, stick with a skill until the students are consistently showing mastery, and provide extra support to the students who aren’t there yet.
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Backward Design emphasizes the following elements in your lessons, units or courses:
The standard does not require students to memorize the phases of the moon. Nor does it ask them to “demonstrate knowledge” of how the whole system works. The standard wants students to develop a model and use it to describe the system. This is a hard pill to swallow, because I wasn’t half bad as a teacher. I had decent relationships with my students and I believe most of them had good experiences in my classroom, but real, durable learning? A unit or sequence of lessons anchored in credible and vital evidence of the desired understandings.
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The Before, Where the Final Product is a Test
When developing your course within a Backward Design framework, it is important to map out your course learning objectives, assessments, and learning activities and instructional materials to ensure alignment across the elements. We suggest using CATE’s Course Map Planning Document to guide your progress. Academic standards usually provide the best direction for educational goals. For example, according to the Common Core Standards for Mathematical Practice, students should be able to understand the concept of ratios by the end of sixth grade. Their proficiency is typically measured through standardized testing.
Part 2: Backwards Design and Designing Assessments
There are, of course, numerous evaluative methods (i.e. essays, term papers, quizzes, lab projects etc.) that can give you feedback on students’ progress, knowledge, and skill level. However, not all of them are appropriate for every type of course, and knowledge. However, not all of them will be appropriate for every course, so it is important to choose those that align most closely with your learning goals, so that you can be sure you are testing for exactly what you want them to learn. In addition to these guidelines, it is also helpful to categorize the goals you have for the course in order of importance. The reason for this is because within the limits of the course, such as time, it is likely that you will need to prioritize certain goals over others to ensure that the most important learning outcomes are achieved. To help you define the curricular priorities for the course, Wiggins and McTighe suggest the following three questions to help you progressively narrow in on and define the most important content areas.
The middle circle identifies what is important to know such as important knowledge (i.e, facts, concepts, and principles), as well as skills, processes, strategies, and methods. In cognitive psychology, cognitive load refers to the amount of resources in working memory that are being used by students for processing and encoding new information. We understand that some level of difficulty and challenge is beneficial during the learning process, but when cognitive load is too high, frustrations rise, comprehension suffers, and some students give up completely. Reducing excessive and/or extraneous cognitive load is completely in the hands of the instructor. Interested in more professional development opportunities for teachers?
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Once the learning goals have been established, the second stage involves consideration of assessment. The backward design framework suggests that instructors should consider these overarching learning goals and how students will be assessed prior to consideration of how to teach the content. For this reason, backward design is considered a much more intentional approach to course design than traditional methods of design. Alignment is the degree to which learning objectives, assessments, learning activities, and instructional materials work together to achieve the desired course goals.
Both the Dick and Carey model and the backward design model are goal and objective oriented; assessment is created based on learning objectives and goals, and instruction is created based on evaluation and assessment. The Dick and Carey model, however, is a more systemic model in that making changes to components affects other components and, therefore, the changes occur in parallel. In the more linear backward design model, the steps are non-flexible which means that skipping or changing steps is not an option. The scope of your assessments should be in line with the outcomes, and the balance between concepts and skills in these assessments should match that presented in your ILOs. Moreover, in assessments, you should strive to measure the kind(s) of engagement described in your intended learning outcomes. If your ILO states that students will be able to describe some phenomenon, don’t use a true/false or multiple-choice question to measure their attainment of this outcome.
The most common approach to course design is to begin with a consideration of the most suitable methodologies for teaching content. In other words, the focus is typically on how the content will be taught, rather than on what is to be taught. However, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe argue that this framework is flawed, because its emphasis on teaching methods is misplaced. Let's consider the Common Core sixth-grade content in fractions and decimals.
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