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If they’re boring, students might get bored, and if they’re not effective, you may not cover all the material you should. By identifying the qualities I want my students to remember me by, I’m using backward design to create my own KUDs—the things I must know, understand, and do in order to achieve these outcomes. It guides how I redirect students, how I handle mistake making, and what consequences students receive. What students are likely really saying is that they don’t understand how the test reflected the content they thought they studied or learned. Or perhaps they don’t feel they were able to adequately demonstrate what they did learn based on the types of questions they were asked on the exam. In other words, they don’t see an alignment between what they learned and what they were tested on.
Instructional Design
Research over the past several decades has shown that students learn more and retain their learning longer if they acquire it in an active rather than a passive manner. In the past, classroom instruction has focused on the instructor and the ways in which the subject matter could best be presented to the student. The objective should include 1) the subject (your students), 2) an action verb, and 4) a noun that describes an intellectual operation or physical performance, as well as 3) a criterion and 5) the conditions for completion (Thomas and Abras, 2016).
Stage 3: Plan learning experiences and instruction
Our students are struggling, and they need our best work in all aspects of their learning, including SEL. With that in mind, here’s how I use backward design to teach the soft skills our students need as badly as they need to read and write. In 2017, Malamed, an e-learning coach, argues, “by reducing the extra mental effort required to learn new information, we can assure greater learner success” (Malamed, 2017, Par. 3).
Stage 2: Determine Appropriate Assessments
The incorporation of backward design also lends itself to transparent and explicit instruction. If the teacher has explicitly defined the learning goals of the course, then they have a better idea of what they want the students to get out of learning activities. Furthermore, if done thoroughly, it eliminates the possibility of doing certain activities and tasks for the sake of doing them.
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In particular, beware of words like “understand” or “know.” Exactly what it means to “understand” or “know” something is open to interpretation. An undergraduate’s level of “understanding” of a topic and that of the instructor will vary wildly, and it will be difficult for students to know which level of understanding they should be aiming for. When developing ILOs, ask yourself how you will know that a student “understands” the material – what will they need to do, or say to demonstrate their understanding? Your answer to this question should provide you with more specific (and measurable ILOs.
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Formative assessments can include short quizzes, peer evaluations, discussions, one-on-one student-teacher interviews and student self-reflections. The intention of these progress assessments should be to gauge abilities like critical thinking, inquiry, problem-solving and foundational knowledge as it pertains to the course content. In backward design, educators start by identifying or creating a final assessment, then building their lessons toward that specific end. Traditionally, educators identify course content they need to cover, design their lessons accordingly, then create the final assessment. While the traditional approach may work in some cases, there are some significant flaws and challenges.
How to guides
This teaching guide will explain the benefits of incorporating backward design. Then it will elaborate on the three stages that backward design encompasses. Finally, an overview of a backward design template is provided with links to blank template pages for convenience. Notice that a general learning outcome (“tease out the laws of electromagnetism…”) is rather non-specific. You can also leverage technology to assess students’ understanding such as online quizzes, tests, exams, presentations, and project submissions. Let’s explore backward design in education, and how you can leverage it to make your teaching more effective.
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Summative assessments such as exams, projects, or presentations on the other hand assess student learning at the end of a lesson, unit, or course. The goal of summative assessments is to have an overall understanding of students’ performance in the course. With backward design, you start by thinking about what you want students to learn, then use the information to plan the activities and assessments that will help them achieve those learning outcomes.
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Critics of backward design express concerns around a potential lack of flexibility in programming. Teachers may fear “teaching to the test” and not enabling authentic learning. Education authorities establish a curriculum in a top-down manner that may not fully address the circumstances in a classroom. Depending on the type of progress and performance you want to measure, you need to figure out what kind of assessment you want to use.
The backward design model seeks to avoid those challenges by encouraging teachers to be much more intentional in their curriculum development and make the most out of class time. The idea in backward design is to teach toward the "end point" or learning goals, which typically ensures that content taught remains focused and organized. This, in turn, aims at promoting better understanding of the content or processes to be learned for students. The educator is able to focus on addressing what the students need to learn, what data can be collected to show that the students have learned the desired outcomes (or learning standards) and how to ensure the students will learn.
Once you know the standards your students are expected to meet by a certain grade level, make a list of all the foundational knowledge they need to reach that goal. Using the ratio example, the teacher would need to ensure their students have a solid understanding of multi-digit multiplication, division, factors and multiples. If students enter sixth grade without competent skills in these areas, the teacher will need to build appropriate units into their lesson plans to achieve the year-end goal of understanding ratios. In Understanding by Design, Wiggins and McTighe argue that backward design is focused primarily on student learning and understanding.
The "Practice Standards" are basically endless formative assessments that lead students to mastery. Secondary teachers tend to think that every thing has to be graded, but non-graded is formative, too. Once you have worked through the three steps of backward design, you should make sure that all elements (objectives, assessments, learning activities, and instructional materials) align with each other.
I mean, even though I loved the book, my students’ response to it was mostly lukewarm. Maybe it was the connections I was able to make to the stuff students dealt with on a day-to-day basis. I taught that book a few times, and even though I looked forward to it every time, I always finished the unit a little unsatisfied. The big ideas and important understandings are referred to as enduring understandings because these are the ideas that instructors want students to remember sometime after they’ve completed the course. One criticism of this approach is that is appears to promote “teaching to the test”. Yet despite the negative connotation that comes along with that phrase, arguable teaching to the test is exactly what the role of the instructor should be.
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