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On top of that, I was actually excited about teaching the lessons I had planned. For the first time, it felt like none of my class was wasted; everything actually mattered. And I got to drool over Matt Dillon in the movie’s opening scene again and again and again. This method is rooted in the constructivist theories of educators like Jean Piaget. Like Backward Design, Inquiry-Based Learning encourages higher-order thinking skills. However, it differs in that the learning process is far less structured, often initiated by a question or problem posed by the students themselves rather than pre-defined learning objectives.
Center for Teaching
Students will also need support to know how to prepare for assignments, to evaluate their work, and to understand their performance. Consider how your teaching strategies and learning activities will explicitly prepare students for assignments and how you can provide tangible feedback on their progress. So far you have defined your course learning goals and outcomes and planned your assessments of student learning.
How to Master the Backward Lesson Planning Approach
Learning barriers can be physical, mental, emotional, cultural, or social elements that obstruct a student from achieving their learning goals. Jean Pak is the founder and owner of Jean Pak LLC and a Thinkific Expert and Learning Experience Designer helping businesses develop more interactive and engaging learning experiences. In conclusion, backwards design planning is a different approach for many of us and will challenge how we traditionally design and build courses by starting with the end goal in mind. The purpose behind Blooms Taxonomy is to help us guide our students from learning to acquire new knowledge to more concrete and higher levels of mastery such as application, analysis, critical thinking and evaluation. For many of us, it is not easy to write this so go for the practice of writing out the outcomes regardless of whether they are accurate.
Why Use Backward Design for Lesson Planning?
For instance, it's difficult to set specific, narrow learning goals for interdisciplinary courses like “Environmental Science” that integrate biology, chemistry, and social science. The challenge lies in encapsulating the breadth of these disciplines into a set of focused objectives without diluting the complexity and richness of the subject matter. For your most important learning outcomes, you may need to develop multiple opportunities to measure students' progress over the duration of the course. This will also give students the chance to practice and apply skills in a variety of contexts, incorporate feedback, and get the practice they need to meet upcoming challenges in the course. For these same reasons, your assessment methods will ideally incorporate various degrees of difficulty or skill integration over the semester.
Create Your Course
It continually encourages the instructor to establish the purpose of doing something before implementing it into the curriculum. Therefore, backward design is an effective way of providing guidance for instruction and designing lessons, units, and courses. Once the learning goals, or desired results, have been identified, instructors will have an easier time developing assessments and instruction around grounded learning outcomes. For educators looking to align their teaching methods with desired learning outcomes, Backward Design offers a robust, flexible framework. Whether you're teaching in a traditional classroom, a corporate setting, or an online platform, taking the time to plan backward can lead to more effective, engaging, and meaningful learning experiences.
Time-Consuming Planning Phase
Backward design and UDL are complementary frameworks for course planning, as each are centered on student learning and purposeful, proactive course design. “Backward Design” is an approach to creating curriculum, subjects, and even single class sessions that treats the goal of teaching as not merely “covering” a certain amount of content, but also facilitating student learning. Backward design prioritizes the intended learning outcomes instead of topics to be covered.
This focus could overshadow other crucial aspects of education, such as fostering a love for learning, encouraging creativity, and developing social skills. The concern here is the potential for "teaching to the test" at the expense of a more holistic education. Plus, because Backward Design focuses on real-world skills and applications, students can easily see the value in what they're learning. No more asking, "When will I ever use this?" They know they're learning things that will help them in the future, whether it's acing a job interview or understanding how to budget their money. Students know right from the start what they're aiming for, which helps keep them motivated and on track. Instead of juggling a bunch of topics and hoping students will get something out of it, teachers can zero in on what truly matters.
Traditional vs. backward design lesson planning
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. If we assume that a large portion of a student’s grade is based on the test, then students are not being measured on their achievement of that standard. 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.
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Backward lesson design begins with identifying a specific desired outcome. Wiggins and McTighe have created a six-part checklist built on the acronym WHERETO that consists of key elements that should be included in your instructional materials and learning activities. And there we have it—a comprehensive look at Backward Design, from its origins and methodology to its benefits, challenges, comparisons with other frameworks, and practical tips for implementation. We hope this guide serves as a valuable resource for educators and curriculum designers alike, offering insights and strategies to enhance teaching and learning for all. Educational technology experts like Dr. Ruben Puentedura, known for the SAMR model, suggest that technology can play a powerful role in implementing Backward Design.
Backward design can be useful for professional educators and for anyone who teaches students, both online and in person. Now it’s time to create lessons and activities for your course materials. Since you already know what your tests will be about, this should be relatively easy.
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Enhancing Japanese elementary and junior high-school foreign language education.
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The first step in beginning to use and incorporate backwards design is to identify the overall course outcomes, not objectives for your learners. One of the best ways to do this is by listing and or writing out outcomes using Bloom’s Taxonomy. Notice that a general learning outcome (“tease out the laws of electromagnetism…”) is rather non-specific. I’m a social studies teacher, so my examples reflect that content — sorry math and science teachers! These indicators can help guide you toward planning both formative and end-of-unit summative assessments.
In that case, make sure that you give your students plenty of time to write notes for your lessons so they can study them and answer you promptly and accurately come test day. This Drake Institute program offers guidance and compensation to full-time (.75 FTE) faculty at Ohio State for time spent researching evidence-based teaching practices and redesigning their courses around those teaching practices. If you're an Ohio State educator looking for more support with course design, there are a number of resources at your disposal. In addition to browsing our growing repository of teaching topics, we encourage you to explore the following professional development activities.
By being aware of these potential pitfalls, teachers, trainers, and curriculum designers can take steps to mitigate them. Now you might be wondering, "Isn't this how all teaching is done?" Not exactly. The old-school way of designing lessons—let's call it "Forward Design"—starts with the teaching materials and activities, sort of like making up the clues for your treasure hunt before you even know where the treasure is hidden. In the simplest terms, Backward Design is like planning a treasure hunt. Instead of starting with the first clue, you begin by planting the treasure—your final learning goal.
Whether it's digital assessments or interactive activities, technology can offer innovative ways to achieve your learning objectives. Dr. Benjamin Bloom, who created Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning objectives, often adhered to this method. While it is still widely used, Forward Design can sometimes lead to misalignment between learning objectives and assessments, something that Backward Design explicitly seeks to avoid. Use specific action verbs to express exactly the kinds of skills you want your students to develop.
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