Whether it be for lessons, units or curriculum, Backwards Design should be the chosen method.
When I landed my first teaching job I was not handed a curriculum to teach from but rather I was asked to create one for my class. Having taken all the required education courses I still felt unprepared for the task. My new colleagues offered their support and my first curriculum was created after a long stressful process. It had appropriate assessments, cohesive units, and engaging activates; I was proud of it. Looking back it was not a good curriculum, but rather a series of disconnected learning opportunities that missed the big picture. It wasn’t until I read Understanding By Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe that I realized how far off I was.
I strongly recommend any teaching professional to pick up the book and give it a read if you have not already done so (affiliate link above). This book helped me understand how to properly plan curriculums, units, lessons, and even layout academic programs that span the course of years. With so much importance rightfully placed on proper planning, this book is a must have for anyone involved in that process. Rather than summarize the whole book, I want to focus on two key points that resonated with me.
Begin planning with the end in mind. It is such a simple concept that we use in our everyday life, but teachers often do not apply it their professional practice. Start by asking what skills do you want your students to attain? Once you do this, then you have a focal point to plan towards. Before you begin designing activities and learning opportunities, start with how will you assess that your students attained those skills? Now you have the goal in mind and how to assess the success of reaching that goal, now you can begin planning the path towards getting there.
This concept applies to all areas of planning from courses to curriculum to lessons. I have observed countless teachers teach lesson where they are so focused on the process, ensuring that everything they wrote in the lesson plan was applied, and completely forgetting that there was a goal to the lesson and they never got there because they were focused on things that are less important. When asked if it was a it a successful lesson, the teacher’s answer is almost always yes, the follow up question is inevitably, did the students reach the goal that you set out, and the answer is almost always, we didn’t get there. So you didn’t reach the goal you set out to reach and you didn’t assess the students learning because you were focused on checking off boxes on your lesson plan. This is the difference between teaching on the fly, and teaching with the end goal in mind (Backwards Design).
The second point, which greatly helped my approach to student learning, is the difference between knowledge and understanding. Simply put, knowledge is the acquisition of new content, understanding is the application of that new content. The book gives a great example of this, students on a high stakes exam were given two questions surrounding the Pythagorean Theorem (A2 + B2 = C2), the first was a straight plug in the numbers question where the formula was prescribed, and the second did not mention the formula, but gave the students a question where they had to come up with what formula to use on their own and solve the problem. Students en masse answered the first question correctly and the second question incorrectly. Students memorized how to use the formula, but had no understanding of what the formula was actually used for.
This concept forced me to ask myself, am I teaching the students to simply acquire new content, or am I teaching in a way that they understand the new content and can apply it across disciplines and scenarios without prompting. I believe early in my career I can say that it was the former. I was more focused on student performance on exams than I was on building lasting experiences. I think many of us get sucked into that temptation. A class of students that score well on our exams reinforces our satisfaction with our own teaching, but did the students truly gain a new understanding of the content or just memorize it to be able to regurgitate it on an exam? Teaching for understanding has to be our goal, and we should plan accordingly.
Planning is not an easy task and the required educational experiences for teachers may not be adequate enough. The good news is that there is no shortage of resources out there to help the professional teacher grow their craft. Understanding By Design is one such resource that I can confidently say should be in every teachers’ library. There are lessons to be learned beyond what I shared here, pick it up and see for yourself.