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Understanding by Design Center for Teaching Vanderbilt University

backwards design lesson plan

Student learning and understanding can be gauged more accurately through a backward design approach since it leverages what students will need to know and understand during the design process in order to progress. Think explicitly about how to organize your content logically given your course subject matter. Possibilities include sequencing it chronologically, around key themes, from simple to complex disciplinary skills, from theory to application, and so on. This is the material you present alongside your main course content to support students with the necessary disciplinary knowledge or foundational skills that underpin or relate to it.

World Language Lesson Planning with Backwards Design

However, these ILOs still communicate crucial information to students about what good communication looks like to the instructor and help them better understand what will be expected of them in the course. As you create assessments and instructional strategies, keep student understanding at the forefront. Educators like Grant Wiggins emphasize that the ultimate goal of Backward Design is not just to teach content but to facilitate true understanding and application of knowledge.

Universal Design for Learning: Planning with All Students in Mind

Or you might keep them for other reasons—not every minute of class time has to be spent on standards-based instruction. Some activities have value because they help us get to know each other better, they help students develop social-emotional skills, or they simply offer a bit of fun. But if a lesson doesn’t do any of these things, if it’s disguised as learning but is doing little more than keeping students busy, it’s time for it to go. At this point, you have determined what students will know and be able to do by the end of your course.

backwards design lesson plan

Clear Learning Objectives

A well-designed rubric can help you align your assessments to your intended learning outcomes. Looking ahead to step two of backward design, you will need to identify evidence that an intended learning outcome has been obtained. If a learning outcome is not measurable, then we will not be able to know whether or not our course successfully achieved its goals.

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That way I can see at a glance if everything is checked off in the first two columns. For the Scientific Revolution unit students needed to analyze documents and figure out the point of view. They also are supposed to improve their essay writing skills, and form conclusions based on research. My dad, a carpenter, always used to say that any job was easy if you had the right tools. When sitting down to chart out your unit plan and a map of your lessons it’s useful to have a few tools of the trade handy. Another term often used for this process is Understanding By Design, a book written by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe.

Alignment of learning objectives to feedback and assessment

The right backward design lesson plan may result in a better learning experience for a classroom full of students, a private client, and everyone in between. We’re going to break down what backward design lesson planning is and why you should use it. The backward design approach to curriculum development first establishes educational goals and then builds assessment and instruction to serve those goals. The process of planning assignments and lessons by instructors to achieve pre-set instructional goals is called backwards mapping.

In this stage, the teacher asks the question, “How do I know if students have achieved the desired results? ” The key is to think as an assessor would and look for meaningful ways to evaluate student achievement. The focus is less on content coverage and more on higher level thinking skills and practical application. Using this approach, the teacher can assess student learning through formative assessments, such as one-on-one interviews, short quizzes, peer evaluation, and individual reflection. As teaching moves further into the 21st century it continues to evolve and change.

Postsecondary Assessments

The standard wants students to develop a model and use it to describe the system. 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. 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?

Unlike content-oriented approaches, the backward design process begins by determining learning goals and outcomes for students. You then develop assignments that will help students practice and meet those outcomes. Decisions about course content and teaching strategies appear last, guided by reflection on what students will need to demonstrate their learning.

Your answers to those questions will become the backbone of your summative assessment. In the second stage of backward design, instructors create the assessments students will complete in order to demonstrate evidence of learning and even progress towards achievement of the learning objectives. (26 PD Hours) In this course, participants will learn the importance of and how to align your instructional strategies and activities with your learning objectives and plans for assessments.

Go through the independent activities included in your book as well, problem sets or the math boxes or any other independent work or exit tickets that the students might be doing or working on. When we look through all the elements of the unit at first, everything seems kind of blurry, out of focus and overwhelming. Once we focus on the standard, we can see traces of it in all the activities and we can see how it’s presented to students throughout the unit – assessment, independent practice, etc. However, as we know, delivering of the curriculum (the standards) doesn’t always mean that children will retain concepts to the application level or develop any depth of understanding.

“Aligning teaching for constructive learning.” Higher Education Academy Discussion Paper. The rigidity of the Backward Design framework has also been critiqued by educators like Sir Ken Robinson, who champion the benefits of creativity and freedom in educational settings. However, proponents argue that the time investment upfront often leads to more effective and efficient teaching down the line. Finally, the Zone of Proximal Development, a concept introduced by Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky in the early 20th century, also supports the effectiveness of Backward Design. According to Vygotsky, this "zone" is the gap between what learners can do independently and what they can achieve with guidance. This teaching guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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