Sunday, April 28, 2024

An Interview with Grant Wiggins: The Power of Backwards Design

backward design in education

Your answer to this question should provide you with more specific (and measurable ILOs. In backward design, you build your course not around predetermined assignments and activities, but around the skills and knowledge you want your students to gain from the experience. In backward design, you anchor the development of a course in a careful articulation of the learning goals—just what it is that you want students to learn—and work backward from there.

backward design in education

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This last example provides intended learning outcomes for a subject focused more on soft skills, where measuring student ability objectively is significantly more nuanced and difficult. 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. If it turns out that those favorite lessons don’t really align with any standards, you might be able to revise them so they do.

9 Tips for Success as an Instructional Designer - Campus Technology

9 Tips for Success as an Instructional Designer.

Posted: Wed, 15 Feb 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Stage 1: Identify desired results

In addition, it is helpful to ask yourself what the impact of the course will be on students, and how you hope they will be different by the end of it. Backward design provides a relevant context for students as they engage in learning activities. Some school districts are bucking the statewide trend, narrowing achievement gaps with higher-than-average outcomes among disadvantaged groups of kids. The Learning Policy Institute recently highlighted these “positive outlier” districts in which students of color are outperforming their racial, ethnic and socioeconomic peer groups.

Part 2: Backwards Design and Designing Assessments

Advocates of backward design would argue that the instructional process should serve the goals; the goals—and the results for students—should not be determined by the process. Because “beginning with the end” is often a counterintuitive process, backward design gives educators a structure they can follow when creating a curriculum and planning their instructional process. As previously stated, backward design is beneficial to instructors because it innately encourages intentionality during the design process. 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.

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. Learning outcomes describe what students know or can do, not what the instructor does.

After all, how do we know students have learned anything after we have taught them if we don't assess them on what we hope they have learned? Since Wiggins helped McTighe write UbD a while ago, I was curious to know how much progress we as educators have made since then. Wiggins and McTighe propose a framework called Six Facets of Understanding as a guide for building effective assessments. It is made up of six non-hierarchical ‘domains’ or ‘facets’ that they identify as indicators of understanding.

However, when the goal is enduring understanding, more complex and authentic assessment strategies might be needed to assess student learning. The illustration below shows an alignment between specific assessment types and the different types of evidence they provide. Planning starts with defining the learning goal and identifying the central question for the lesson.

Learner-Centered vs Content-Centered Approach

Convocation 2018 – BMCC - BMCC

Convocation 2018 – BMCC.

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The information that fits within this question could be the facts, concepts, principles, processes, strategies, and methods students should know when they leave the course. Research demonstrates the influence teachers of color have in lifting up academic achievement for students of color, and the effort has been a state focus over the last year. But while America’s teaching corps has become more diverse, recruiting and retaining qualified teachers of color has remained a challenge in California. An analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California found that changes in California’s school funding law have lowered classroom sizes and added resources, such as extra teachers and support staff, for schools with high concentrations of disadvantaged students. But those extra teachers, the analysis found, were still more likely to be inexperienced. 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.

When schools moved to virtual instruction in early 2020, parents with more resources were able to provide a softer landing. Low-income, Black and Latino families, however, were more likely to lack an internet connection and slip through the cracks completely. Some experts expect it’ll take some marginalized student groups a generation to recover. The “backward design” model exemplified here is developed in considerable detail by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe in their book Understanding By Design. While most of the examples in that book come from K-12 education, their method can be adapted to university education. One criticism of this approach is that is appears to promote “teaching to the test”.

Remember that “students” is the subject of the generic learning outcome stem shown at the beginning of this section. The goals for your course should not be stated in terms of what the instructor will cover, but rather in how the students will change, facilitated by the instructor’s guidance. But California public schools educate more than 6 million students, so it’s difficult to scale successes. The state is home to the nation’s second-largest district (Los Angeles Unified), dozens of other large districts each responsible for educating tens of thousands of kids, and hundreds of small districts spread throughout the state’s urban and rural areas.

Posing hypothetical questions or problems designed to allow students to apply new knowledge, or to practice newly acquired skills, will give them a sense of mastery that mere memorization cannot. 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.

“Develop and use a model of the Earth-sun-moon system to describe the cyclic patterns of lunar phases, eclipses of the sun and moon, and seasons” (MS-ESS1-1). Instead of starting with a topic, we’d do better if we start with an end goal, and that’s where backward design comes in. We have known for some time that high levels of stress and anxiety can wreak havoc on our overall health. Browse over 500+ educator courses and numerous certificates to enhance your curriculum and earn credit toward salary advancement.

When I taught seventh grade language arts, one of my favorite things to teach was S.E. Every year, we began the unit with a discussion about the cliques that formed in students’ lives, how these groups interacted, the unwritten rules that governed their behavior, and what happened when groups clashed or people formed relationships across group lines. After we did some reflecting, writing, and talking, we were ready to start the book. 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). 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.

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