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It creates a concrete, clear picture of what road to take when you have a destination in mind. Oral interpersonal communication tasks engage students for the purpose of exchanging information and ideas, meeting one’s needs, and expressing and supporting opinions through speaking and listening or signing with others. This condition might be a tool, reference, aid, or context that students will or will not be able to use. Curriculum theorist Jay McTighe, another co-creator of Backward Design, highlights how the approach can be adapted for different subjects, age groups, and educational settings. This adaptability makes it a popular choice for a wide range of educational contexts, from K-12 to higher education and corporate training. By focusing on the end goals—say, improving customer service or increasing sales—trainers can build a program that really works.
Alignment of learning activities to assessments and feedback
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. Some chapters we did in class (I would read to them, then they would read silently), and others at home. Some students became as absorbed in the novel as I’d hoped they would; others, not so much. Predictably, some fell behind in the book like they did with all assigned reading. Professor Buckeye has been asked to teach an introductory course on a standard topic in his discipline—it’s a course he’s never taught before and it’s not exactly in his area of expertise.
Backward Design Model: Lesson Plans and Examples [PLUS: Free Lesson Plan Template]
The result was very nearly always far less transfer and skill acquisition than I wanted. Students often showed a surface understanding of the skills we discussed but failed to exhibit them over the long term. You don’t have to sit down for hours and do all three steps at the same time.
Alignment of learning objectives to feedback and assessment
I’m a social studies teacher, so my examples reflect that content — sorry math and science teachers! 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. In the first stage of backward design, instructors identify what students should know, understand, and be able to do by the end of the course, lesson or module. With this detailed set of ILOs, we see exactly how the three general ILOs in the first section will be measured. Relatively immeasurable outcomes (e.g., “Gain an appreciation…”) are analyzed into the homework and exam tasks through which students can show that they have gained such an appreciation. This second set of ILOs also provides much more detail, specificity, and measurability.
Basic Steps of Backward Design Lesson Plans
Teachers like Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann have popularized this approach, which often involves students watching lectures at home and engaging in activities during class. While the Flipped Classroom also aims for active learning and engagement, it doesn’t necessarily start with specific outcomes in mind, making it different from Backward Design in its initial focus. Popularized by education reformers like John Dewey, Project-Based Learning focuses on complex questions or challenges that require students to engage in critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration. While PBL and Backward Design both stress the importance of real-world applications, they differ in structure. PBL is generally more open-ended and may not align neatly with specific learning objectives. One of the most celebrated aspects of Backward Design is its focus on clear learning objectives.
Stage 3: Plan learning activities and instructional materials
Backward design takes a learner-centered approach to course design, facilitating the creation of more cohesive, clear, and intentional learning experiences for students. A learner-centered approach goes beyond engaging students in content and works to ensure that students have the resources and scaffolding necessary to fully understand the lesson, module, or course. 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. Your learning outcomes should be achievable for the students in your class and achievable in the time allotted to your subject. Crafting realistic learning outcomes requires some understanding of students’ prior knowledge and skills in your subject. In this model, traditional classroom activities and homework assignments are reversed.
Research has shown that starting with the end goal in mind and working backward to design instruction can lead to better student outcomes and deeper learning. In contrast, the backward design approach has instructors consider the learning goals of the course first. These learning goals embody the knowledge and skills instructors want their students to have learned when they leave the course.
This learner-centered focus makes it a powerful approach for modern education, where student engagement and outcomes are increasingly emphasized. This method is rooted in the constructivist theories of educators like Jean Piaget. Like Backward Design, Inquiry-Based Learning encourages higher-order thinking skills.
Determine appropriate assessments
So if we re-do this unit plan with backward design, we’ll need to start by developing an assessment that would measure success with that standard. I was first introduced to this concept in my sixth year of teaching, and the genius of it completely blew me away. I used it when planning my next unit and experienced the biggest spike in student success I’d ever seen. 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. There was something a lot more satisfying about doing things this way.
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Some states in the U.S., like Massachusetts and North Carolina, even began incorporating elements of Backward Design into their educational standards. 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. Using a process like backward design helps us get better at making these decisions. 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. With a good rubric in place, we then work backwards to determine what lessons students need to do excellent work on the final assessment.
Two heads are always better than one, so after you’ve taken the time to thoughtfully backwards design a lesson, after you teach it, the next step is to collaborate with a colleague. Debriefing about what worked and didn’t during the instruction will help you improve the lesson even more for next time you teach it. It may also help you realize you need to put on the brakes and tweak some things in the lesson to make it more accessible so that when it comes time for an exit ticket, more than two kids actually meet the standard. You can also think about the prerequisite skills students need in order to achieve the objective. This lesson would have looked very different with some backwards design! I can’t imagine you will not find the process useful and increase the cohesiveness of your lesson plans.
If you’ve never heard of backwards design or see it being used then it is because most of the time people are using a traditional approach. The traditional design approach is the exact opposite- the process starts at the front and works its way to the end. When we first begin the process of building our online course, we are overwhelmed by all the different ways to begin the process. We know the content so well and have taught the material many times but suddenly we get stuck when planning the course.
Backwards design is simply starting from the outcome (or transformation) for your students & building the modules/chapters/sections with those outcomes in mind. As we established last week, while the standards are the same for everyone, each program has a different thought process, different activities, and their lesson for that standard will be completely different. Do I ever find myself under the gun for any myriad of reasons, behind on my lessons for the week and simply do my best with what’s available? By creating 3 columns of goals I simply choose at least one from each for any given lesson.
This practice will take time to adapt to this approach but will get easier over time as we begin to identify and see the difference when the outcomes match up with the course design and learning experience. The benefit and results for your learners will lead to a more positive and rewarding online learning experience. Backward design provides a relevant context for students as they engage in learning activities.
ACTFL is committed to providing vision, leadership, and support for quality teaching and learning to prepare the next generation of global citizens. Criterion – How WELL the learner must perform to demonstrate content mastery. This refers to a degree of accuracy, the number of correct responses, or perhaps a teacher-imposed time limit. As educational paradigms continue to evolve, frameworks like Backward Design will likely undergo revisions and adaptations.
Unlike Backward Design, which is highly structured around pre-set objectives and assessments, Montessori is far more exploratory and driven by the student's own interests. Backward Design is a way of planning lessons or training sessions by starting with the end goal in mind. Imagine planning a road trip by first thinking about the destination, and then figuring out all the best stops and routes along the way. Use specific action verbs to express exactly the kinds of skills you want your students to develop. Ensure that various, appropriate levels of challenge are represented in your outcomes so you can measure how close students are to achieving the learning goal. You might wonder what the true difference is between traditional and backward design lesson plans.
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