Backward Design

This week’s post is written by Sarah. I am an almost finished PhD candidate in Geology and Geophysics.

I wanted to write a little about a concept that the GTC (and lots of other people - see some more links below) thinks is important and that we introduce in many workshops that we lead: backward design. I’ll also talk about a discussion that we had in my Fundamentals of Teaching Science workshop about backward design, where participants felt it was a little impractical.

Backward design emphasizes learning goals and outcomes as opposed to starting by deciding what topics you need to cover. Instead of first deciding what content you will teach or what activities you will do, backward design begins with figuring out what your desired results are.

Basically, you start out by deciding how you want students to be different when you’re done teaching. What do you want them to be able to do or know?

Then you decide how you’ll be able to tell if that was done. Is there a test question that would let you know? Should you have them do an experiment or demonstration to show you they know how? Should they write a paper about it?

Then you’ll decide what you as a teacher will do to help your students reach these goals. Is a lecture the best way? Should you have them go outside and observe a phenomenon? Should you assign a book or paper for them to read and discuss with other students?

Cue infographic:

(Image from Wikipedia)

After presenting this to our first Fundamentals session this fall, we were met with some skepticism. Would this really be feasible in someone’s first semester of teaching a class at a brand new job at a brand new university when they have so much other stuff to do? I suppose the official answer could be that it shouldn’t matter, you want the best for your students no matter how long it takes. But yes, it is overwhelming to think about redesigning a whole course when there is already one being taught that seems to be working fine.

That, to me, is the beauty of backward design. It is not all or nothing. This can be your framework for so many scales, from entire curricula to a semester-long course to a 50 minute class to a 10 minute activity. If there is a class that you may not have a lot of control over the whole thing (or you don’t want to change the whole thing) this is still a great way to make your activities and lessons align with your learning goals.

It was said at Teaching at Yale Day last month and many more times at GTC events – we want people to try new things even if they aren’t sure it will work. Otherwise, how do you know? I hope my skeptical workshop participants now feel a little more confident to try backwards design at least on a small scale because otherwise how will they know how cool it is?

So does starting on a small scale make it seem more doable? A devil’s advocate asked me, isn’t this just teaching to the test? What do you think?

Here are some other people talking about this:

A Chronicle article

Lots of examples and resource