Wiki Page, GOTT Clover II: Think Backward

Wiki Page
2016-08-14T21:32:33-06:00

When planning a new course, it's often best to utilize backward design.

Backward design begins with the end in mind. You start by considering the enduring understandings you want your students to develop, and from that you develop learning objectives for the unit. Then you decide the best way for your students to demonstrate their understanding of those learning objectives. Then working backward from that, you think about how you will ensure your students have the skills and understand the concepts required on the summative assessment. From this backward thinking, you arrive at content that supports the assessments, and they in turn support the learning objectives. You start with what is most important and work backwards.

By utilizing backward design, teachers are able to avoid focusing so much on content that they end up writing a textbook instead of an online course. An online course, after all, should encourage discovery and higher level thinking through activities, rather than memorization of text for a multiple-choice quiz. Backward design encourages teaching for understanding and requires students to apply and demonstrate their learning. Many of the best teachers have been using this approach, even if they didn't have a name for it.

Planning the course

Step 1: Decide on the themes, enduring understandings and essential questions for the course. What do you want students to leave your course with?

Step 2: Use the enduring understandings and essential questions to help articulate the learning objectives of the course. Remember higher levels of learning when developing learning objectives. Learning objectives should utilize active verbs.

Step 3: Take your learning objectives and start organizing them into "themes" or units. Your modules in Canvas will come naturally from these groupings of learning objectives.

For each unit or module:

Step 1: Articulate your learning objectives for the unit or module. Create objectives with action verbs from Bloom's higher levels of thinking.

Step 2: Design a summative assessment for the end of the unit that allows students to demonstrate understanding of the learning objective(s).

Step 3: Choose strategies, activities, best practices to prepare students for the summative assessment

Step 4: Choose resources and material that supports and prepares students for the activities

Things to consider

Describe how you will build connections between the “units” or “modules” so students understand the relationships

How will you make your “big ideas” apparent throughout the course, so they are pervasive and not just listed at the start of a topic?

It can be an adjustment for many teachers to develop this way. You need to decide on what is essential for students to know; what is at the core or "heart" of your discipline and then decide how you will know when students have reached that goal. So, designing your assessment is a necessary piece that must occur in the beginning to give both you and your students a clear destination for the unit. Once the destination is clear, the teacher is able to create the best roadmap to get there.