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[Hilary]

I ran across this on the D&C site ... I don't know who Laura Thompson is (does anyone?) but I found some of this strange ... I hope it doesn't just mean teaching to the test! And I don't know ... the last sentence just sounds like gobbledygook to me ..


The Rochester City School District's Foreign Language Department has established a committee on curriculum that is currently working to enhance the existing Foreign Language curriculums being used in our schools. This committee has decided to apply the concept of Backward Design(BD), a process of lesson planning created by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe and introduced in Understanding by Design (1998).               

          Using backward design or teaching for understanding, and requiring students to apply and demonstrate their learning are not new concepts. Many teachers have been successful with this approach, even if they didn't have a name for it. BD is a process that focuses on assessment first and instructional activities last. It shifts teacher perspectives as it forces teachers to look at the big picture with the end goals in mind. In planning with this approach, teachers set the essential understanding of their curriculum or unit, decide how students will prove their learning, and finally design instructional activities to help students be successful. BD begins with the end in mind and asks questions such as; What are the enduring understandings that we want students to develop? How will students demonstrate their understanding? How can we be sure that students have the skills and understand the concepts required on the summative assessment? It's called backwards design because in theory as well as in practice, the unit begins at the end. It is based on the concept that by starting with a focus on the enduring understandings that you want your students to learn and apply, then developing how you will know how and when they have reached that understanding, the steps between will be carefully scaffolded to reach that objective.

The steps to this process are as follows;

Decide what are the desired outcomes and results.

Determine what assessments to use.

Plan instructional strategies and learning activities that bring students to the decided upon levels of competency.

The benefits of using Backward Design are many and include the reduction in the number of assessments that students have to take, which reduces the teacher's work load. Another benefit is that we move toward deeper understanding by students because we are clarifying the strengths and weaknesses in the learning process.

A very important benefit that promotes life long learning for students is the ability to connect the knowledge and skills learned across all content areas which they can apply to real life situations.