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Stephanie Knight is the Language Technology Specialist for CASLS at the University of Oregon. Her interests are in second language acquisition, innovative pedagogy, curriculum development, and increasing access to high-level course work for traditionally underrepresented populations of students. She has taught Spanish at both the high school and university level. She earned her Master's in Latin American Studies from the University of New Mexico in 2009.

Backwards design is one of the ultimate buzzwords in present academic spheres. Talk to the teachers who use it, and it becomes somewhat of a silver bullet for curricular planning. Talk to the teachers who are still learning it, and it can feel like yet another initiative layered upon their already heavy burdens. It is celebrated and incorporated into current frameworks such as Project-Based Learning, Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design (2005), and International Baccalaureate unit planners. However, does backwards design merit this attention?

In order to answer this question, consider the following example:

After hearing about backwards design, Mr. Johnson writes a summative assessment incorporating all key vocabulary and grammar from a few chapters in his Spanish textbook and then carefully builds his classroom days around student acquisition of this content. As he teaches, he notices that student engagement is unchanged. Summative assessment scores only show negligible improvement, and Mr. Johnson doesn’t know if backwards design is worth the extra planning that it entails.

What did not work for Mr. Johnson?

Essentially, though Mr. Johnson designed backwardly, he did not engage in backwards design. In order to understand why, one must understand Graff (2011) and his analysis of what Shulman (1986) describes as curricular knowledge. Curricular knowledge is the knowledge needed to undertake both vertical and horizontal planning. Simply put, awareness of overarching concepts and topics in other subject areas is essential to building relevance for students. Consider a different scenario:

Mr. Johnson discovers that in about a month, the math teacher is going to cover percentages and ratios and the history teacher is going to cover the Mexican-American War. He realizes that both topics are related to the concept of change occurring over time, and he decides that he wants his own students to explore that concept through the creation of a multimedia presentation that documents the history of an immigrant family from the local community.  Using the context of the history of Mexican Immigration to the United States, he helps students acquire grammar (past-tense verbs) and vocabulary (government words) via discussions, videos, and readings. Students add flavor to the classroom by discussing how the Mexican-American war impacted immigration and how the percentage of immigrants making up the United States’ population has changed over time. In their summative assessment, Mr. Johnson notes that his students finally care more about communication than memorization.

The experience of teachers like Mr. Johnson shows that 1) teaching to the test is not backwards design as it was meant to be implemented and 2) effective backwards design requires intentional planning in which one’s subject matter is taught at a conceptual level. Teaching in such a way serves to ignite learning within a classroom and to encourage students to think beyond the textbook and into the real-world application of the information that they are learning.

References

Graff, N. (2001). “An Effective and Agonizing Way to Learn”: Backwards Design and New Teachers’ Preparation for Planning Curriculum. Teacher Education Quarterly, Summer 2011, 151-168.

Shulman, L.S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15 (2), 4-14.

Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2^nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.