As a teacher for the past 10 years, I have found that using backwards design is a game changer in making sure that I stay ahead in my planning for my classes. I do feel that if you are a new teacher, backwards design is way more daunting until you have a general idea of how you teach and understand the curriculum a little bit. Backwards design is great to implement when you are adding in or changing a unit rather than designing a whole year of curriculum while teaching it too!
Table of Contents
Concept of Backwards Design
When I say “backwards design,” the concept is that you start with the final summative assessment and the skills that will be assessed for the unit. Then work backwards in your planning to make sure that you are providing ample practice with those skills that will be assessed.
As an English teacher, backwards design also provides me with a sequence of the reading pace for novels that we are reading as a class. I often have students write essays as well, so when I know that the prompt is going to be, I am able to direct attention during reading towards making sure students are focusing on the right ideas. For example, when teaching Animal Farm, they write a characterization analysis essay. So we focus on comprehension, characterization, and practice theme development over the course of reading the book.
Steps to Backwards Design
- Identify the summative assessment.
- Identify the skills and standards.
- Identify readings/topics to get to complete understanding.
- Identify activities.
- Basic understanding activities.
- Deeper analysis activities.
- Plan out the time.
Steps 1 and 2 of Backwards Design
The first step to having successful backwards planning is making sure you can identify what the summative assessment will be and what are the skills that will be assessed. When planning for the final assignments, remember that it doesn’t always have to be a test. There are tons of ideas of how to assess for understanding and I provide lots of ideas of creative summative assessments.
Step 3 of Backwards Design
Once you identify the summative, skills, and standards, you must figure out what are the readings and topics that should be touched on to ensure understanding. This is where you will introduce background information and context, different events, specific literary concepts (like characterization, figurative language, etc), or any other things that need to be understood to help students be successful for the summative assessment. You’re essentially designing your unit to match the test.
Step 4 of Backwards Design
With knowing the summative assessment, skills, and topics, you now get to focus on the biggest part of our units: deciding and creating the activities. This is the step where the majority of the work and time goes into backwards design, which makes sense as this is the bulk of the unit.
When it comes to activities, we want to think about the basic understanding activities and the deep analysis activities. For example, when reading a novel, I make sure that we complete some basic comprehension for that chapter. Then the following day, we will dive into a deeper concept to understand from that novel rather than continuing to read the novel. These deeper analysis activities are where I’m going to push students to dive into the upper levels of Bloom’s taxonomy and challenge their thinking. But you can’t do that without a basic understanding of what is happening and vocabulary.
Step 5 of Backwards Design
Deciding on the final assessment and the activities to get you there are the biggest time suck when it comes to using backwards planning. But once you’ve decided those things, the last step is to literally plan out the unit – how long everything will take. When it’s the first time that I am going through a unit, I try to build in one day every couple of weeks as a work day in case I find that my pace is going too quickly. If students don’t need that day, I can add in a quick mini-lesson, community building activity, or an assessment to make sure that students are on track with where I hope they are!
This is where having a digital planner helps so much – as it makes editing my plans way easier! Copy and paste is way simpler than erasing and rewriting!
Again, backwards design completely changed how I approach teaching. It has reduced my stress, allowed me to manage my time better, and has made me feel more like an accomplished teacher. I highly recommend trying it out – and if you already have complete units, do a reflection on them to make sure that the lessons and summative assessment are aligning for student success!
