Planning Backward: Goals-Led Lesson Design

Janice Gallagher

May 3rd, 2011

Objectives• Understand the “Planning Backwards”

Approach

• Short-term: Apply this understanding to the lesson you will be giving

• Long-term: When you teach your own courses, remember this as an approach to curriculum design

Agenda• Introductions• Understanding by design (“Planning

Backwards”) intro• Identifying learning outcomes:

– Enduring Understandings, Important info and info worth being familiar with

– Assessment rationale– Incorporating backwards planning into your

lesson plan

Introductions

– What is an important personal or professional goal you have set for yourself?

– (Why did you set this goal?) – How did you know/will you know when you

have achieved it?– What were the intermediary steps or

achievements that made it possible for you to succeed?

3 Stages of Planning Backwards

Stage 1: Identify desired outcomes and results.

Stage 2: Determine what constitutes acceptable evidence of competency in the outcomes and results (assessment).

Stage 3: Plan instructional strategies and learning experiences that bring students to these competency levels.

3 different types of outcomes Information…

1) Worth being familiar with

2) Important to know and do

3) “Enduring” understanding

Stage 1: Identify desired outcomes and results.

Enduring Understandings• Enduring understandings are statements

summarizing important ideas and core processes that are central to a discipline and have lasting value beyond the classroom.

• They synthesize what students should understand—not just know or do—as a result of studying a particular content area. Moreover, they articulate what students should “revisit” over the course of their lifetimes in relationship to the content area.

Enduring Understandings1. Identify core concepts, principles, theories, &

processes

2. Serve to organize important facts, skills, or actions

3. Can transfer to other fields as well as non-academic life

4. Require uncoverage: what are the abstract/complex ideas that require genuine insight?

5. Are deliberately framed as declarative sentences that present major curriculum generalizations and recurrent ideas.

Enduring Understandings: Examples

• The scientific method and technology allow us to gather data, analyze results, draw conclusions to solve problems.

• Scientists recognize and analyze spatial relationships in order to see the relationship between and among organisms and places.

• An organism’s structure helps it to survive in its environment.

• Scientific claims must be verified by independent investigations.

• Standardized measures allow people to more accurately describe the physical world.

Your future class

1) What is an enduring understanding you can identify: from a class you’ve taken, from your discipline, even from a lecture.

2) What is the “enduring understanding” of your lesson?

- What do you want them to remember 1 year, 3 years after your lesson?

Important to know and do

• This is information that you would like students to retain throughout the course.

• Examples: – How to work with lab equipment– Why certain chemicals interact in certain

ways

Important to know and doIn your lesson - what is it important that

students know and be able to do?

- Think about sequencing: - what do they need to know coming into the

class you will teach?- Are there individual pieces of

knowledge/processes that could be introduced prior to your lesson that would strengthen students’ ability to fully participate in your lesson?

Worth being familiar withIn your lesson - what should students be

familiar with?

- This is information necessary to perform the task or reach the desired enduring understanding, desired “know and be able to do”

- Examples:- The chemical symbols of different elements- The full scientific name of certain species

Stage 2:Thinking about assessment:

How will I know that students have gained the enduring understandings, the important information and abilities, and

familiarities that I value?

Possible Assessment Types:

• Quizzes, tests, lab write-ups• Papers• Performance Tasks

What will yours be?

How will your assessment incentivize and structure learning?

When evaluating student work:

• How will you explain what you are looking for?

• When will you do this? On day of lesson? Before? Why?

• Will you show them a rubric before they submit work?

Stage 3: Plan instructional strategies and learning experiences that bring students to these competency levels.

Does your current lesson plan lead to the successful fulfillment of your desired learning outcomes?What could you change in your lesson plan so that it more successfully achieves your desired outcomes?

Final Activity:* Reflection: What do you feel like you take away from this strategy

that will be useful?