Do you ever struggle to come up with lesson plans? Do you find yourself staring at a blank page, wondering where your creativity went? Try using the backwards design approach to lesson planning. This method really helps me when I feel stuck planning a lesson.
Made popular by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins, backwards planning is a method where the teacher first figures out the end result of the lesson.
I have a love/hate relationship with lesson planning. It stresses me out sometimes, and I get annoyed with the amount of time it can take. However, I don’t like teaching without a plan! I know there are countless benefits to lesson planning.
Lesson Planning Helps Teachers:
– tailor lessons to meet specific objectives
– manage time spent in the classroom
– plan ahead for how students will be grouped
– visualize a plan for how activities are linked to assessments
– evaluate their own knowledge of a topic or concept that they will teach
– feel prepared and confident when they go to teach a lesson
Steps to Backwards Design Lesson Planning
How can you make lessons with a backwards design approach?
– First, determine what outcome(s) will be addressed. What will students be able to do after they’ve participated in this lesson? These outcomes can be based off a needs analysis or they can be part of a set of predetermined standards/objectives for your class.
– Second, the teacher determines what forms of assessment, or evidence, would prove that this learning occurred. What assessments can measure this learning? For example, will they do a writing assignment, a presentation, or a test?
– Finally, the teacher makes decisions about what activities will lead up to this assessment. What activities will students do in class that will help prepare them for successful completion of the assessment? These activities will be integrated into the lesson(s) leading up to the assessment.
Example of Backwards Design
- 1. Outcome: Students will be able to compare and contrast two or more things in writing. This becomes the learning objective for the lesson.
- 2. The final product/assessment will be a compare and contrast paragraph on a particular topic. The teacher makes the rubric for this assignment.
- 3. Looking at the rubric, the teacher knows that students will need to learn compare and contrast language such as comparative adjectives. Students will need to practice this language in a controlled way at first, and then the practice activities will gradually get more difficult and open-ended.
The lessons leading up to the assessment can span several days. For the example above, the teacher could teach an additional lesson on compare/contrast signal words such as in contrast, on the other hand, like/unlike, etc. If students don’t know basic paragraph structure, that would need to be taught, as well.
Backwards design answers the questions Why am I doing what I’m doing? Why are the students doing this activity? This helps the instructor plan lessons with purpose and intentionality. There is a stronger focus on learning rather than on teaching with a backwards design.
For more information on backwards design, check out this website about the book Understanding by Design (2005) by Wiggins & McTighe.