Chapter 1
Surfacing Backward Design

INTRODUCTION

I yanked open the door of the English building, only moments to spare before class was due to begin. Along with several students who were cutting it equally close, I hurried up the stairs to my First-Year Composition classroom on the second floor. Reaching the open doorway mere seconds before 8:00 a.m., I rushed into the room, gown flying behind me (well, not literally, but you get the idea) like Harry Potter's Snape bursting into his dungeon Potions classroom.

I slung my professorial-looking leather school bag onto the table in the front of the room and pulled out my green "Modern Class Record" attendance book, the one supplied by the English department to every graduate teaching assistant (GTA). I took my place behind the lectern, opened my authority-bestowing book, and proceeded to call roll. My sleepy (or bored) students - it was difficult to distinguish between the two - took turns responding with a mumbled "here," or occasionally (for variety) "present."

Having completed the housekeeping, I opened my college-ruled spiral notebook, the one in which I jotted down my lesson plan for each day. As I skimmed over my hasty and underdeveloped agenda, I drawled, "Let me seeee heeeeeere .." while I tried to remember what we would do that day and why.

Every. Single. Day. Every single day of my very first semester teaching college, I began class with those not-so-inspiring words-or so my students told me at the end of the semester (I didn't realize I was doing this). The class met at 8:00 a.m., four days per week. And every day I would race into class, take roll, and say, "Let me see here," while trying to figure out what the plan was. Not exactly a great start to my teaching career.

I've thought a lot about that semester. At only 22, I faced a sullen bunch of 18- and 19-year-olds every morning across the podium. That their sullenness might be related to my teaching only occurred to me later. It came as a shock to me that not everyone loved writing papers. Didn't everyone find joy and satisfaction in expressing themselves in the written word?

Somehow or other, I made it through that first semester. Prior to the first day of class, I and the other new GTAs had sat through a few days of training. After the semester started, we met every week to continue learning how to teach First-Year Composition. We'd discuss the content, the writing assignments, and sometimes even teaching methods. What we never discussed was the overall purpose of the course. What were the objectives of the course? Certainly we wanted students to become better writers. But better in what sense? For what purpose? To get jobs? Become novelists? Write better memos in their business careers?

Since I didn't have a clear view of the specific purpose of the course, I didn't have a clear sense of how all of its elements came together. The course seemed like a collection of different parts and practices - assignments, classroom activities, grading - that were each their own thing. But what connected them all? Why, for example, were the papers assigned and structured the way they were? What was the purpose of peer review? Why had the course readings been selected? None of this was apparent to me.

I suspect that many of us learned to teach college courses in the same way that I did: by the seat of our pants. Of course, flexibility and agility are virtues in our teaching, and every successful teacher must learn to improvise in the classroom. But that doesn't mean we should not also begin with a robust, systematic, and purposeful overall plan for the course. Having such a plan allows us to flex within the boundaries of our well-designed class, one that has developed answers to the kinds of questions articulated above.

Cue backward design.

IN THEORY

Imagine you are planning a road trip for your summer vacation. Do you hop in the car one day and mindlessly drive wherever the road leads? The more free-spirited among you might well try something like that. But most of us decide on a destination first. Where do we want to go?

Having settled on the destination, we make other plans to help us get there. We consider various routes for the trip. We research and select incremental milestones: Where might be a good place to break the journey for meals or exercise? Where should we stay overnight? We also have to make decisions about supplies we might need, the tools to make a successful journey. What do we need to pack? Do we need beach chairs and sunscreen for a trip to the ocean? Or are hiking boots and trekking poles needed for a mountain adventure?

Very few of us begin journeys without thinking about where we are going, how we will get there, and what we will need on the way.

In their seminal book Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe propose taking a similar approach to the design of educational experiences. They suggest beginning the process of teaching a course by thinking about the end first. If you're not familiar with this book, I highly recommend reading it before you teach your next class, as it provides many useful strategies for putting their theory into practice. You might also look at Dee Fink's Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses (2013), which takes a parallel - and equally thorough - approach to the process of creating a meaningful learning experience for your students.

The very short version of the arguments that both books make is that we should begin the course-planning process by focusing first on the most essential goals that we have for our students. Wiggins and McTighe refer to those goals as the "enduring understanding" that we want students to take away from the course. They explain that in order for an understanding to qualify as enduring, it should have "endured over time and across cultures because it has proved so important and useful," and also that it should "endure in the mind of the student . it should be learned in such a way that it does not fly away from memory once the unit is over or the test is completed" (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005, p. 136). Only after we have identified those deep goals should we worry about the content of the course, or the methods of instruction, or the kinds of assessments we will invite students to undertake. Everything must be anchored in the goals for enduring understanding; everything stems from those goals. New faculty members often begin the course-planning process by selecting the content: the textbooks and lecture materials. The backward-design process forces them to forget about the content until they decide what they really want students to learn.

When you backward design a college course, you might consider how you would answer three large questions, drawn from the road-trip analogy:

• Where do we want to go? What are our primary goals for the course? What do we want students to know and be able to do by the end of the term? This should form the basis of our thinking around course learning objectives or outcomes. Early in your career you might have taught courses without a clear sense of what the learning objectives listed on the syllabus actually say or really mean. Maybe you inherited a syllabus or a course shell from someone else, or maybe you just whipped up some objectives in order to fill a spot on a required course template. When we take a backward approach to designing our course, we think carefully about our destination. Where do we want students to end up? This helps us to slow down and consider both the substance and the wording of our objectives.
• How will we know if we have arrived? Once we are clear about the course learning objectives, it's essential to measure students' achievement of those objectives to determine whether they attained them. We do this by way of both summative and formative assessments. Summative assessments such as final exams, papers, and projects allow students to demonstrate their mastery of our course learning objectives. Formative assessments such as low-stakes quizzes or weekly reflections help us to know whether students are making good progress. Planning intentional measures designed to reveal whether students are achieving the course outcomes forms a critical part of deliberate course design.
• What will we need to help us get there? After deciding on the destination and effective ways of measuring whether or how well we arrived there, the final core step in backward design is to consider what students will need in order to succeed on our assessments. Here is where we (finally) select course materials such as textbooks and other content. We design activities that help students engage with and process new information and concepts. We devise a course schedule with milestones, often in the form of incremental deadlines or formative assessments that keep students accountable and allow us to give feedback on their work along the way. In doing so, we help our students make steady progress toward the destination - that is, achieving the course learning objectives.

We've provided here only the barest sketch of backward design, because the core concept of it is relatively simple to understand. You can find a much more thorough explanation of the idea from either Fink or Wiggins and McTighe, as well as plenty of overviews through some simple...