Backward Design

   I'd never heard of Backward Design before watching educator, Grant Wiggins's video presentation. His clear and organized workshop taught me a lot about this new concept.
   Backward Design is an effective planning framework for teachers in all fields of education. While planning a lesson, we need to keep long-term goals in mind, get the right blend of learning content and performance, and better engage our students. Backward Design aids instructors in achieving the ultimate goal of every educator, to enable our students to perform on their own and be able to transfer what they've learned to real-life situations.

   How is this effectively done? One must focus on long-term goals and embed them in the short-term goals of each lesson. Once you've stated your long-term goal, you must then elaborate and specify what will follow for instruction and assessment. Remember that your long-term goals should dictate what is to follow and not the other way around.
   Your students should know your goals; they should be stated a reiterated throughout the year. A good way to make sure students are clear about what your goals are is by doing the following. Ask them to self-assess against your goals; if they can easily do this, you know that you've been successful. If, however, your goals were unstated or ambiguous, your students will be unable to complete this task.
  "The textbook is not the course, it's a resource." Many teachers mistakenly create their curriculum as dictated by the textbook. This however, is wrong. With the concept of Backward Design, an effective teacher has his or her long-term goals in mind and can prioritize the use of textbooks in the lesson. Based on the long-term goals, a teacher should be able to decide which chapters should be highlighted,, skimmed, skipped, or re-sequenced.
   Backward Design requires teachers to prepare their students to be able to act while encountering many situations in life. Rather than teaching just facts, teachers must give over core skills such as critical thinking, problem solving and planning.
  Without knowing this concept, I've applied it when creating a learning unit in science. While teaching in a special ed. school I was tasked with coming up with a learning unit in science for one of my autistic students. I was given a CCSS based textbook and asked to come up with the rest. I first asked myself what my goal was for this particular student; I went through the book and decided which chapters I wanted to teach and in which sequence I was going to present them. I also generated my own worksheets, created my own projects and gathered materials I needed. This was all done with my long-term goals in mind.