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.
Stage 1: Identify desired outcomes
and results.
3 different types of outcomes
Information…
1) Worth being familiar with
2) Important to know and do
3) “Enduring” understanding
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 Understandings
1. Identify core concepts, principles, theories, &
processes
2. Serve to organize important facts, skills, or actions
3. Can transfer to other fields as well as nonacademic 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 do
In 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 with
In 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?