After reading about the backward design method, you have undoubtedly noticed ways in which it meshes well with adult learning th

Design, v.,—To have purposes and intentions; to plan and execute —Oxford English Dictionary

The complexity of design work is often underestimated. Many people believe they know a good deal about design. What they do not realize is

how much more they need to know to do design well, with distinction, refinement, and grace.

—John McClean, “20 Considerations That Help a Project Run Smoothly,” 2003

Teachers are designers. An essential act of our profession is the crafting of cur- riculum and learning experiences to meet specified purposes. We are also designers of assessments to diagnose student needs to guide our teaching and to enable us, our students, and others (parents and administrators) to deter- mine whether we have achieved our goals.

Like people in other design professions, such as architecture, engineering, or graphic arts, designers in education must be mindful of their audiences. Professionals in these fields are strongly client-centered. The effectiveness of their designs corresponds to whether they have accomplished explicit goals for specific end-users. Clearly, students are our primary clients, given that the effectiveness of curriculum, assessment, and instructional designs is ulti- mately determined by their achievement of desired learnings. We can think of our designs, then, as software. Our courseware is designed to make learning more effective, just as computer software is intended to make its users more productive.

As in all the design professions, standards inform and shape our work. The software developer works to maximize user-friendliness and to reduce bugs that impede results. The architect is guided by building codes, customer budget, and neighborhood aesthetics. The teacher as designer is similarly con- strained. We are not free to teach any topic we choose by any means. Rather, we are guided by national, state, district, or institutional standards that spec- ify what students should know and be able to do. These standards provide a

13

Backward Design

Chapter 1

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from capella on 2022-02-21 13:36:25.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 5 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

useful framework to help us identify teaching and learning priorities and guide our design of curriculum and assessments. In addition to external standards, we must also factor in the needs of our many and varied students when design- ing learning experiences. For example, diverse student interests, developmen- tal levels, large classes, and previous achievements must always shape our thinking about the learning activities, assignments, and assessments.

Yet, as the old adage reminds us, in the best designs form follows function. In other words, all the methods and materials we use are shaped by a clear conception of the vision of desired results. That means that we must be able to state with clarity what the student should understand and be able to do as a result of any plan and irrespective of any constraints we face.

You probably know the saying, “If you don’t know exactly where you are headed, then any road will get you there.” Alas, the point is a serious one in education. We are quick to say what things we like to teach, what activities we will do, and what kinds of resources we will use; but without clarifying the desired results of our teaching, how will we ever know whether our designs are appropriate or arbitrary? How will we distinguish merely interesting learning from effective learning? More pointedly, how will we ever meet content stan- dards or arrive at hard-won student understandings unless we think through what those goals imply for the learner’s activities and achievements?

Good design, then, is not so much about gaining a few new technical skills as it is about learning to be more thoughtful and specific about our purposes and what they imply.

Why “backward” is best How do these general design considerations apply to curriculum planning? Deliberate and focused instructional design requires us as teachers and cur- riculum writers to make an important shift in our thinking about the nature of our job. The shift involves thinking a great deal, first, about the specific learn- ings sought, and the evidence of such learnings, before thinking about what we, as the teacher, will do or provide in teaching and learning activities. Though considerations about what to teach and how to teach it may dominate our thinking as a matter of habit, the challenge is to focus first on the desired learnings from which appropriate teaching will logically follow.

Our lessons, units, and courses should be logically inferred from the results sought, not derived from the methods, books, and activities with which we are most comfortable. Curriculum should lay out the most effective ways of achieving specific results. It is analogous to travel planning. Our frameworks should provide a set of itineraries deliberately designed to meet cultural goals rather than a purposeless tour of all the major sites in a foreign country. In short, the best designs derive backward from the learnings sought.

The appropriateness of this approach becomes clearer when we consider the educational purpose that is the focus of this book: understanding. We can- not say how to teach for understanding or which material and activities to use

U n d e r s t a n d i n g b y D e s i g n 2 n d E d i t i o n

14

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from capella on 2022-02-21 13:36:25.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 5 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

until we are quite clear about which specific understandings we are after and what such understandings look like in practice. We can best decide, as guides, what “sites” to have our student “tourists” visit and what specific “culture” they should experience in their brief time there only if we are clear about the particular understandings about the culture we want them to take home. Only by having specified the desired results can we focus on the content, methods, and activities most likely to achieve those results.

But many teachers begin with and remain focused on textbooks, favored lessons, and time-honored activities—the inputs—rather than deriving those means from what is implied in the desired results—the output. To put it in an odd way, too many teachers focus on the teaching and not the learning. They spend most of their time thinking, first, about what they will do, what materi- als they will use, and what they will ask students to do rather than first con- sidering what the learner will need in order to accomplish the learning goals.

Consider a typical episode of what might be called content-focused design instead of results-focused design. The teacher might base a lesson on a par- ticular topic (e.g., racial prejudice), select a resource (e.g., To Kill a Mocking- bird), choose specific instructional methods based on the resource and topic (e.g., Socratic seminar to discuss the book and cooperative groups to ana- lyze stereotypical images in films and on television), and hope thereby to cause learning (and meet a few English/language arts standards). Finally, the teacher might think up a few essay questions and quizzes for assessing student understanding of the book.

This approach is so common that we may well be tempted to reply, What could be wrong with such an approach? The short answer lies in the basic questions of purpose: Why are we asking students to read this particular novel—in other words, what learnings will we seek from their having read it? Do the students grasp why and how the purpose should influence their studying? What should students be expected to under- stand and do upon reading the book, related to our goals beyond the book? Unless we begin our design work with a clear insight into larger purposes—whereby the book is properly thought of as a means to an educational end, not an end unto itself—it is unlikely that all students will understand the book (and their performance obligations). Without being self- conscious of the specific understandings about prejudice we seek, and how reading and discussing the book will help develop such insights, the goal is far too vague: The approach is more “by hope” than “by design.” Such an approach ends up unwittingly being one that could be described like this: Throw some content and activities against the wall and hope some of it sticks.

Answering the “why?” and “so what?” questions that older students always ask (or want to), and doing so in concrete terms as the focus of curriculum

B a c k w a r d D e s i g n

15

Consider these questions that arise in the minds of all readers, the answers to which will frame the priorities of coached learn- ing: How should I read the book? What am I looking for? What will we discuss? How should I prepare for those discussions? How do I know if my reading and discus- sions are effective? Toward what perfor- mance goals do this reading and these discussions head, so that I might focus and prioritize my studies and note taking? What big ideas, linked to other readings, are in play here? These are the students’ proper questions about the learning, not the teaching, and any good educational design answers them from the start and through- out a course of study with the use of tools and strategies such as graphic organizers and written guidelines.

Design Tip

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from capella on 2022-02-21 13:36:25.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 5 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

planning, is thus the essence of understanding by design. What is difficult for many teachers to see (but easier for students to feel!) is that, without such explicit and transparent priorities, many students find day-to-day work con- fusing and frustrating.

The twin sins of traditional design More generally, weak educational design involves two kinds of purposeless- ness, visible throughout the educational world from kindergarten through graduate school, as noted in the Introduction. We call these the “twin sins” of traditional design. The error of activity-oriented design might be called “hands-on without being minds-on”—engaging experiences that lead only accidentally, if at all, to insight or achievement. The activities, though fun and interesting, do not lead anywhere intellectually. As typified by the apples vignette in the Introduction, such activity-oriented curricula lack an explicit focus on important ideas and appropriate evidence of learning, especially in the minds of the learners. They think their job is merely to engage; they are led to think the learning is the activity instead of seeing that the learning comes from being asked to consider the meaning of the activity.

A second form of aimlessness goes by the name of “coverage,” an approach in which students march through a textbook, page by page (or teachers through lecture notes) in a valiant attempt to traverse all the factual material within a prescribed time (as in the world history vignette in the Intro- duction). Coverage is thus like a whirlwind tour of Europe, perfectly summa- rized by the old movie title If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, which properly suggests that no overarching goals inform the tour.

As a broad generalization, the activity focus is more typical at the elemen- tary and lower middle school levels, whereas coverage is a prevalent second-

ary school and college problem. Yet, though the apples and world history classrooms look quite different with lots of physical activity and chatter in the former versus lecturing and quiet note taking in the latter, the design result is the same in both cases: No guiding intellectual purpose or clear priorities frame the learn- ing experience. In neither case can students see and answer such

questions as these: What’s the point? What’s the big idea here? What does this help us understand or be able to do? To what does this relate? Why should we learn this? Hence, the students try to engage and follow as best they can, hop- ing that meaning will emerge.

U n d e r s t a n d i n g b y D e s i g n 2 n d E d i t i o n

16

■ MISCONCEPTION ALERT!

Coverage is not the same as purposeful survey. Providing students with an overview of a discipline or a field of study is not inherently wrong. The question has to do with the transparency of purpose. Coverage is a nega- tive term (whereas introduction or survey is not) because when content is “covered” the student is led through unending facts, ideas, and readings with little or no sense of the overarching ideas, issues, and learning goals that might inform study. (See Chapter 10 for more on coverage versus uncoverage.)

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from capella on 2022-02-21 13:36:25.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 5 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

Students will be unable to give satisfactory responses when the design does not provide them with clear purposes and explicit performance goals highlighted throughout their work. Similarly, teachers with an activity or cov- erage orientation are less likely to have acceptable answers to the key design questions: What should students understand as a result of the activities or the content covered? What should the experiences or lectures equip them to do? How, then, should the activities or class dis- cussions be shaped and processed to achieve the desired results? What would be evidence that learners are en route to the desired abilities and insights? How, then, should all activi- ties and resources be chosen and used to ensure that the learn- ing goals are met and the most appropriate evidence produced? How, in other words, will students be helped to see by design the purpose of the activity or resource and its helpfulness in meeting specific performance goals?

We are advocating the reverse of common practice, then. We ask designers to start with a much more careful statement of the desired results—the priority learnings—and to derive the curriculum from the performances called for or implied in the goals. Then, contrary to much common practice, we ask designers to consider the following questions after framing the goals: What would count as evidence of such achievement? What does it look like to meet these goals? What, then, are the implied performances that should make up the assessment, toward which all teaching and learning should point? Only after answering these questions can we logically derive the appropriate teaching and learning experiences so that students might perform successfully to meet the standard. The shift, therefore, is away from starting with such questions as “What book will we read?” or “What activities will we do?” or “What will we dis- cuss?” to “What should they walk out the door able to understand, regardless of what activities or texts we use?” and “What is evidence of such ability?” and, therefore, “What texts, activities, and methods will best enable such a result?” In teaching students for understanding, we must grasp the key idea that we are coaches of their ability to play the “game” of performing with understanding, not tellers of our understanding to them on the sidelines.

The three stages of backward design We call this three-stage approach to planning “backward design.” Figure 1.1 depicts the three stages in the simplest terms.

Stage 1: Identify desired results

What should students know, understand, and be able to do? What content is worthy of understanding? What enduring understandings are desired?

B a c k w a r d D e s i g n

17

To test the merits of our claims about pur- poselessness, we encourage you to sidle up to a student in the middle of any class and ask the following questions:

What are you doing?

Why are you being asked to do it?

What will it help you do?

How does it fit with what you have previ- ously done?

How will you show that you have learned it?

Design Tip

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from capella on 2022-02-21 13:36:25.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 5 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from capella on 2022-02-21 13:36:25.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 5 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

skills (processes, procedures, strategies) will students need in order to per- form effectively and achieve desired results? What activities will equip stu- dents with the needed knowledge and skills? What will need to be taught and coached, and how should it best be taught, in light of performance goals? What materials and resources are best suited to accomplish these goals?

Note that the specifics of instructional planning—choices about teaching methods, sequence of lessons, and resource materials—can be successfully completed only after we identify desired results and assessments and consider what they imply. Teaching is a means to an end. Having a clear goal helps to focus our planning and guide purpose- ful action toward the intended results.

Backward design may be thought of, in other words, as pur- poseful task analysis: Given a worthy task to be accomplished, how do we best get everyone equipped? Or we might think of it as building a wise itinerary, using a map: Given a destina- tion, what’s the most effective and efficient route? Or we might think of it as planning for coaching, as suggested earlier: What must learners master if they are to effectively perform? What will count as evidence on the field, not merely in drills, that they really get it and are ready to perform with understanding, knowledge, and skill on their own? How will the learning be designed so that learners’ capacities are developed through use and feedback?

This is all quite logical when you come to understand it, but “backward” from the perspective of much habit and tradition in our field. A major change from common practice occurs as designers must begin to think about assess- ment before deciding what and how they will teach. Rather than creating assessments near the conclusion of a unit of study (or relying on the tests pro- vided by textbook publishers, which may not completely or appropriately assess our standards and goals), backward design calls for us to make our goals or standards specific and concrete, in terms of assessment evidence, as we begin to plan a unit or course.

The logic of backward design applies regardless of the learning goals. For example, when starting from a state content standard, curriculum designers need to determine the appropriate assessment evidence stated or implied in the standard. Likewise, a staff developer should determine what evidence will indicate that the adults have learned the intended knowledge or skill before planning the various workshop activities.

The rubber meets the road with assessment. Three different teachers may all be working toward the same content standards, but if their assessments vary considerably, how are we to know which students have achieved what? Agree- ment on needed evidence of learning leads to greater curricular coherence and

B a c k w a r d D e s i g n

19

■ MISCONCEPTION ALERT!

When we speak of evidence of desired results, we are referring to evidence gathered through a variety of formal and informal assessments during a unit of study or a course. We are not alluding only to end-of-teaching tests or culminating tasks. Rather, the collected evidence we seek may well include traditional quizzes and tests, performance tasks and projects, observations and dialogues, as well as students’ self-assessments gathered over time.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from capella on 2022-02-21 13:36:25.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 5 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

more reliable evaluation by teachers. Equally important is the long-term gain in teacher, student, and parent insight about what does and does not count as evi- dence of meeting complex standards.

This view of focusing intently on the desired learning is hardly radical or new. Tyler (1949) described the logic of backward design clearly and suc- cinctly more than 50 years ago:

Educational objectives become the criteria by which materials are selected, content is outlined, instructional procedures are developed, and tests and examinations are prepared. . . .

The purpose of a statement of objectives is to indicate the kinds of changes in the student to be brought about so that instructional activities can be planned and developed in a way likely to attain these objectives. (pp. 1, 45)

And in his famous book, How to Solve It, originally published in 1945, Polya specifically discusses “thinking backward” as a strategy in problem solving going back to the Greeks:

There is a certain psychological difficulty in turning around, in going away from the goal, in working backwards. . . . Yet, it does not take a genius to solve a concrete problem working backwards; anyone can do it with a little com- mon sense. We concentrate on the desired end, we visualize the final position in which we would like to be. From what foregoing position could we get there? (p. 230)

These remarks are old. What is perhaps new is that we offer herein a help- ful process, a template, a set of tools, and design standards to make the plan and resultant student performance more likely to be successful by design than by good fortune. As a 4th grade teacher from Alberta, Canada, put it, “Once I had a way of clearly defining the end in mind, the rest of the unit ‘fell into place.’ ”

The twin sins of activity-based and coverage-based design reflect a failure to think through purpose in this backward-design way. With this in mind, let’s revisit the two fictitious vignettes from the Introduction. In the apples vignette, the unit seems to focus on a particular theme (harvest time), through a spe- cific and familiar object (apples). But as the depiction reveals, the unit has no real depth because there is no enduring learning for the students to derive. The work is hands-on without being minds-on, because students do not need to (and are not really challenged to) extract sophisticated ideas or connections. They don’t have to work at understanding; they need only engage in the activ- ity. (Alas, it is common to reward students for mere engagement as opposed to understanding; engagement is necessary, but not sufficient, as an end result.)

Moreover, when you examine the apples unit it becomes clear that it has no overt priorities—the activities appear to be of equal value. The students’ role is merely to participate in mostly enjoyable activities, without having to demon- strate that they understand any big ideas at the core of the subject (excuse the pun). All activity-based—as opposed to results-based—teaching shares the weakness of the apples unit: Little in the design asks students to derive

U n d e r s t a n d i n g b y D e s i g n 2 n d E d i t i o n

20

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from capella on 2022-02-21 13:36:25.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 5 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

intellectual fruit from the unit (sorry!). One might characterize this activity- oriented approach as “faith in learning by osmosis.” Is it likely that individual students will learn a few interesting things about apples? Of course. But, in the absence of a learning plan with clear goals, how likely is it that students will develop shared understandings on which future lessons might build? Not very.

In the world history vignette, the teacher covers vast amounts of content during the last quarter of the year. However, in his harried march to get through a textbook, he apparently does not consider what the students will understand and apply from the material. What kind of intellectual scaffolding is provided to guide students through the important ideas? How are students expected to use those ideas to make meaning of the many facts? What per- formance goals would help students know how to take notes for maximal effec- tive use by the course’s end? Coverage-based instruction amounts to the teacher merely talking, checking off topics, and moving on, irrespective of whether students understand or are confused. This approach might be termed “teaching by mentioning it.” Coverage-oriented teaching typically relies on a textbook, allowing it to define the content and sequence of instruction. In con- trast, we propose that results-oriented teaching employ the textbook as a resource but not the syllabus.

A backward design template Having described the backward design process, we now put it together in a useful format—a template for teachers to use in the design of units that focus on understanding.

Many educators have observed that backward design is common sense. Yet when they first start to apply it, they discover that it feels unnatural. Work- ing this way may seem a bit awkward and time-consuming until you get the hang of it. But the effort is worth it—just as the learning curve on good soft- ware is worth it. We think of Understanding by Design as software, in fact: a set of tools for making you ultimately more productive. Thus, a practical corner- stone of Understanding by Design is a design template that is meant to rein- force the appropriate habits of mind needed to complete designs for student understanding and to avoid the habits that are at the heart of the twin sins of activity-based and coverage-based design.

Figure 1.2 provides a preliminary look at the UbD Template in the form of a one-page version with key planning questions included in the various fields. This format guides the teacher to the various UbD elements while visually con- veying the idea of backward design. Later chapters present a more complete account of the template and each of its fields.

Although this one-page version of the template does not allow for great detail, it has several virtues. First, it provides a gestalt, an overall view of back- ward design, without appearing overwhelming. Second, it enables a quick check of alignment—the extent to which the assessments (Stage 2) and learn- ing activities (Stage 3) align with identified goals (Stage 1). Third, the template

B a c k w a r d D e s i g n

21

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from capella on 2022-02-21 13:36:25.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 5 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development. Created from capella on 2022-02-21 13:36:25.

C o p yr

ig h t ©

2 0 0 5 . A

ss o ci

a tio

n f o r

S u p e rv

is io

n &

C u rr

ic u lu

m D

e ve

lo p m

e n t. A

ll ri g h ts

r e se

rv e d .

can be used to review existing units that teachers or districts have developed. Finally, the one-page template provides an initial design frame. We also have a multipage version that allows for more detailed planning, including, for exam- ple, a Performance Task Blueprint and a day-by-day calendar for listing and sequencing key learning events. The Understanding by Design Professional Development Workbook (McTighe & Wiggins, 2004, pp. 46–51) includes a six- page template that allows for more detailed planning.

We regularly observe that teachers begin to internalize the backward design process as they work with the UbD Template. Stage 1 asks designers to consider what they want students to understand and then to frame those understandings in terms of questions. In completing the top two sections …