Backward Design

Backward design is like deciding the destination for your vacation, before planning and making your travel arrangements.  It’s starting with the end in mind.

By contrast to backward design, a more common design practice begins with and centers content first.   The instructor decides which content to curate for a course, based on knowledge of the field or industry requirements,  then designs scaffolding activities and assignments to help the students learn that content.  Often, assessments are designed last in this design practice, with a hope the assessments will show evidence the student has met the course outcomes.  This far-to-common design process  risks having students arrive at an unintended destination.

In backwards design, the instructor instead starts first with the course learning outcomes. Next, the instructor determines what evidence would be acceptable to show the outcomes have been met, and designs assessments for students to present that evidence.   Finally, the instructor plans the curriculum, including content, learning activities and assignments which will prepare students to eventually demonstrate evidence of their learning.

The process is done in three steps:

Step One – Identify the desired results (Bowen, 2017).

To begin thinking with the end in mind, take a piece of blank paper, and draw three large circles to fill the page, labeled as below (adapted from Sample, 2011).

Begin filling in the circles:

1. What are the enduring understandings you wish students to leave your course with? Enduring understandings represent the foundational knowledge, ideas or skills you would like students to remember or do, well beyond your course. These should be things that are at the heart of your discipline (in the scope of the course), or that are prerequisites for the next course in the sequence.
2. Important to know and do:  Knowledge, ideas or skills that are less imperative in the immediate, and may become critical in the future.  This content is central to making meaning and solidifying the enduring understandings in students’ schemas.
3. Worth being familiar with: Content that is not essential, but can make the enduring understandings interesting and relevant. This is negotiable space that can reflect students’ interests and careers in each course section.

Focusing on the enduring knowledge and skills is critical, since as you move (backwards) to the evidence and content stages, it will ensure you get to the ‘most important’.  What gets cut, or lands on the editing floor (because it doesn’t fit in the 55 hours) is thus the ‘nice, but not necessary’. This can potentially free up class time for things instructors often wish there was more time for, like building relationships with their students.

From the enduring understandings, Course Learning Outcomes can be drafted (or revised as needed).

How to develop student-centered Course Learning Outcomes (CLOs)

Learning outcomes are statements of what a student should be able to do to demonstrate the knowledge/skills/understandings they have learned in your course. They represent the enduring
learnings and foundational ideas students should achieve upon completing the course (as opposed to learnings from just a single unit of instruction, or from a series of courses in your department).

Outcomes should be stated in a way that allows all students, including English language learners, to readily understand what they are expected to be able to do by course end, without using overly complex language.

You can visit the Assessment Committee’s website to read more about (CLOs) and check out their CLO guide, with criteria and examples, for additional help.

Step Two – Determine acceptable evidence (Bowen, 2017).

In this step, you will consider two questions:

1. What evidence you will want students to provide to show they have achieved the goals of the course (the enduring understandings) that were honed in step one?
2. What assessment methods would allow students to best demonstrate or provide that evidence?

Consider having a variety of assessment types, as appropriate to the course and modality, including term papers, group or lab projects, homework assignments, multiple choice or short answer exams, and so forth.

Universal Design for Learning’s principal of multiple means of expression and engagement stresses allowing students to demonstrate their learning in different ways.  This is an important equity strategy as well as an accessibility consideration in supporting people with disabilities.

Also, make sure the assessments align and match to  the course learning outcomes.  Following are examples of alignment matches and mis-matches between assessments and course outcomes:

Examples of alignment MATCH:

 

Examples of alignment MIS-MATCH:

 

Step Three – Plan content, learning activities, and learner interaction (adapted from Bowen, 2017).

Content and instruction come last in backward design.  Remember the concentric circles  exercise?  To avoid the ‘nice but not necessary’, in this step, instructors design only that content and scaffolding which will help prepare students to achieve the desired results identified in step one.

Nothing more, nothing less.

Now that the learning goals (enduring understandings, course learning outcomes) and assessment methods have been established, instructors will have a clear path forward to design content and learning experiences that will lead to the desired results.

Here are some Questions to consider for this step:

1. What do students already know? And what knowledge (even imperfect) will students bring to the course?
2. What knowledge, skills, and abilities will students need to learn to perform effectively and achieve desired results (outcomes)?
3. The relevant practice and scaffolds (activities, assignments, group work, discussions) that will help solidify the knowledge, skills, and abilities? To be relevant, the practice and scaffolding should match the performance  called for by the course learning outcome. For example, if an outcome requires a student to properly install a LAN, or solve quadratic equations, then at some point, they should have practiced LAN installation, or solving equations.

To ensure that the student has adequate and relevant opportunities to learn, interact with, and  practice the very knowledge, skills or abilities called for by the stated learning outcome, complete an alignment table.  Start by listing the learning outcomes in the first column, and then fill out the table from left to right. Here is an example alignment table

Professional development opportunities

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Related books in the LTC collection

Additional resources and scholarship

• Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching discusses benefits of backward design and provides a design template
• Jennifer Gonzalez in the Cult of Pedagogy discusses the basics of backward design
• Mark Sample writes for the Chronicle about teaching for enduring understanding

References

Bowen, R. S.  (2017). Understanding by design. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved August 3, 2022.

Sample, Mark. (2011). Teaching for enduring understanding. Retrieved August 3, 2022.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (1998). Backward design. In Understanding by Design (pp. 13-34). ASCD.