“Begin with the end in mind”
As a teacher, your aim is to complete the prescribed syllabus within the academic year, ensure your students score better, and over an above ensure that the students are motivated to learn and engage with the subject of your teaching.
Your ask is find a better way of teaching or a teaching technique that will be interactive and engaging and not just align with the syllabus and results in higher scores.
Backward Design Model proposed by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe is a more specific and goal-oriented model which is more focused on aligning instruction and assessment with desired student outcomes. Instead of content the outcomes or desired results drive the designing of the learning experience. It truly lives by the adage “Begin with the end in mind”.
We began with an example from the academic world, but it doesn’t mean that the model applies only to that sector. Backward Design Model can be applied when creating corporate learning experiences too. A very good example could be used for a course design for a Certification Program.
Backward design involves a 3 stage process:
- Identify desired results (learning outcomes)
- Determine acceptable evidence (assessment)
- Plan learning activities (learning experiences and instruction)
Some call it a model used for solely “teaching for the tests”. But it’s not entirely true because it actually gives you a direction of how to frame your instructions and experiences.
Say your outcome is at the end of the lesson, the students will be able to differentiate between tenses, you create your assessment around matching the sentence to the tense or identifying the sentence with the correct tense, now with this in your mind, you are going to focus on teaching the students the difference between each tense and not just walking them through the tense.