How to Utilize Backward Design

When planning a new course, it's often best to start with the end in mind. This is sometimes referred to as “backward design” by instructional designers. In backward design, a teacher starts by considering the enduring understandings or big concepts students should know after completing the course.

The teacher then writes down learning objectives that help point students toward the enduring understandings.

Next, the teacher should decide the best way for students to demonstrate their understanding of the learning objectives. This is when a teacher may create a summative assessment tool.

Working backward from that, the teacher plans ways to help students prepare for the summative assessment, often through activities or assignments.

Last, comes the content. This is what “fleshes out” the spaces between assignments and activities. The content provides students with background information or context they need to complete activities or assignments.

Often, teachers start a new course by writing lots of content students should know. But in backward design, the content is written last. This ensures the content supports what really matters most: the learning objectives and enduring understandings. Put simply, you start with what’s most important and work backward from it.

By utilizing backward design, teachers avoid focusing so much on content that they end up writing a book instead of an online course. An online course, after all, should encourage discovery and higher level thinking through activities, rather than memorization of text for multiple-choice quizzes. Backward design encourages teaching for understanding and requires students to apply and demonstrate their learning.

“Put simply, you start with what’s most important and work backwards from it.”

Planning a Course Backward

Step 1: Decide on the themes, enduring understandings and essential questions for the course. What do you want students to leave your course with?
Step 2: Use the enduring understandings and essential questions to help articulate the learning objectives of the course. Remember higher levels of learning when developing learning objectives. (Links to an external site.) Learning objectives should utilize active verbs.
Step 3: Take your learning objectives and start organizing them into "themes" or units. Your courses "modules" will come naturally from these groupings of learning objectives.

For Each Unit or Module:

Step 1: Articulate your learning objectives for the unit or module. Create objectives with action verbs from Bloom's higher levels of thinking.
Step 2: Design a summative assessment for the end of the unit that allows students to demonstrate understanding of the learning objective(s).
Step 3: Choose strategies, activities, best practices to prepare students for the summative assessment
Step 4: Choose resources and material that supports and prepares students for the activities

Things to Consider

Describe how you will build connections between the “units” or “modules” so students understand the relationships.
Consider how to make your “big ideas” apparent throughout the course, so they are pervasive and not just listed at the start of a topic.

It can be an adjustment for many teachers to develop this way. The teacher needs to decide on what is essential for students to know--what is at the core or "heart" of his or her discipline--and then decide how to know when students fully comprehend that "core knowledge." Designing the assessment is a necessary piece that must occur in the beginning of course development to give both the teacher and students a clear destination for the unit. Once the destination is clear, the teacher is able to create the best roadmap to get to that destination.