Seattle Press on Line - Starting at the Right End: Planning Backwards

Teacher Ted

Starting at the Right End: Planning Backwards

By Ted Lockery

Feb 28, 2002 -- I, like most teachers, am forever fixated on tomorrow. By this I don't just mean the future--preparing students to participate in a political and social democracy--I mean the very next day, as in "What lessons do I have planned for tomorrow?"

Most days at school I stay late to organize curriculum materials according to the notes in my weekly planner. Just before I switch off the lights, as a ritual of reassurance, I take a second glance over the next day's itinerary, just to be sure.

The emphasis of my planning--presentation details, group work segues, and homework assignments--tends toward the nuts and bolts of a week's worth of activities. What often get buried in the day-to-day, though, are the big picture goals of understanding, i.e. the important things what we want our students to understand at the end of the course or unit. Instead of focusing on understandings--what should be the ends of our educational efforts--I, like many teachers, invest most of my energy creating and implementing activities and discussions: the tangible means toward those ends.

This common planning practice may seem backward, but, according to Nilsa Sotomayor and Katie Taylor, presenters I met at a recent symposium of Northwest members of the Coalition of Essential Schools, this practice is not backward enough, or rather, not backward in the right way.

Drawing from research by the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development (www.ascd.org), and the work of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (Understanding by Design), Taylor and Sotomayor recommend what they refer to as the "Planning Backward Process." Instead of beginning one's planning with the selection of textbook readings, and the creation of lessons or activities, teachers are encouraged to start their planning where they hope to end the course or unit: with identifying the "enduring understandings" they want their students to develop.

Only after teachers have articulated what they want students to know and be able to do should they move on to step two: determining how they will assess what students understand or are able to. Here, assessment keeps its focus on the goals of understanding rather than on testing students' memory of information presented in lectures, homework readings, or handouts.

The third and final step in the Planning Backward Process is the one we are most familiar with: developing activities and strategies of instruction. These last-step elements of curriculum planning ought to flow from and be supported by the foundational elements of the curriculum: the goals of understanding or performance abilities, and the methods of assessing growth or accomplishment in these areas. They are the interactive means by which students progress toward the understanding goals and by which their progress is assessed.

Think of it this way: Within each activity or instruction strategy should exist a kind of DNA of the end goals: enduring understandings. That is to say, the goals and the assessments ought to be present in each stage of the curriculum.

I would add that the presence of goals and the means of assessing those goals ought to occupy a consistent and mindful presence within the classroom for students as well as for teachers.

Why not post the goals of a unit, in the form of deep and rich questions (perhaps generated by both students and teacher), in a place of prominence within the classroom? This way, students won't rightly ask, "Why are doing this?" They'll know why. They'll see how what they are doing in the moment is linked to where they are headed. And teachers, too, will be able to keep their pedagogical eyes on the prize of helping students discover and develop enduring understandings.

Planning backwards may be the best way for all of us--teachers and students--to go forward.

Ted Lockery is a teacher at Nathan Hale High School. He can be contacted by e-mail at teacherted@seattlepress.com.

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