PBL Activity 3: Instructional Design
How will using the “Backward Design” strategy change your curriculum planning?
How will the strategy impact the teaching/learning process?
What simultaneous outcomes will you include in your PBL unit?
March 27, 2008
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1. How will “Backward Design” strategy change your curriculum planning?
In my History classes, I do my best to employ the backward design approach to structuring units, lessons, etc. already. It is not a huge change in planning to go towards this approach. However, I have not created all my lessons and units to fit this concept, and that is where most of the change for me will take place.
2. How will the strategy impact the teaching/learning process?
Backward Design units and lessons teach more than just material. Along with information, these units and lessons also seek to teach decision-making, cooperation, and discernment. So, the learning process is changed from mere knowledge retention to the learning of life skills which go to making the student the most productive democractic citizen they can be.
3. What simultaneous outcomes will you include in your PBL unit?
In regards to my unit on Manifest Destiny, I hope to include several different simultaneous outcomes: critical thinking and problems solving skills, communication and collaboration skills, as well as a multitude of the life and career skills options. Also, technology will be incorporated, so media literacy and ICT literacy will hopefully be included as well.
Using the backward design strategy really won’t change my curriculum planning. I believe I am already doing this because I know students’ outcomes from the beginning of the school year. In teaching graduation exam preparation, I already know that a certain student needs to receive a 3 out of 5 on certain questions pertaining to subject-verb agreement. The students and I actually sit down together to review the results so we know exactly what they need to know for the graduation exam. So, I think I am already doing this type of design in my classes.
I think the strategy is wonderful. From the beginning, the students and I know exactly what they need to know for the actual graduation exam. This way, we don’t get hung up on the little things in each subject area. For example, if I know the student needs to know the difference in active and passive voice, I am going to focus just on active and passive voice. We will not take the time to focus on gerunds or participles because I already know they do not have to know this for their gradution exam. I think it is excellent for both teaching and learning. The students seem to like it because they have an actual reason for learning certain topics, and I rarely hear the old question, “Why do I need to do this, or why do I need to know this?”. Seeing the end result helps them to focus on the task at hand. It also helps me to stay on track when I am teaching.
For the outcomes of the unit, I would make sure students understood the differences among the battles of the Civil War specifically focusing on the leaders of each battle, the casualties, the winners, and the outcomes of each battle. The student would also know the reasons for the war as well as the consequences of the war.
1. How will “Backward Design” strategy change your curriculum planning?
For my project-based unit/course design, I cannot begin to plan without envisioning the end product. If my desire is to create a real-life scenario, then I must create a real-life simulation with the end product being most realistic.
2. How will the strategy impact the teaching/learning process?
The process will build with everyone understanding what the end product should look like, but not necessarily what information it should contain. It is like giving directions where everyone knows the end position but not necessarily the full details. It creates a road map that allows for students to absorb their own scenery. This scenario allows a great deal of higher-order-thinking (HOT) as well as hands-on activities
3. What simultaneous outcomes will you include in your PBL unit?
Students will be working on reading, technology, and writing skills. There will be an individual focus on writing skills as students work outside of their cooperative teams to complete a parralel research paper as a means of ensuring everyone is being held accountable for the long-term task.
How will using the “Backward Design” strategy change your curriculum planning?
I agree with the others in stating that I don’t think that “backwards design” will effect my teaching strategy. I have always used this design, whether or not I knew what it was called. In science courses, you always look at the big picture of what you want the students to learn and devise ways (lectures, activities, and labs) to practice these things.
How will the strategy impact the teaching/learning process?
I think that this strategy, if shared with other teachers, could prevent people from strictly “going by the book” and have them think outside of the box in planning their lessons. This would more actively engage students in their own learning process.
What simultaneous outcomes will you include in your PBL unit?
My PBL unit is designed with students learning the differences in simple machines. It also includes them making a video (using technology) to identify simple machines in their own world. In the video, students will tell about the simple machine that they have chosen and tell how it makes our everyday lives easier. The students will then type up a report or “script” to their video to turn in.
I’m sorry that I’m tardy with my response here, but I have a valid (and related) reason. For the past two weeks, I’ve been working with three professors in my classroom (one from AU, one from Stanford, and one from Vermont) to implement a new curriculum that we devloped. This has taken all my planning and after school time for the past two weeks, and untold hours since we started tweaking the unit back in December.
The good news, though, is that I had the opportunity to work with three experts in the field of curriculum design, and what we were doing was definitely backwards design. They actually started with the big idea (How does a writer craft character), then worked backwards to develop the unit with Julius Caesar. One of the first thing they did was develop the end-of-unit test (which we also used as a pre-test); next, they discussed the evaluations that would take place throughout the unit. In the midst of all this, we discussed the objectives that could be taught using the English 10 Course of Study as a foundation, but it was the big idea (what the experts call “enduring understanding,” based on my reading.)
Anyway, this will change my planning be helping me focus more on big ideas rather than individual objectives. This is the new idea here for me. I think a lot of teachers THINK they’re doing backward design if they look at the objectives first, but that isn’t necessarily true. I think backwards design also helps teachers better evaluate the importance of what they teach. This is an idea that we’ve been working on quite extensively for the past few years with the Sun Belt Writing Project as a way of helping teachers who feel overwhelmed by trying to cover all the objectives.
This strategy will impact the learning process because my students will have more retention of more important information and skills. It’s a return to the early days of my teaching career before I became bogged down with long lists of objectives. Focusing on a big idea (or several big ideas throughout a semester) will make my students see something meaningful in what we cover. Hopefully, these are lessons that they’ll remember as more meaningful than a list of dates or symbols.
I haven’t yet decided on simultaneous outcomes becasue I’m still trying to tweak my thoughts concerning the Big Idea. What I hope them to take from this unit is a better appreciation of how we appreciate others in our lives via the creation of monuments. I think this will be a simultaneous outcome that not’s necessarily tied into the big idea of the unit.
John
How will using the “Backward Design” strategy change your curriculum planning?
I don’t think learning about this strategy will change my planning. I already plan this way. However, the strategy gave helpful guidance about how to establishing curriculum priorities. I liked the graphic that broke the curriculum content into “Worth being familiar with” “Important to know” and “Enduring knowledge”. The list of filters to help choose what’s important verified the strategy that I already use. Also, the Mini-Lesson planning template would be helpful if I want to “start over” on a unit. There are a couple of units that I would like to approach with a clean slate.
How will the strategy impact the teaching/learning process?
This strategy is geared toward developing student understanding instead of just “covering” the material. Students will feel more connected to the activities because they will see that they are relevant to the desired outcomes and not just “busy work”. Designing the assessments before the unit starts is helps keep the instructor focused. He/she has already decided what’s important so the lessons are geared toward those concepts.