Backward Design

1. Identify desired accomplishments (What do students take away when they leave?).

2. Determine acceptable evidence (How do we know that students can do it?

3. Plan learning experiences and instruction.

Simply stated, design backward from your goals, connected with standards.

Learning for understanding requires that curriculum and instruction address three different but interrelated academic goals: helping students, first, acquire important information and skills, second, making meaning of that content, and third, effectively transfer their learning to new situations both within the school and beyond it (Wiggins & McTighe, 2008).

Students need to know what they are learning and why. Wiggins and McTighe (2005) claim that students who really develop and own an idea are more likely to successfully interpret new situations and tackle new problems than students who possess only drilled knowledge and skill. Therefore, I am committed to implementing the stages of learning that these authors recommend promoting the learners’ agency in the learning process.

The single most important variable in promoting long-term retention and transfer is "practice at retrieval." This principle means that learners need to generate responses, with minimal cues, repeatedly over time, with varied applications so that recall becomes fluent and is more likely to occur across different contexts and content domains (Halpern & Hakel, 2010).