Gaining clarity on our goals
The statement “life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward” contains two opposite ideas that make it seems impossible. However, it is probably true when we are talking about education. Backward design begins with an aim in mind. It really helps us to teach for understanding. In this design, we, teachers become the designers who articulate the goal right from the beginning in order to be quite clear about which specific understanding we aim at and how it would be performed in practice. The basic steps to follow are deciding on themes, enduring understanding, aligning units with standards and choosing outcomes, strategies and best practices to teach students. It has to be said that many designers have struggled with problems of standardization for educational planning such as the number of contents versus the time available to learn them, the size of standards and vague specification of them. Identifying big ideas and core tasks within standards is indispensable to get through these problems. Choosing resources to create a rich and engaging unit and weaving back and forth across the curriculum map to make revisions and refinements are important too.
How we can design an assessment or instruction before teaching a unit is an important concern which teachers have to deal with. To succeed in this task, we have to decide on what is essential for students to know, what is at the core of the heart of our discipline and then decide on how we would know when students have reached the goal. Considering the template, it helps us to differentiate Establish Goals, Understanding, Essential Questions, Knowledge and Skills which are different but in practice they might overlap with each other.
Theoretically, everything sound obvious but practically we do not take these issues into consideration as we should. Don’t you think?
‘Standardization for educational planning such as the number of contents versus the time accessible to learn them, as well as fuzzy specification of them’, is one of the main problems we face in our teaching. And of course, ‘choosing resources to create a rich and engaging unit and going back and forth across the curriculum to ‘clean’ and ‘purify’ our teaching are important issues to reflect upon.
ReplyDeleteAs a matter of fact, everything may sound, at a theoretical level, self-evident, but as you clearly reffered, if we do not start thinking about how to take all this big ideas, core tasks and all this interesting appealing apparatus into our classrooms, things will remain the same. It is not enough to start reflecting and thinking, but coming to terms with this issues, and above all, putting these ideas into concrete tangible practice, viz. our classrooms.
‘Theoretically, everything sound obvious but practically we do not take these issues into consideration as we should. Don’t you think?’
I definitely agree Paloma.
Hi Paloma,
ReplyDeleteI really like your definition of teachers as "designers" which made me think of fashion designers. Can you imagine a fashion designer beginning a piece of clothing without having clearly in mind the final product he/she wants to get? I cannot think of any serios designer doing such an irresposible thing, and the same counts for us as teachers. We are in charge of designing the appropriate planning for our students, considering their expectations, interests and needs. We need to set them clear goals which will make them improve in their learning proces and therefore move forward, but all this must be done in a serious way, keeping in mind we are professionals.
Dear Palomits,
ReplyDeleteBackward design seems to be the most tangible way to accomplish the goal of meaningful learning, since it starts by stating the point where we want our students to get to. At first, we might consider it is surreal to start by thinking about the end of the process, but it actually helps organising all the way through.
Dear Paloma,
ReplyDeleteBackward design with the template offered by Wiggins could help us improve significantly our curriculum design. However, the last point you mentioned about practicability cannot be overlooked. In theory, we could put this template into practice, but we are always bound to tackle constraints wherever we work as teachers of English. In fact, content coverage could be prioritized, and this type of template might be regarded as too complex.
Despite this obstacle, we could try to convince our heads of the english departments to adopt this new curriculum: Understanding by design. It is worth the effort.
As you stated we as teachers must fight against what other think it is a right procedure, such as covering large amount of contents in limited time, however we must to be able to give a framework to our teaching what means to give priority to the quality of teaching and not to the quantity. You can see most of the contents given in the textbooks but if they are not focused in looking for the understanding, they will become meaningless and usefulness, therefore teachers should have the capacity to bring abstract ideas into reality, because this arises as the only method through students can make links between the theory and the practice what will guide them to be able to transfer information from one setting to another.
ReplyDeleteHi Paloma,
ReplyDelete“Theoretically, everything sound obvious but practically we do not take these issues into consideration as we should. Don’t you think?”
I think now most of us do so but obviously we have to face many obstacles to apply all the tips given by Wiggins along the different chapters. But we must recognize the opportunity given to reflect on this issues which from my point of view is the beginning of our future actions to contribute to this teaching - learning process. So, maybe we can say that we are working on setting clear goals to be achieved by our students and therefore thinking backwards about our practices. So planning must be our tool in order to look forward to aiming our and our students’ goals.
Backward design is the key to get to meaningful learning, it is the first step on planning and eventhough we donot know where are we going to finish, we do not what do we want, so we can have an idea of the possible end, our planns must be as a ring shape, the very beginning connected to the very end, to have meaningful learning
ReplyDeleteHi Paloma!
ReplyDeleteAs you posted "...everything sounds obvious but practically we do not take these issues into consideration as we should...", and it is not because we don not want to, sometimes it's just because we don't know how or we lack the support and the self confidence to do so. For too long this society has put more and more responsibility on the shoulders of teachers; however, whenever a teacher wants to make a change, to prove new things and to put into practice new theories and ideas, he/she is questioned by everyone, people who lack the knowledge or the preparation in the field of education. As I said in my blog, a change is necessary, not only from teachers, but also from the way our society looks at us.
Dove:
ReplyDelete"How we can design an assessment or instruction before teaching a unit is an important concern which teachers have to deal with."
"To succeed in this task, we have to decide on what is essential for students to know"
These two ideas we discussed in one of the plenaries at TESOL today. The first one was presented as without having any clear attainable concrete aim from the very beginning you were doomed to fail. I think there's not much to think about it, no plan, no good lesson. Perhaps, if you're skillful enough, you may achieve a few things, on a luck basis, something rare to happen though. The other point was presented through a series of videos and pieces of writing in which students presented what they consider important in their lives, with cross cultural issues, like family, love and so on. The nice thing about them it's that you could see or perceive their voices in their works, which by the way were amazing. So, today I saw evidence of how important is to include their inner ideas to carry out good and deep understandings and critical thinking.
hugs