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Backward Design Overview & FAQs
Backward design begins with the end in mind: What enduring understandings do I want my students to develop? How will my students demonstrate their understanding when the unit is completed? How will I ensure that students have the skills and understand the concepts required on the summative assessment? These are the kinds of questions that teachers pose at the earliest stages of the backward design planning process. By beginning with the end in mind, teachers are able to avoid the common pitfall of planning forward from activity to activity, only to find that some students are prepared for the final assessment while others are not. Using backward design, teaching for understanding, and requiring students to apply and demonstrate their learning are not new concepts. Many of the best teachers have been using this approach, even if they didn't have a name for it. The resources on these linked web pages attempt to explain the backward design planning process and show how it can be used to design thematic, multi-genre units that promote enduring understanding. Some Frequently Asked Questions & Answers About Backward Design

What is important to know and do? What is nice to know? What is worth being familiar with? In other words, what knowledge is //worth// understanding?
 * Question:** Why is it called Backward Planning?
 * Answer:** In theory and practice, the unit begins at the end. Sound like a paradox? Not really. It is based on the concept that both the students and teacher will have a much firmer and clearer grasp of where the learning is going if the goal or summative assessment is clearly articulated right from the beginning. By starting with a focus on the enduring understandings that you want your students to learn and apply, then developing how you will know how and when they have reached that understanding, the steps between will be carefully scaffolded to reach that objective. Teachers are designers; we need to ask and answer the following questions before we move to the actual day-to-day lessons:
 * What is Essential to know and be able to do?**


 * Question:** What are the basic steps to the backward design planning process?
 * Answer:** The steps to this process are listed below and explained in detail on the linked pages (see the menu to the left):
 * **Step 1:** Decide on the themes, enduring understandings and essential questions for the unit.


 * **Step 2:** Design a summative for the end of the unit.


 * **Step 3:** Align the unit with the New York State ELA Standards and choose outcomes, strategies and best practices to teach them.


 * **Step 4:** Choose resources to create a rich and engaging multi-genre thematically-linked unit.


 * **Step 5:** Weave back and forth across the curriculum map to make revisions and refinements.
 * Question:** How can I design an assessment before I teach a unit?
 * Answer:** Yes, this is a major paradigm shift for many of us. To be able to do this, you need to decide on what is essential for students to know; what is at the core or "heart" of your discipline and then decide how you will know when students have reached that goal. So, designing your assessment is a necessary piece that must occur in the beginning to give both you and your students a clear destination for the unit. Once the destination is clear, the teacher is able to create the best roadmap to get there.

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STep 1: Identifying Themes, Enduring Understandings, & Essential Questions

In their book, //Understanding by Design//, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe assert that there are six facets of understanding**.** According to Wiggins and McTighe, we truly understand when we:
 * Theme(s)**: As English teachers, how often have we designed our units around a particular text that we are teaching? This fact is evidenced by the language of our conversations, “I’m in the middle of my //Huck Finn// unit right now; what are you doing?” “I just started my unit on //The Things They Carried//, by Tim O’Brien.” Backward Design shifts us into thinking about theme-driven units as opposed to a text-driven units. This opens up a unit considerably so that we can take a multi-genre approach and use a variety of texts to gain multiple perspectives on the questions associated with the theme. This necessitates that we move away from a genre approach to teaching English toward a curriculum that focuses on the “big ideas and questions” that will engage students and will help them to see the relevance of the study of literature and language. Thus, our conversation might be, “I’m in the middle of a unit on Social Justice; what are you doing?” “I’m just starting a unit exploring the complexities of War.” While our budgets and our bookrooms may govern some of the choices of our “anchor texts,” these realities need not limit the breadth, depth and scope of the approach we take to design units that promote active critical inquiry.
 * E****nduring Understandings:** Knowledge and understanding are both central to learning. However, knowledge and understanding are not the same thing. To know the characters in a novel is very different from understanding how the characters change in the face of conflicts or obstacles. How do we move students beyond mere knowledge to enduring understandings?
 * **Can Explain:** provide thorough, supportable and justifiable accounts of phenomena, facts and data


 * **Can Interpret:** tell meaningful stories; offer apt translations; provide a revealing historical or personal dimension to ideas and events


 * **Can Apply:** effectively use and adapt what we know in diverse contexts


 * **Have perspective:** see and hear points of view through critical eyes and ears; see the big picture


 * **Can empathize:** find value in what others might find odd, alien, or implausible; perceive sensitively on the basis of prior direct experience

These facets of understanding can help teachers identify the enduring understandings that students will think deeply about throughout the unit. In the case of the theme of conflict and change, these might include:
 * **Have self-knowledge:** perceive the personal style, prejudices, projections, and habits of mind that both shape and impede our own understanding; aware of what we do not understand and why understanding is so hard.
 * Conflict and change are an unavoidable part of the human experience


 * How a person faces conflict reveals the nature of his/her character


 * Conflict can be an agent for positive or negative change


 * A person's point of view affects how they deal with conflict or change


 * Essential Questions:** After you identify the enduring understandings for your unit, you then develop your essential questions. These questions are geared to help students take an inquiry approach toward the various learning experiences you will design. Look at your list of enduring understandings and develop 1-3 essential questions that cover all of them. You may have one “overarching” essential question or a series of related questions that will cover the full range of your enduring understandings. Good essential questions have the following criteria in common:
 * Open-ended questions that resist a simple or single right answer


 * Deliberately thought-provoking, counterintuitive, and/or controversial


 * Require students to draw upon content knowledge and personal experience


 * Can be revisited throughout the unit to engage students in evolving dialogue and debate


 * Lead to other essential questions posed by students

//What is the relationship between conflict and change?//
 * Overarching Essential Question:**
 * **Facets** ||
 * **Related Essential Questions** ||
 * **Explanation** || How does conflict lead to change? ||
 * **Interpretation** || How does conflict influence a person's decisions and actions? ||
 * **Application** || What problem-solving strategies can people use to manage conflict and change? ||
 * **Perspective** || How does a person's point of view affect how they deal with conflict or change? ||
 * **Empathy** || How might it feel to live through a conflict that disrupts your way of life? ||
 * **Self-knowledge** || What personal qualities have helped you to deal with conflict and change? ||
 * **Perspective** || How does a person's point of view affect how they deal with conflict or change? ||
 * **Empathy** || How might it feel to live through a conflict that disrupts your way of life? ||
 * **Self-knowledge** || What personal qualities have helped you to deal with conflict and change? ||
 * **Self-knowledge** || What personal qualities have helped you to deal with conflict and change? ||
 * **Self-knowledge** || What personal qualities have helped you to deal with conflict and change? ||

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Step 2: Designing the Summative Assessment

This is the origin of the phrase, “beginning with the end in mind.” The summative assessment is the culminating task that will require students to draw upon the skills and concepts they have developed throughout the unit in order to demonstrate their understanding. Traditional units tests (with multiple-choice, true/false, and short answer questions) are poor summative assessments because they rarely require the application of skills and concepts or the demonstration of understanding. Summative assessments must require the application of skills, concepts, and understandings, rather than a mere reporting of information. Sometimes these types of summative assessments are called performance assessments because they require students to apply skills, concepts, and understandings to a new problem in a different context or to a different text(s). The best summative assessments often incorporate the essential question(s) that have focused the unit, requiring students to answer one or more of the essential questions drawing upon ideas from personal experience, from the texts studied, and from new text(s) encountered as a part of the assessment. You may be asking, “How can I design an assessment before I teach a unit?” To be able to do this, you need to decide what is essential for students to know and then determine how students will demonstrate their understanding. Designing your assessment //must// occur early in the planning process to give both you and your students a clear destination for the unit; the teacher is then able to create the best roadmap for the learning experiences required to get there. Some considerations are:
 * How will the summative assessment require students to demonstrate their understanding and their ability to apply essential skills and concepts?


 * How can I incorporate/integrate the essential question(s) in the summative assessment to check for each student’s understanding?


 * How will I communicate the components/elements of this summative assessment to the students at the //beginning// of the unit so students will know what will be expected and required?


 * How will I communicate the criteria for a successfully completed performance assessment? (See the rubric link to the left for standard-based rubrics)


 * How might I integrate one of the eight required writing tasks as a part of the summative and/or formative assessment?


 * What role can students play to help shape the summative task that they will complete?

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Step 3:

Identifying the Learning Outcomes & Instructional Strategies

This is the point in the process where you identify the specific skills and concepts required to successfully complete the summative assessment. You might ask: "What will students need to know and be able to do so that when they get to the summative assessment, they will be able to successfully apply the these skills and concepts?" Answering this question requires a careful task analysis of the summative assessment to determine the embedded skills and concepts that are a part of the task requirements. For example, a summative assessment may require students to "synthesize ideas and information from one or more texts." Given this requirement of the summative assessment, students need to practice applying the skill of synthesizing ideas and information from one or more texts throughout the unit so that they are prepared to apply this skill by the end of the unit. Once these skills and concepts are identified, it then becomes possible to design lessons that incorporate instructional strategies and best practices to explicitly teach these skills and concepts.

This process of chunking skills and concepts and teaching them throughout the unit is sometime referred to as scaffolding because we are providing students with temporary assistance to help them develop independence with the skills and concepts. Knowing what the summative assessment will require of students is necessary before we can identify the scaffolding they will require to be successful.

The reading and writing outcomes (see links to the left) provide a list of the skills and concepts that should be embedded within summative assessments and, therefore, targeted with explicit instruction. Explicitly targeting specific outcomes means designing embedded mini-lessons throughout the unit that help students to practice and learn to apply the skills and concepts. These mini-lessons should include modeling (both processes and products), providing opportunities for guided practice, and structuring tasks that require the independent application of these skills and concepts.

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Themes and essential questions help to frame student inquiry and promote critical thinking. They also provide a helpful framework for organizing a unit of study using a multi-genre approach. The themes to the left have been designated for instructional focus at each grade level. Beginning in September, the expectations for teachers related to the designated grade-level themes will be as follows:

1.Teachers will use the designated grade-level theme to organize a multi-genre, thematic unit of study; the unit may last from 10 weeks (at a minimum) to 40 weeks (the entire year) at the teacher’s discretion. 2.Whether teachers decide to use the designated grade-level theme for a marking period, a semester, or for the entire year, they will use a thematic multi-genre approach throughout the year; if teachers choose to use the designated grade-level theme for part of the year, they will then choose additional themes from the list as long as they do not teach the theme designated to the previous or following grade levels. 3.Teachers will use essential questions to promote open-ended inquiry as they engage students in exploration of the theme and the related multi-genre texts; teachers may use the essential questions provided as examples or they may generate their own.

Good essential questions have some basic criteria in common:

· They are open-ended and resist a simple or single right answer

· They are deliberately thought-provoking, counterintuitive, and/or controversial

· They require students to draw upon content knowledge and personal experience

· They can be revisited throughout the unit to engage students in evolving dialogue and debate

· They lead to other essential questions posed by students

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SAMPLES

__**Language & Literature**__

How is our understanding of culture and society constructed through and by language?
 * Language**

How can language be powerful?

How can you use language to empower yourself?

How is language used to manipulate us?

In what ways are language and power inseparable?

Is it possible to have culture without language?

Is it possible to think without language?

How does language influence the way we think, act, and perceive the world?

How do authors use the resources of language to impact an audience? How is literature like life?
 * Literature**

What is literature supposed to do?

What influences a writer to create?

What is the purpose and function of art in our culture?

How does literature reveal the values of a given culture or time period?

How does the study of fiction and nonfiction texts help individuals construct their understanding of reality?

In what ways are all narratives influenced by bias and perspective?

Where does the meaning of a text reside? Within the text, within the reader, or in the transaction that occurs between them?

Can a reader infer an author's intentions based on the text?

What are enduring questions and conflicts that writers (and their cultures) grappled with hundreds of years ago and are still relevant today?

How do we gauge the optimism or pessimism of a particular time period or particular group of writers?

Are there universal themes in literature that are of interest or concern to all cultures and societies?

What are the characteristics or elements that cause a piece of literature to endure?

What distinguishes a good read from great literature?

Who decides the criteria for judging whether or not a book is any good?

What is the purpose of: science fiction? satire? historical novels, etc.?

__**Relationships & Community**__ What are the elements that build a strong friendship?

How do friendships change over time?

What impact does family have during different stages of our lives?

What can we learn from different generations?

How is conflict an inevitable part of relationships?

How do you know if a relationship is healthy or hurtful?

What personal qualities help or hinder the formation of relationships?

How are people transformed through their relationships with others?

What is community and what are the individual’s responsibilities to the community as well as the community’s responsibilities to the individual?

__**Our View of Ourselves & The World**__

How do we know what we know?

How does what we know about the world shape the way we view ourselves?

How do our personal experiences shape our view of others?

What does it mean to be an insider or an outsider?

What does it mean to "grow up"?

Do you believe that things are fated no matter what, or do you believe your actions can change the course of your life?

Have the forces of good and evil changed over time?

What is the relevance of studying multicultural texts?

How does the media shape our view of the world and ourselves?

In a culture where we are bombarded with other people trying to define us, how do we make decisions for ourselves?

What turning points determine our individual pathways to adulthood?

What is the relationship between decisions and consequences?
 * __Decisions, Actions, & Consequences__**

How do we know how to make good decisions?

How can a person’s decisions and actions change his/her life?

How do the decisions and actions of characters reveal their personalities?

How do decisions, actions, and consequences vary depending on the different perspectives of the people involved?