Week 2: Assignment 3- Backward Design
Backward Design has a huge focus on the teacher's end goal of the lesson or course. Wiggins described it best when he explained that having an end goal in mind while teaching makes it easy to adapt and construct your lesson plan for a particular unit.
I found it interesting when Wiggins talked about how not all textbooks should be gone through in entirety. He explains that content is important to have in each lesson but the content must completely support that end goal. If the textbooks don't fully support the end goal it is important for teachers to instruct students to the correct spots of the book, leaving certain sections out.
From what I have learned about backward design thus far, it seems to me its important to keep the students in the loop on this. The teacher must present to the students in the beginning of the lesson what they are expected to learn and what they should know by the end of the unit. The teacher should assess the students on what they learned and what they lacked on (the type of assessment will vary depending on grade level). And finally, feedback is a huge part of student involvement, giving the students knowledge on what was done correctly and what they could have improved upon.
I thought that Wiggins made a good point that as teachers we have to incentivize how the students responded to our teaching, and through that verbal or sometimes non verbal feedback we have to adjust our styles.
Hi Haley. I liked the point you described in the second paragraph of your blog post about content and textbooks being used selectively to support backward design goals. I remember many classes in high school, college, and grad school where the teacher or professor went sequentially through the textbook chapter by chapter. Sometimes it worked out fine in the end. Other times I was a bit lost and found myself seeking out other resources to clarify a concept unsure of the direction of the material or how it all fit together.
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