It seems that I thought of a great idea and only later on did someone come along and make their mark with the very same idea.
Just a quick caveat before I start. It would be easy to read this blog entry and think that I'm whinning because I was beaten to the punch with 'my great idea'. That isn't what I'm trying to write at all. I want to say that I feel validated that I'm not barking up the wrong tree.
'Back in the Day' when I was teaching at the University of the South Pacific, I always designed my courses 'back to front'. That is I started from the end, and then worked backwards from there to decide what I needed to teach tomorrow. I think I always taught like this because of my training as a diving coach (or trampoline, or gymnastics) where you break down complex movements into a series of progressions. You know the end result (a somersault) and therefore you figure out what does the gymnast need to be able to do just before they can do a somersault etc. Logical right?
Except that I never saw much evidence of this logic in much of my colleagues own work. Incidentally, I was working in the Department of Education & Psychology (now defunct) so one would have thought that this would be obvious especially to my education colleagues.
Today I dug up a lecture that I did after 7 years of teaching which distilled my teaching ethos under the rubric of 'criterion assessment'. I gave the lecture at the end of Feb in 2001. I state this only to provide some wafer thin evidence that I haven't just swiped the idea from others.
What is Working Back to Front?
Well for designing a teaching/learning event:
- you start with your end goal – say a student has to understand the definition of what 'ethnocentricism' means.
- The next step is to figure out how you can demonstrate to someone else that your student has actually understood the term. I for one would want a student to give a personal example from their own lives of how ethnocentric thoughts are expressed, along with an explanation of how they have recognised that this is an ethnocentric way of thinking. This is of course an assessment - and, at least partially, I've given the criteria for how a student can demonstrate their understanding of the term.
- Finally of course I will design my lessons in order that the student can actually pass the assessment.
Notice how I'm actually teaching towards the assessment - normally this is shunned by traditional teaching practice even if we all know that this is exactly what pupils and students actually do.
The lovely thing about the internet and search engines like Google, is of course that I can inexpensively search for things on a whim. So a few months back we decided at MIC to run a series of workshops that focussed on the curriculum particularly for our subjects that are not so comprehensively covered such as social science and technology. I was thinking about 'working back to front' as a way of constructing a curriculum and on a whim I entered in 'back design education' and a few other variations. Low and behold a set of two authors kept popping up Grant Wiggins & Jay McTighe who have coined the term 'Backwards Design'. It's exactly the same scheme that I've been using for all these years. I've gone right ahead and had Messers Amazon deliver their book Understanding by Design, delivered to my doorstep and it's so far every bit as good as I read about. Unlike me, they've been humble enough to acknowledge that this core concept is not that original either.
References
Polya, G. (1990). How to Solve it: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method (Penguin Science). Penguin.
Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by Design (Merrill Education/ASCD College Textbooks). Allyn & Bacon.