I'm reading lots of inspirational/motivational crap during the break. There are all these "exercises" where you write down what you would do if you were a millionaire and every exotic sight you hope to see before you die etc. etc. While I tend to agree with Michael Bolton I'm trying some of them anyway. So far I've discovered that I should have taken the trumpet instead of the flute in 9th grade (because, lie me, it's loud and compact, and it fits better into my fantasy of Leaving the Academy to join the E-Street Band) and I need a hiking partner (no one ever mistakes a hiking wombat for preggers). But all this "imagine the future and then work backwards from there" crap reminded me an idea for something to apply to teaching that I always say I’m going to try, but then never do. It's nothing novel, I've heard of people doing this before, but I thought if I shared it, I'd be more likely to follow through with it. But also, I'm interested in hearing from people who've planned classes this way before. I want to know if it either helped or hindered upholding standards.
First you write your final exam (which may or may not need a massive overhaul three months into the future). With the final in front of you as a guide, you write your regular exams, and from them you write your homework assignments. And last you write a syllabus.
I don’t know if I can exactly follow that method, because it’s so foreign to me. I think what I’ll really do is write a syllabus first, do the rest of it as prescribed, and then revise the syllabus. But for those of you who already plan this way, I wanted to know if having something tangible (rather than just an idea) representing what you want to use as a final assessment helps you hold the line as you plan and go through the rest of the term. It seems like it would help. But I can also see myself getting too optimistic if I write a final exam over intersession break (i.e. with two weeks of peace and quiet insulating me from the last snow storm), and then when they derail my fantasy, deluding myself into thinking they’ve accomplished things they have not actually accomplished.
Yeah, that's the gist of the "backwards planning" style advocated by Grant Wiggins. You begin with a set of essential questions that you want your students to be able to answer and plan from there. I did a workshop on it my second year of teaching and found it very helpful. It still guides my planning.
ReplyDeleteI find it really helpful in mentoring new teachers as well. Newbies can get all fired up about cool-sounding projects and lose sight of what they're trying to accomplish. Backwards design helps them see that building a sugar-cube Great Wall doesn't actually teach students anything about Chinese history. I know it sounds obvious, but in middle and secondary school, there's a lot of pressure on teachers to do things that look "exciting" or involve the latest technology or whatever's in edu-vogue. Teachers are regularly validated for assigning projects that are often intellectual tripe, so it's important to help them stay grounded in what they want their students to understand about the topic, and how they're going to get there.
I'll settle for them just passing the final. This planning method would cause me to just teach them how to solve 50 multiple choice chemistry problems.
ReplyDeleteNow that I think about it, if they actually learned to solve 50 problems, that would be ok.