Identifying Learning Outcomes
Lesson plans are a road map to facilitate teaching and learning. Lesson planning is an important aspect of effective teaching because it focuses the teaching on the students; however, lesson planning can seem overwhelming and laborious. In this section, you will learn about the process of ensuring alignment during lesson planning. Throughout the course, we will build on this foundation by adding different elements to enhance your lesson planning skills.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to
- Unpack content standards.
- Write measurable learning objectives aligned to standards.
Backward Design
Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2005) are often credited with the idea for lesson planning called Backward Design based on their book, Understanding by Design. Wiggins and McTighe maintain that the traditional pattern of planning for teachers resembles a “forward design” in which they consider the learning activities (what students will do), the assessments (how they will measure students), then conclude by connecting everything to learning goals and standards. Using the Backward Design approach helps teachers to align the intended student learning outcomes, to the assessment evidence, and then to the learning activities.
The first step in the lesson design process is knowing where you want your students to end up. Successful teachers are diligent in their planning efforts, specifically when it comes to articulating the results they desire for their students. In the architecture world, it is stated that form follows function. That principle means that before deciding on the shape of a new building, an architect should first understand how that building will be used. In the teaching world, successful teachers follow a similar idea in that they do not start planning their instruction until they have mapped a plan for where they are headed.
The second step of the Backward Design process requires you as the teacher to determine what form of evidence you will accept as evidence of student achievement of the learning objective. In this stage, you will either select or develop the assessment task that will provide the specific evidence you need. This step requires that you understand a variety of assessment types and their pros and cons in order to select the best format for your assessment (which will be addressed later in the course).
The last stage of the lesson design process focuses on planning the actual learning experiences. Now that we know where we want our students to end up, and ultimately do, we can effectively plan learning experiences that will prepare them to achieve our desired results. It is for this reason that backward design is considered to be a more intentional approach to lesson planning.
- Check out Megan Faherty’s post (or listen to the podcast) about how she approaches lesson planning.
- If you are interested in seeing how I use Backward Design to layout the undergraduate course t