5.1 Understanding by Design

Overview

Understanding by Design  (teaching guide) by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe offers a framework for designing courses and content units called backward design. We have summarized the main points for you but please take a look at the guide as a reference. This teaching guide will explain the benefits of incorporating backward design and elaborate on the three stages that backward design encompasses. 

Instructors using backward design first consider the learning goals of the course: these learning goals embody the knowledge and skills instructors want their students to have learned when they leave the course. Next, instructors consider assessment: how will students be assessed on each learning goal? Finally, instructors plan how they will teach the content. 

This 2:30 minute video explains the basic idea behind backward design:

This teaching guide has been adapted from the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Why use Backward Design?

“Our lessons, units, and courses should be logically inferred from the results sought, not derived from the methods, books, and activities with which we are most comfortable. Curriculum should lay out the most effective ways of achieving specific results… in short, the best designs derive backward from the learnings sought.”
In Understanding by Design , Wiggins and McTighe argue that backward design is focused primarily on student learning and understanding. When teachers are designing lessons, units, or courses, they often focus on the activities and instruction rather than the outputs of the instruction. In other words, teachers often focus more on teaching rather than learning. This perspective can lead to the misconception that learning is the activity when, in fact, learning is derived from a careful consideration of the meaning of the activity.

Check out these benefits of backward design:

The Three Stages of Backward Design

“Deliberate and focused instructional design requires us as teachers and curriculum writers to make an important shift in our thinking about the nature of our job. The shift involves thinking a great deal, first, about the specific learnings sought, and the evidence of such learnings, before thinking about what we, as the teacher, will do or provide in teaching and learning activities.”

Step 1: Identify desired results

In the first stage, the instructor must consider the learning goals of the lesson, unit, or course. Wiggins and McTighe provide a useful process for establishing curricular priorities. They suggest that the instructor ask themselves the following three questions as they progressively focus in on the most valuable content:

What should participants hear, read, view, explore or otherwise encounter?

This knowledge is considered knowledge worth being familiar with. Information that fits within this question is the lowest priority content information that will be mentioned in the lesson, unit, or course.

What knowledge and skills should participants master?

The knowledge and skills at this sub-stage are considered important to know and do. The information that fits within this question could be the facts, concepts, principles, processes, strategies, and methods students should know when they leave the course.

What are big ideas and important understandings participants should retain?

The big ideas and important understandings are referred to as enduring understandings because these are the ideas that instructors want students to remember sometime after they’ve completed the course.

[Text description of image: Small circle inside a medium circle inside a larger circle: Small circle reads, "Enduring understanding," medium reads: "Important to know and do," and large circle reads: "Worth being familiar with."]

The figure above illustrates the three ideas. The first question listed above has instructors consider the knowledge that is worth being familiar with which is the largest circle, meaning it entails the most information. The second question above allows the instructor to focus on more important knowledge, the knowledge and skills that are important to know and do. Finally, with the third question, instructors begin to detail the enduring understandings, overarching learning goals, and big ideas that students should retain. By answering the three questions presented at this stage, instructors will be able to determine the best content for the course. Furthermore, the answers to question #3 regarding enduring understandings can be adapted to form concrete, specific learning goals for the students; thus, identifying the desired results that instructors want their students to achieve.

Stage 2: Determine Acceptable Evidence

The second stage of backward design has instructors consider the assessments and performance tasks students will complete in order to demonstrate evidence of understanding and learning. In the previous stage, the instructor pinpointed the learning goals of the course. Therefore, they will have a clearer vision of what evidence students can provide to show they have achieved or have started to attain the goals of the course. Consider the following two questions at this stage:

1. How will I know if students have achieved the desired results?
2. What will I accept as evidence of student understanding and proficiency?

At this stage it is important to consider a wide range of assessment methods in order to ensure that students are being assessed on the goals the instructor wants students to attain. Sometimes, the assessments do not match the learning goals, and it becomes a frustrating experience for students and instructors. Use the list below to help brainstorm assessment methods for the learning goals of the course.

• Term papers.
• Short-answer quizzes.
• Free-response questions.
• Homework assignments.
• Lab projects.
• Practice problems.
• Group projects.
• Among many others…

Stage 3: Plan learning experiences and Instruction

The final stage of backward design is when instructors begin to consider how they will teach. This is when instructional strategies and learning activities should be created. With the learning goals and assessment methods established, the instructor will have a clearer vision of which strategies would work best to provide students with the resources and information necessary to attain the goals of the course. Consider the questions below:

1. What enabling knowledge (facts, concepts, principles) and skills (processes, procedures, strategies) will students need in order to perform effectively and achieve desired results?
2. What activities will equip students with the needed knowledge and skills?
3. What will need to be taught and coached, and how should it best be taught, in light of performance goals?
4. What materials and resources are best suited to accomplish these goals?

Leverage the various instructional strategies listed below:

• Large and/or group discussion
• Interactive lecturing and think-pair-shares
• Flipped classroom
• Cooperative learning (including team-based and project-based learning)
• Guided note-taking
• Guided inquiry for problem-solving

Want more?

If you'd like to learn more about Backward Design, watch this 10-minute video by Grant Wiggins, one of the co-authors of Understanding by Design.

Reference:

Wiggins, Grant, and McTighe, Jay. (1998). Backward Design. In Understanding by Design  (pp. 13-34). ASCD.