5.1 Understanding by Design

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.