Week 2-3: Understanding by Design

Backwards Design is constructing a lesson plan by starting off with the learning goal of the lesson. There are three stages of Backward Design, first is to identify the desire result, determine the acceptable evidence, and plan learning experience and instruction. The learning goal represents the skills and knowledges you want the students to accomplished when they leave the course. Once you have the learning goal in mind you, the second stage is to consider all the performance task and assessments the students will need to complete in order to determine if they have achieved the learning goal. You can use assessments such as quizzes, papers, projects, and much more. The final stage of Backwards Design is to think about how you will teach the learning goal. You can incorporate various instructional strategies. 

To my understanding Backwards Design is to think about the goal you want your students to achieve at the end of a course or lesson. Then you need to think of different ways of how you will ensure throughout the lesson that they are understand the concept and will achieve the goal at the end. Then you will deliberate how you will teach this lesson and what tools and technique you will use. 

Wiggins and McTighe discusses that sometimes teachers are more focused on the activities instead of the long-term goal. Backwards Design is beneficial to teacher because you can create an effective lesson plan that has the goal you want your students to achieve, you are using activities to just ensure they are understand how to achieve the goal. Do teacher really focus more on the activities, instead of the overall goal of the lesson? This is a good question to think about, when planning a lesson.