Chapter I: Backward Design. (Wiggins & McTighe , 2005)

In teaching there are many fundamental aspects that have to be thought and considered before starting giving lessons. In this chapter, Wiggins and Mctighe support the idea that “teachers are designers”. The authors meet the conception that the whole process of teaching is directed to desired goals in which teachers are the milestone for designing and creating learning experiences. At the same time, these authors provides a full conception of what they call “Backward design”. This concept is the most important one in this chapter and this is going to be developed in order to have further understanding.

The idea of having desired purposes as the first thing to think when planning a particular learning experience seems to be a new and interesting one from the point of view of “Backward Design”. That is to say that when planning is really important to have a clear visualization of what the goals are for a given class or course. But why Backward Design is best? Because of the idea that once we have this goals to be achieved clear in our planning, the teaching is going to be constructed from that goals backwards, so that the process of building this planning will be from the final and mayor goal which is understanding. So, first we focus on the desired results, then in the activities and content (skills) that will enable students to achieve those goals mentioned.

Another important idea that this chapter shows is “the twin sins of traditional design”. The first sin is called activity-oriented design, which is based on the premise that when a teacher is planning what really matters is to be focus on the activity instead of the learning the students should go through. It is been said that “activities, though fun and interesting, do not lead anywhere intellectually” (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) . This kind of planning only enable students to learn by chance instead of learning by clear goals. The second sin is called “coverage” which means to teach directly from the course book going page by page trying to covering all the contents within a specific time to do so. The thing is that this type of approach on teaching does not have clear and specific goals to be achieved as part of the learning process. It just goes expecting that students learn by the activities from the book without any reason of why they should be seeing that content.

Finally, this chapter explain the three stages of backward design. They are: Identify desired results, Determine acceptable evidence and Plan learning experiences and instruction. The first one is oriented towards having a clear understanding of what the goals are going to be in a particular course. In this part we should go the national standards in order to see what are desired results in that curricula so that we can plan prioritizing the contents (skills). The second one means how we collect evidence in order to plan our classes. This one calls for validation of determined evidences in order to design units and lessons. That is to say that teachers should analyze the results from assessment procedures so that they will improve teaching by designing better classes. And finally it is the turn to plan learning experiences and instruction. We need to plan appropriate instruction for our students according to the evidence we get from the assessment procedures and from the clear goals we have established since this process started. These learning experiences are logically directed to what materials or teaching procedures we are going to use in order to students can achieve the desired goals.

Backward design seems to be fundamental for teachers who really want to stay focus on student’s learning. At the same time, it increases the awareness of how teachers should be always worried about what they can do for students’ learning instead of being only focus on the activities they would like to use as part of their teaching. In order to have the appropriate material, teachers should be able to think on what the purposes are first and then by what teaching approach and materials the goals will be achieved through.