Working Backwards to Move Forward

Educators have been using the ideas first forged by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2005) for several years now. Their work, known as Understanding by Design has been used to redesign unit and lesson plans. In some instances, their ideas have been used to rewrite entire curriculums. However this process can be daunting. Often, Wiggins and McTighe can become quite lofty idealists. This is why I turn to a more practical approach after the initial work using the UBD methods has been completed.

As teachers, we are ultimately responsible for assisting students to learn more than they knew the day before and work towards them retaining the essentials. A way to do this is to incorporate the ‘backwards’ design approach while developing the learning targets. Learning targets the essential knowledge, reasoning, skills and products would like students to know, understand, or demonstrate to show understanding. Identifying these will help in the development of the essential summative assessments that will measure student a student’s achievement.

Another step is careful construction of these assessments of learning. If the assessments are constructed in a way that can measure student achievement in multiple ways, i.e., selected response, short response, extended response and/or a performance, then a clearer picture begins to form regarding whether or not the student has exceeded the standard (A), met the standard (B), below the standard (C) or not yet meeting the standard (D). A zero, or a grade of ‘F’ indicates that the student hasn’t learned anything.

If these assessments can be used as pre-assessment tool then assessments for learning, or formative assessments, can be used to monitor student progress towards meeting the standards, then we can begin to identify student needs early and thus provide the necessary assistance right away. Once all of this is in place, a teacher who becomes worried about a student can confer with his or her colleagues that teach a similar group of students (same grade or same curriculum) or reach out to other colleagues outside of the grade or curriculum for additional ideas. In other words, having a professional learning community (PLC) that exists to support the teacher’s desire to have his or her students succeed is an integral part of this process.

If these steps don’t work, then the school or district should have a referral process (RtI) that can review what has and hasn’t worked for the child and offer recommendations to support the child in the classroom. This can be based on the teacher’s record-keeping of the summative and formative assessments. The very last resort would be to pull the student out of the class.

By working backwards like this to reach the individual child, we as educators can begin to make huge strides as we move forward with student progress and support.