The other day I was scrolling on Facebook and came across a post in one of those teacher groups (which, by the way, I RARELY partake in... because they are FILLED with negativity about the profession), and I screenshotted it and sent it to my colleague.
"THIS! THIS is what is wrong with our education system and why students aren't learning!" was the text that accompanied my text. The post read something like this:
Help! I am teaching The Crucible this year, and all of a sudden I need a particular 'skill' I am teaching through our unit. My goal so far has always been to keep students engaged and make sure they understand the story, but it seems I need to have a specific skill I am teaching. Which standard would align with this play?
This, my friends, is exactly why there is a gap in our students' education, and why they sometimes leave our classrooms with both the teacher AND the group of kids feeling like they didn't gain a single thing from the course. Because instead of identifying the SKILLS they need and planning lessons accordingly, we are choosing MATERIALS we want to teach and trying to find standards that match them as an afterthought.
And it's not the teachers' fault, necessarily, as this has been the practice of traditional education for far too long. Most teachers, and districts, operate by this way of thinking, rather than using backwards design to create their units.
Backwards design was first introduced in 1998 in the book Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, but it has moving its way into classrooms today at snail speed. Instead, most teachers shove common core state standards aside and focus solely on the content they are teaching. While this is tempting to do with the overwhelming amount of standards we are expected to teach (which, let's be real... is a conversation for WHOLE other post), there IS value in identifying WHICH standards you are hoping your students master by the time they leave your classroom. However, most teachers neglect to start with the end in mind, leading to the very question the teacher in this group asked.
Traditional Education (and the way many teachers still plan today) goes something like this:
STEP ONE: Identify a topic or chunk of content to cover. Many teachers choose content THEY are interested in - which already results in lack of engagement from their students - or they choose a topic that has been taught for years and years and years that is no longer relevant.
STEP TWO: Plan a sequence of lessons to teach that content.
STEP THREE: Create an assessment that matches the content covered to measure the students' ability to reiterate what they've learned. In most cases, this may look like a surface level, multiple choice test.
The problem with this method is that you are not teaching students a skill that can be transferred from lesson to lesson, from class to class, or from school to life. Instead, students are merely being asked to memorize content that won't necessarily teach them anything other than how to study for a test and then immediately forget the information afterwards. Notice that the assessment comes after the lessons are planned, meaning it's not so much about them being able to perform the skill we had hoped they would learn, but rather testing to see if they were paying attention to what we said throughout the unit.
When I teach my students Animal Farm, it would be really easy to follow this method. It would be less work for me as the teacher, and it would be less challenging for the students. It might look like the following:
Decide my students will be learning about the Russian Revolution.
Create lessons around reading the chapters of the book and discussing the characters and events.
Create an assessment that asks them to match characters to their descriptions to show they've read the book, and ask questions about the plot to show their understanding of the content.
But with doing it this way, my students aren't practicing a SKILL. I am not saying there's no benefit to simply reading to gain knowledge about a topic and understand the plot, but that is not my goal of this unit. Instead, I start with the end goal in mind by asking myself, what skill is it that I want my students to learn? What do they need to be able to DO by time they leave my class? This very question shapes my units, my lessons, my assessments, and the content I use to teach them.
BACKWARDS DESIGN
When using the backwards design method for planning, everything you do is in connection to the standards you are trying to teach. This is where the importance of UNPACKING those standards come into play, which, personally, I do WITH my students as our very first lesson. Alerting students of what it is they are expected to learn and be able to achieve by the end of the unit and explaining the PURPOSE for the unit is crucial for their success, but more on that in another post.
A teacher who uses backward design in their curriculum would go about their planning like this:
STEP ONE: Identify what students should be able to do by the end of the unit.
STEP TWO: Create an assessment that will measure that learning.
STEP THREE: Plan a sequence of lessons that will successfully teach and prepare students to master the skill and perform well on that assessment.
While the steps here are essentially the same, the ORDER of the steps is significant. When we plan our assessments first, we are only creating lessons and assignments that directly correlate with that standard and assessment. There is no tedious work that doesn't have a purpose, and personally, it results in much less grading for me as the teacher because I am only grading assignments that directly align with the skill I will be assessing at the end of the unit.
Using the example of teaching Animal Farm, this is how the planning cycle looks different:
Look at the CCSS and determine which standard(s) I think students should know by the end of their 11th grade year. When doing this, it is crucial to identify your POWER STANDARD(S) for the unit. For this unit specifically, it has TWO major standards students will be expected to master: analyze a case in which grasping a point of view requires distinguishing what is directly stated in a text from what is really meant (e.g., satire, sarcasm, irony, or understatement). (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.6); cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain. (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.1)
Create an assessment that directly measures students' growth in this skill. For this unit, their final assessment is to write an essay responding to the following prompt: using evidence from the novel, explain how Animal Farm is a piece of satire. Be sure to focus on how what is explicitly stated in the novel differs from Orwell's intended meaning and purpose.
Create lessons that scaffold the learning to achieve this goal. Prior to reading the novel, students read Jonathan Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal." Together, we analyze the text for techniques he used that tells us his intended meaning is different than what he actually stated in the text. This text is long, but they always get a kick out of reading about his idea to eat babies. As a formative assessment, students write a focused satirical analysis explaining how this essay is a work of satire. Then, we move onto Animal Farm. Students learn a bit about the Russian Revolution, and we read the entire novel together in class to allow time for discussion. Majority of our lessons focus on the allegorical meaning of the names and events in the novel, as well as other techniques Orwell employs.
Notice the difference here. The final assessment for this unit does not ask students to remember which character represents whom from the Revolution. It does not ask them to memorize satirical techniques such as sardonicism and tongue-in-cheek. Students are allowed to use all notes and materials when writing their essay because I am assessing the SKILL, not the memorization of the content in the novel or that was covered in class.
THE RUBRIC
One habit I've started doing is creating my rubrics directly from the standards themselves. Not only does this save me time, it ensures I am measuring the standard directly, and it makes it easy for students to see what is expected of them. When it comes to writing assessments, I not only assess the power standards of the unit, but I include the writing standards as well. Here's my rubric for this specific assessment:
TIME TO SELF-REFLECT
If a student were to ask you, in the middle of the unit, what skill am I learning here? would you have one solid answer for them without hesitation? If the answer is no, it might be time for some adjustments in your curriculum. I KNOW many educators already have their favorite units and lessons they hate to part with, and maybe you don't have to! If you practice backwards design in your classroom, it might turn out that you can use those topics and materials you love so much with the standard and assessment in mind. And maybe your students will learn something new in the process!
At the end of the day, educators need to ask themselves what it is their students should learn before walking through the doors of their classroom for the last time. And while there are many steps to this process that does take some work and adjustments, I promise that it's a worthwhile one.
Until next time,
Paige
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