More Backward Course Design: Getting Learning Done!

Imagine yourself at term’s end, talking with a sympathetic faculty colleague, or with a partner or family member. Your head is full of final papers or exams, ranging from exceptional to disappointing, and you cry out, “Argh! I just want them to ‘get’ that…(your rant here)!”

If you can complete that sentence, then you have all you need for a start on “backward course design,” an idea fundamental to the widely-used framework Understanding by Design (book by McTighe and Wiggins), and having some similarity to David Allen’s Getting Things Done system of task management. Jane S. Webster blogged here at Seminarium on her own experience with “backward course design,” inspiring in me the same impulse I get when I meet someone with whom I share a love of some obscure musician: an urge to shout “Me, too!” and then talk everybody’s ear off on the subject.

I had often been told to base my syllabus on “learning outcomes,” but always found the instruction to be rather opaque and abstract. Understanding by Design and Getting Things Done provided me a kind of one-two punch that brought “backward course design” into focus and into practice. Both involve starting with a destination clearly in mind: “Argh! I just want them to ‘get’ that…(your rant here)!”

Getting Things Done

David Allen’s system of Getting Things Done has (as does Understanding by Design) a kind of cult status in certain pedagogical circles: see, for example, the number of GTD-related posts at ProfHacker. The GTD system is organized around the idea of “projects”: a “project” is any task that requires more than one action to complete, and whose outcome can be envisioned. When trying to get your head around a new project–crafting a syllabus, building a tenure box, cleaning the garage–the first step is to envision an outcome. The order of events is like this (adapted from the book GTD, 56):

1. Defining purpose and principles (e.g., “a clean garage is safer than a cluttered one; safety is good for my family “)
2. Outcome envisioning (“what are the features of a clean garage?”)
3. Brainstorming (“in no particular order, what’s involved in cleaning a garage?”)
4. Organizing (“what orderings are required to arrange these steps sensibly?”)
5. Identifying next actions (“what comes first?”)

I find this to be a helpful way to get my head around “backward course design.” Defining the purpose and principles of a course unit (say, “Latter Prophets”) might prompt me to consider my institution’s statement of degree-program goals; if my institution wants to build “bold leaders,” then how might I imagine bold Old Testament researchers and teacher/preachers? Envisioning an outcome compels me to ask, “What are the features of a successful Old Testament researcher and teacher/preacher?” I can then brainstorm and organize a unit curriculum that guides a learner in acquiring the necessary knowledge and skills. “Brainstorming” makes me ask, “What does a learner need in order to develop these characteristics?” “Organizing” might involve scaffolding the unit according to Bloom’s revised taxonomy).

A “project” is any task involving more than one action, leading to an outcome that you can envision. Learning (“I just want them to ‘get’…!) is a project.

Understanding by Design

Like GTD, Understanding by Design begins with an outcome that you can envision; specifically, learning outcomes. To imagine these, it’s helpful to return to my faculty-lounge rant:

• “I just want them to get that…the Latter Prophets are not all saying the same things as each other!”
• “I just want them to get that…the Latter Prophets write to their own contemporaries, because they want something to happen in their own time and place!”

McTighe and Wiggins call these the “big ideas” that animate our course design. Often, we can think of open-ended, thought-stimulating questions–“essential questions”–that arise from these ideas:

• Can truth be expressed in theological diversity or only uniformity? In disagreement or only in agreement?
• How, in our experience, can words effect timely, real-world change?

If I can then brainstorm the performances that a learner would need to accomplish in order to demonstrate engagement with such “big ideas and essential questions,” then I’m on my way toward the elements of an assessment rubric for my “Latter Prophets” unit. As Jane notes also, I can organize these elements according to Bloom’s (revised) taxonomy. (I choose here the “lower” levels because it’s an early unit in an introductory-level course.)

• Learner recalls and describes prophets’ varying social/historical locations.
• Learner interprets specific texts, explaining their meaning for their likely authors and what the author wanted to happen in his readers and in his time.
• Learner applies understanding of individual prophets’ perspectives to familiar modern situations. (How might Amos view the US Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United v. FEC? How might Isaiah of Jerusalem view the US’s assembling of allies against Iraq and Afghanistan? How might Hosea assess the use of “Christa” (female) crucifixes in Christian worship?)

In a final grid-based rubric, each of the following elements would be followed by a description of what it looks like for a learner to accomplish that element “more than well enough,” “well enough,” or “not well enough.”

Having crafted a list of “big ideas and essential questions,” along with assessment rubrics describing what learners need to perform as demonstration of their understandings and skills, then you simply need to decide what resources and activities the learner needs in order to develop these understandings and skills. Look at all the resources and activities that have followed you around from your grad school days and through your early years of teaching: ditch whatever’s not needed, and start casting about for whatever’s missing.

To learn more about Understanding by Design, revisit Jane’s blog post. If you have experimented yourself with “backward course design,” share your experience here in the Comments. I hope you will now be ready to pull out your notebook and capture the possibilities when you next hear or speak those words: “I just want them to ‘get’ that…!”

 

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