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….