An Assessment of Backward Planning and Education

An Assessment of Backward Planning and Education

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Backward planning is a tool that serves to make more efficient choices in class time management. In a 2017 article, Jamie L. Johnson notes that backwards planning is a way to avoid “mindless fishing trips”. These trips are used to describe making choices for education without knowing what the end goal is. “To avoid aimless data collection, we introduce a structured approach.” (Johnson 2017) Backwards planning is knowing the goal and making choices that help get you directly to this end result.

To the uninitiated, backwards planning’s definition seems particularly close to the idea of “teaching to the test”. This is not necessarily so. The biggest drawback to teaching to the test is that the results don’t tend to be long lasting and the students don’t develop creative sensibilities. While students may learn to achieve high scores, they don’t learn how to use the information in different ways. Through backwards planning, “As a curriculum development model, UbD is recognized as a means to foster enduring understanding and to promote the transfer of knowledge to real-life applications. In the context where course objectives align with community needs, UbD can be applied to service-learning project design.” (Jozwik, 2017)

By planning backward, students are allowed to focus on “Big Ideas”. These “Big Ideas” enable students to focus or refocus on concepts that give them a chance to have a firmer grasp on a discipline as a whole rather than very specific, specialized segments like trivia, facts, or inflexible knowledge. Planning with a goal concept or skill in mind is truly the most idealistic version of teaching to the test, where the test is not only relevant to the student’s development, but the process is that which has multiple applications and will be useful further down the road for the student. (Mills, 2019)

This process is one that has applications both in the educational world and points beyond. As stated before, backward planning can help to avoid “fishing trips”. The concept, when applied to the subject of market research, makes as much sense. By researching the subject, the results of the market become more predictable and therefore the investor becomes more successful. By comparison, the investor is the teacher, the money invested is the teacher’s time, and the stock’s value is the student’s “educational equity”. It obviously takes a bit of experience to have effective exercises lined up for your students, but with careful consideration, backward planning becomes increasingly more effective.

Resources

Jozwik, S., Lin, M., Cuenca-Carlino, Y., (2017) Using Backward Design to Develop Service-learning projects in teacher preparation. Illinois State University. New Waves Educational Research & Development 35 December, 2017, Vol. 20, No. 2

Jensen, J., Bailey, E., Kummer, T., Weber, K., (2017) Using backward design in education research: a research methods essay, Journal of Microbiol Biol Edu, Published online 2017 Oct 5. doi: 10.1128/jmbe.v18i3.1367

Mills, J., Wiley, C., Williams. J., (2019) “This is what learning looks like!” Backward design and the framework in first year writing, Johns Hopkins University Press, Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 19, No. 1, https://preprint.press.jhu.edu/portal/sites/ajm/files/19.1mills.pdf