Backward design, also called backward planning or backward mapping, is a process that educators use to design leaning activities and experiences and instructional techniques to achieve specific learning goals. Backward design begins with the objectives of a unit or course—what students are expected to learn and be able to do—and then proceeds “backward” to create opportunities for students to achieve those desired goals.
The gold standard for course design is to begin the process by articulating goals for student learning (learning objectives/outcomes) and then align the activities, tone, and assignments of the class with them. Educational developers call this process of articulation and alignment “backward design”—you start with where you want your students to end up, then work backward.
This may sound obvious, but it’s common to see courses that seem misaligned: an instructor thinks getting his students to think critically is the paramount objective of his course but teaches only through lecture and recall-based exams; a professor thinks it’s urgent for today’s students to slow down and develop detailed close-readings, but packs so many novels onto the syllabus that there’s never time to model or practice this in class. Indeed, UO’s Science Literacy Program researchers Nicola Barber, Austin Hocker, and Elly Vandegrift found alignments, but also intriguing disconnects, between learning objectives articulated on the syllabus and the types of questions included in course exams.
A good set of learning objectives (LOs) helps us know how to direct our efforts, divvy up class time, and even ensure we occasionally prioritize joy, or fun, or community. If you had an LO like, “Students will come to see themselves as a community of writers, developing and earning trust in one another through thoughtful, constructive critique,” then you might take more time early in the class to actually form a community—learn names, interview each other, attend an optional co-curricular event. Or you might devote time to clearly modeling what helpful peer feedback really looks like; peer reviews might be a part of the final grade in a class that aspires to be a learning community.
LOs remind us that even if we assign brilliant readings, even if we perform our hearts out at the podium, “teaching can and unfortunately does occur without learning” (Linda Nilson, Teaching at Its Best, 17). The best—and perhaps only—measure of successful teaching is in its influence on how students “think, act and feel” (Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do, 5). LOs direct our attention where it belongs: student learning.
Learning Objectives suggest a reasonable level of faculty accountability for how we use student time and effort; and they help students see what they’re working toward.
Even as some faculty seek to complicate instrumentalist views education—“I need this course, this credit, this credential so that I can get this job, this lifestyle”—it seems fair enough that students should feel they’re moving purposely through the course and curriculum toward clear goals that they understand and share, not engaging in busy work for reasons that seem like mysterious impositions of the professor’s authority—“I’m doing this because… she told me to.” Ideally, LOs invite students to have a mature relationship to the “whys” of their own educations. When we articulate goals, students can buy into them, track their own progress toward them, see coherences across courses and co-curricular activities, use them—repeat them to families who thought they should major in X not Y, to employers who want to know just what they bring to the table.
(1) A LO is a succinct statement with a verb indicating exactly what students should be able to do at a given point in your course or its afterlife.
(2) Most of these student actions should be demonstrable through the completion of the tasks you assign. Use verbs like “understand” and “appreciate” with caution because you can’t really observe or assess them. Instead, students might “translate,” “compare,” “interpret,” “recommend,” “appraise,” “predict,” “design,” or “rank.”
(2) These goals should have an appropriate level of rigor—they shouldn’t be easy, nor should they be impossible. With their diligent effort and your support, students should be able to achieve them.
(3) Some LOs should demand a high level of student cognition—if they’re all about memorizing and recalling information, that’s probably a missed opportunity for a university-level course.
(4) They should be in a language students can understand, not shrouded in specialist language.
Some faculty think of LOs in terms of Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy, considering a range of objectives that run from Bloom’s lowest or foundational level, knowledge (students remember/recall) to:
TEP’s appreciates the taxonomy of “significant learning” by L. Dee Fink in his Creating Significant Learning Experiences (2003). It asks us to think about a fuller range of affective, developmental and “metacognitive” dimensions of student growth. It, too, begins with foundational knowledge, then works up to:
I might put some of these types of objectives/dimensions of learning into action with a list like, “Students in this class will…
TEP’s backward design handout can help you get started writing learning objectives and aligning them with the work of the course.
In this link you will find videos of Grant Wiggins talking about Backwards Course Design. Wiggins and Jay McTighe offer several resources on this page to walk you through the understanding by backward designing the course design process and several PDF templates that you may find useful.
Backward Design from Muhlenberg College: A simple explanation of backward design.