To begin with the end

Backward design begins with the end in mind: What enduring understandings do I want my students to develop? How will my students evidence their understanding when the unit is completed? How will I ensure that students have the skills and understand the concepts required on the summative assessment? To answer these questions is essential to have a clear purpose to plan and apply. Then we have to map out the steps to get to our goal.

The logic of backward design suggests a plan­ning sequence for curriculum. This sequence has the following stages:

1. Deciding on the objective.
2. Creating a rubric or grading standard.
3. Planning the instruction.
4. Teaching the lesson.

Clearly, there are many advantages of developing a course from this approach but it is also a great challenge thus I realize that I have to revise my teaching practices to design an effective learning - teaching process (What to teach, how to teach). Definitely not easy!

Evaluation guided by criteria

Clearly, criteria is a key issue when evaluating, thus we need to measure understanding in its different degrees in order to gather the required information on students’ learning results. To do so, we need to be “consistent and fair” (p. 172) but how? Identifying and clarifying “a set of independent variables in the performance” from the goals.

According to this, rubrics can be very useful assessment tools thus they can provide specific information about students’ tasks insights and outcomes, but what should we really evaluate: correctness or understanding? Validity can give us a clue about this because it affects rubric design.

The answer seems to be assessing understanding by clearly setting criterion to reach effective, useful and needed evidence “to ferret out the reasons behind the answers and what meaning the learner makes of the results”.

Criteria for assessment through the use of rubrics can lead us to success in the difficult task to assess learning. Being clear at this point also tells students what they should know, understand and be able to do, and for sure helps teachers to decide whether their students have in fact achieved the learning intention answering the same question from the point of view of the student: How will I know if I've achieved the learning goal?

"Thinking like an assessor".

I dare to support the authors’ arguments when they expresses that teachers are not used to thinking like assessors; they are “far more used to thinking like an activity designer or teacher” (P. 150). In other words, we usually and maybe unconsciously jump to Stage 3, i.e. design of lessons, activities, and assignments without first asking what performances and products we need to teach toward. While reading I actually realized how creative I am at the moment of design activities and assignments, but I have to admit that they do not always really assess big ideas. Let’s face it; it is hard to create true understandings and transferability. Wiggins and McTighe make teachers to reflect on three questions in order to aid in thinking like assessors:

“What kinds of evidence do we need to find hallmarks of our goals, including that of understanding? What specific characteristics in student responses, products, or performances should we examine to determine the extent to which the desired results were achieved? Does the proposed evidence enable us to infer a student’s knowledge, skill, or understanding?” (P. 150)

I like the analogy the authors use regarding seeing effective assessment as a scrapbook as opposed to a snapshot (P.152) and the use of authentic, real-world assessments that will help students transfer their understanding of material. Skills need to be practiced in order that students can perform in the authentic assessments.I have been reflecting a great deal over my own education and I have identified a few memorable assignments that I really felt demonstrated my understanding of the subject matter: those in which the situations that I had to solve where real, useful and challenging. I also found really interesting the use GRASPS (P. 157-158) in order to frame the assessment. It could be very useful at the moment of reflecting on, designing and applying any sort of activity and maybe also assessments.

The notion that we need to understand a student’s thought processes, not just check to see if the answer is correct may lead us to the real objective of assessment but what worries me it’s the issue that students use to think just about the mark especially when our educational system and schools seem to be in the same way.

Gaining Clarity in Our Goals.

“Backward design is goal directed”.

Reflecting on this statement, it seems to me that we have to focus our attention mainly on two aspects in teaching: planning and performing, from the basis of what we want to achieve as a goal. By this I’m referring to the importance of identifying the aim students are expected to reach and the tools we provide them to know how to do it and how to perform.
Not an easy task, if we realize that most of the syllabuses and teachers’ performances point to cover contents instead of highlighting the issue of setting clear means to aim that.
As teachers, we are under the pressure of responding to certain syllabus in terms of contents, but “to what extent does that syllabus give our students practice, coaching and feedback in how to apply the ideas?” (P. 59). How well are we dealing with the concept of teaching? Maybe answering these questions can give us some guidance about the way we are planning and performing our lessons and therefore the results we are gaining in all sense.

“Goals specify what students should know and be able to do”.

As we know, the main issue of the teaching - learning process is Understanding. To do so, clear aims must be set and as well as contents to cover in a certain time. But as teachers, we know that there is never enough time to accomplish this goal and “as a result, teachers are overwhelmed with aims”. But the author analyses this problem and suggests that the contents standards must be “unpacked” to identify the big ideas and core tasks contained within it. Again planning seems to be the key to the effectiveness of the process, thus key ideas, performance indicators and asks are mentioned by the author as essential points when planning and therefore performing. According to this, we must identify the big ideas (what to teach and what to learn) that connect topics and skills.


“We are obliged to make choices and frame priorities”.

As I mentioned before, we must identify Big ideas in order to achieve Understanding , and as time is a problem to cover all the author’s suggestions, we should clearly identify and classify the knowledge our students are expected to “be familiar with” in order “to perform and transfer more complex tasks” (P. 72) But, are we paying attention to such big ideas and key knowledge or are we just trying to cover the syllabuses? Are we prioritizing in our planning? Are we really concentrating on transferability?. Hard task, isn’t it?

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” - Soren Kierkegaard, Journals, 1843.

Esssential Questions:
Doorways to Understanding

“These are questions which are not answerable with finality in a brief sentence”
“Such questions when properly used, thus send all the right signals about understanding as a goal”.

According to the reading, the objective to be achieved through Essential Questions is to provoke critical thinking in our students, so they will be stimulated to come up with more questions exploring and allowing in that way the transfer process.
As I see, we must develop in our students higher abilities to face problem-solving and understanding in different settings. In fact , essential questions deal with the upper levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
We must teach our student that “education is not just about learning ‘the answer’ but about learning how to learn” (p.108)


“A teacher’ s job is not merely to teach a set of simple skills. Her job is to teach certain skills in order to develop self suffiency”.

One of the challenges we face as classroom teachers is learning to use Essential Questions to guide our students' learning experiences. Creating Essential Questions that truly give a student the opportunity to engage in the learning process is a difficult endeavor. The author has a great list of tips for using essential questions on p. 121, but one idea calls my attention. “Help students to personalize the questions. Have them share examples, personal stories, and hunches. Encourage them to bring in clippings and artifacts to help make the questions come alive” (p. 121). From my point of view, we should take into account purpose and value, strategy and tactics, and context of use of the Essential Questions provided.



“Our students need a curriculum that treats them more like potential performers than sideline observers”.

Our student aren’t really often asked to participate in it, to use what they know or think about what they’re learning beyond regurgitating for a test! I really think we have to make our classes challenging in order to make our students think about things in new ways. What we need to do, then, is step back and see whether we have created a class based on “an unending stream of leading questions” (p.122).We sometimes send students the message that getting through the content is more important than their own questions. We have trained students that not to know something and be curious about it is risky but we have to give them the possibility to go beyond the knowledge level of learning and react to thought-provoking questions in order to stimulate discussion, debate, dissent, and research.

What does “understand” something really mean?

I want to examine the issue of understanding as complex phenomena and as a different matter of knowing any particular subject.

Reading about how to play an instrument doesn’t mean you then know how to play the instrument. So what does it mean to understand something? This is a difficult question, and I am not particularly confident of my answer to it. But I can give my view on it according to the reading “Understanding understanding”. It seems to me that understanding something means "seeing" or having insight into how it "works", and that what one knows describes part of that insight, but more importantly, it derives from that insight. This means when teachers are trying to teach a topic for understanding, they need to do more than to try to get students to learn particular propositions. They need to try to get students to have the insights and perspectives those propositions try to convey and from which they derive. That is a more difficult task in many cases than is simply getting students to memorize or know a set of particular statements. I dare to say that it is an art, and it takes methods for discovering what students are both "seeing" and not "seeing" about the subject. To achieve this goal, teachers must try to unleash the student's powers of insight or to focus it on some aspect of the phenomena that is causing the stumbling block. Strategies to teach understanding to individuals work when the teacher says or does enough different things in teaching so that each student's power of understanding will be fostered. For instance, a good lesson can stimulate thinking and focus it in particular ways. Therefore, teaching for understanding, it is the focused stimulation of thinking that is important. According to this, my feeling is that understanding some subject means you know and apply some information becoming meaningful, i.e people have to learn in order to understand.

In summary, to get the understanding as we teachers want, we need to put understanding up front our lessons. And that means putting thoughtful engagement in performances of understanding up front!.