“Teaching is a means to an end. Having clear goals helps to focus our planning and guide purposeful action toward the intended results”. (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005)
If teachers have clear goals and know their “audience”, they will be able to design in order to achieve those goals. However teachers should be aware of certain standards that provide useful frameworks that help to identify teaching and learning priorities, and guide the design of curriculum and assessments.
The backward design invites us to think first on the desired learning and then appropriate teaching will arise. It calls us to make our goals or standards specific and concrete, in terms of assessment evidence, as we begin to plan a unit or course. “Only by having specified the desired results can we focus on the content, methods, and activities most likely to achieve those results”. (Wiggins and McTighe, p:15) It also proposes “result oriented teaching”, to use the textbook as a tool, not the syllabus (coverage), “peer review”, sharing and discussing curriculum and assessment design with colleges and finally “design tools” like a template to support teachers and curriculum developers.
The backward design consists on three stages:
· Indentify desired results: Goals and priority.
· Determine acceptable evidence: What forms of assessment will demonstrate if the students are acquiring and understanding the knowledge.
· Plan learning experiences and instruction: Appropriate instructional activities.
If we follow the stages of the backward design our results will be coherent, and the students’ learning experiences will be as we planned.
I definitely agree with the fact that as teachers we must pay particular attention to our "audience". We certainly cannnot have the same objectives in different contexts. That is why it is important to adapt our objectives depending on our reality and make them achievable for our students.
ReplyDeleteI think that if we have clear who are the people we are dealing with and the different learning styles they have, we are going to be able to set clear objectives too so planning will be more useful and students will feel less lost, since sometimes they just don't see the point of learning a particular content or doing a specific activity, so if your planning states clear obejectives, they are going to see what we are expecting from them and will try to do their best.
ReplyDeleteI liked that part when you said "to know our audience". I think that our students are te crux in all this teaching-learning process, and according to them we are going to plan our classes...taking into account their learning styles, interests, abilities, etc. Our students are the main character when we state our objectives and we do our plannings.
ReplyDeleteThe best or the worst thing of being a teacher is that we finally get involved with many other people at work. The most important for me are students, of course. They shape the way teachers perform or plan a lesson. They are lost lambs looking for a shepherd to guide them. Every single one of them is different to the next, but we must take them all to the same place.
ReplyDeleteThe more aware we are of their learning styles; the better is our leadership, as we can use that knowledge for more different strategies to get then through the right path.