Alignment and Backwards Design

Alignment & Backwards Design

One thing that could be addressed more often in teacher education is the importance of instructional alignment when planning lessons. Specifically, aligning assessments and activities to learning objectives / outcomes. Alignment is often taught implicitly, through modeling or having student teachers apply selected teaching strategies that demonstrate best practices in lesson planning.

Backwards design, instructional design

The first time alignment was explicitly introduced to me was after I stopped teaching and took a course called Instructional Design through the University of Houston's Learning, Design, and Technology program. I was assigned a book called The Systematic Design of Instruction by Walter Dick, Lou Carey, and James O. Carey to use with course activities and in planning my capstone project. The Dick and Carey model is a backwards-- instructional design model that is very detailed compared to other models out there. As I shifted to working in instructional design and educational technology, I learned more about different instructional design models, but most build on this backwards approach.



Why is this important?

Alignment shows that your assessments correlate to your goals and objectives, specifically standards decided by your state if you are in K-12. In higher education, it's similar-- except instructors themselves are the ones who outline the course goals. Backwards design helps to focus, stop, and ask yourself whether doing an activity actually reinforces the objectives and prepares students for the assessment. This is especially important in online course design where it is easy to throw in an extra reading or video that may not be necessary for learners.

How do I do it?

Traditional design

Traditionally, teachers decide on content, then derive activities and assessments based on the content in mind. This is the approach that I often see in higher education, and it was also my approach my first year of teaching. In order to make sure that your teaching and learning plan is aligned, best practices in instructional design says you should begin with your goals and objectives at the forefront, select your assessments, and lastly, decide on the learning activities. This concept is called backwards design, a term introduced by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins in their book, Understanding By Design.

In contrast, forward design is when you decide on learning activities first, assessments next, and review the objectives last. In those cases, you might find that the activities may not directly support the desired outcome, or that your test did not accurately measure what was intended.

Backwards design model

Backwards design supports the planning of:
  1. assessments that measure the desired outcomes
  2. activities that lead to desired outcomes

What does backwards design look like in K-12?

From what I've seen, many teachers use backwards design in K-12. It all starts with lesson planning with your curriculum. Although writing lesson plans can feel like a time consumer, it is a way to self check that what you are doing leads to students accomplishing the learning objectives.

For example, in my past district I was expected to download and use the district curriculum at the beginning of the school year. From what I can remember, its format began with the the state standards which include broad goals and specific objectives, key ideas, example test questions, and suggested activities. Curriculum varied by district but is always based on the state standards. Using the standards, I designed assessments and learning activities.

Revising instruction

Assessment is an on-going process in K-12 in an effort to personalize instruction. In regular grade-level meetings with my school principal, teachers were required to present data analysis on how students performed on benchmark assessments. The analysis included an overview of class and individual performance based on question numbers, the objectives, what students had correct or missed, how many missed what, and whether or not the objective needed to be revisited as a whole group, in small groups, or individually. Lesson plans and group activities were planned based on ongoing analysis. This felt like overkill, but it enhanced instructional alignment.


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When I adjuncted for a college online course, I caught myself forgetting the principle of alignment like it was my first year teaching third grade again! I kept putting in an extra video or reading and expanding the course content, but those extras could have been optional or taken out entirely 😅. Recently, I was refreshed on the importance of learning objectives because I am in the process of designing a course about best practices in teaching online.

I've found that thinking about alignment by keeping objectives at the forefront has really helped me stay focused when planning learning experiences. I hope that reading about this concept here or elsewhere will help you, too.

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