Week 8 – Understanding by Design & Group Design Project

The Understanding by Design framework, sometimes called Backwards Planning or Backwards Design, is not a model in that it doesn’t provide a practical methodology for implementation. However, it does provide guidelines to help the designer or educator focus their learning activities on the outcomes that are desired. That perspective is the strength of this framework. It requires that the designer or the educator identify desired learning outcomes up front, then specify how the learner will demonstrate mastery of the outcomes. Knowing how the student will need to demonstrate mastery will provide guidance for the educator when determining what learning activities to use. It helps to focus those activities on the things that are most important.

My wife, who teaches 2nd grade, uses this approach when planning. She finds it practical and effective. The school district provides planning sheets that use the backwards planning steps and gives them CBA data that defines the expected learning outcomes as well as the assessment guidelines. This allows the educator (my wife) to focus on finding engaging activities that will result in the desired outcomes. She uses these planning sheets often and likes the process. She finds that she loses sight of the learning outcomes if she does not keep up with the backwards planning methodology. However, she said that the approach is simple enough that now she often uses it as part of her conceptual process, without actually documenting it. She has been trained to think about the outcomes before trying to design the activities.

The only weakness in the approach is one that my wife’s school district has mitigated, and that is the time required to properly implement the framework. Since this framework is particularly intended for K-12 education, teachers are going to be responsible for implementing it. Without providing design and planning guidance from the district level, most teachers would not be able to fully and effectively implement this approach as it requires time and expertise.

Our class project was interesting. I found that the place where we struggled the most was in defining the tasks to be performed and specifying what the process outcomes/deliverables were to be. In fact, the first night we really didn’t make much progress at all. However, once we organized, we were able to find consensus by making some assumptions. For example, we assumed a certain level of technology would be available and we assumed that the instructor would use our product to develop subsequent instructional modules. When time came to present, I felt like we were prepared. We each had selected the part of the plan that were to present and had all edited our part of the final presentation. My own part of the presentation had to do with product development and implementation. Ultimately, I think our design was sort of half-baked. Because of the initial disagreement about critical project requirements like deliverables and methodology, we never really got a lot of traction in the design.