Abackward design lesson plan can be an excellent way to improve your student outcomes and learning processes. If you’re an online course creator, an online tutor, or a teacher of any other type, you probably develop your lessons in the same way. You study standards, learning objectives, or profit margins, then create your lessons and learning materials based on those goals. That’s not a bad way to design a lesson in and of itself.
But in other cases, it might be wiser to use backward design lesson plans. The right backward design lesson plan may result in a better learning experience for a classroom full of students, a private client, and everyone in between. We’re going to break down what backward design lesson planning is and why you should use it.
A backward design lesson plan is one in which you start with the end goal for your students and their assessments in mind from the get-go rather than focusing on the lesson content itself.
For example, where you might normally have an objective – like your students perfecting the knit stitch, or becoming proficient in a certain programming language – you instead focus on what you will assess and create lesson plans around those future assessments instead.
Normally, or with traditional lesson planning, you focus on standards and learning objectives. Then you design your tests around those. A backward design plan is the opposite. Design your tests and assessments first, then figure out your lesson plans, then teach your students.
The result? When done well, backward design lesson plans often result in better test or assessment outcomes, which can be advantageous both for professional educators and for online teachers of all other types, like small business owners.
Now let’s take a look at how you can create backward design lesson plans of your very own.
To begin creating a backward design lesson plan, you have to create student-centric learning objectives rather than focusing on arbitrary or data-backed lesson objectives. Specifically, your objectives should include:
Basically, focus on identifying the desired results, which should be student-centered. Then your course design will have learning experiences tailored toward those learning outcomes.
Once you figure out your student-focused learning goals, you’ll be better equipped to figure out how best to test for those goals instead of the other way around. This prevents your tests and assessments from feeling useless at best and contrary or irrelevant to your students at worst.
Now it’s time to figure out how you will assess or test your students. This doesn’t have to be just a single test, of course. You might have assessment methods including but not limited to:
Depending on your class and what you teach, you may have multiple assessments throughout the course or just one at the very end. If you have just a final assessment, make sure that you model teaching tactics or learning activities toward that test as much as possible.
In any case, set your test assessment methods, then figure out what your assessments will measure in your students’ performance. At the end of this stage, you’ll know:
In theory, this will mean that every test your students take is relevant and helpful and shows them exactly what they do and do not need to do in order to pass your course.
Now it’s time to create lessons and activities for your course materials. Since you already know what your tests will be about, this should be relatively easy.
Do you have a final exam surrounding a few modules from a book or from an online class? Make sure that the exam has a section for each module so students can study the entire course’s material from start to finish.
Or are you planning on a series of oral interviews? In that case, make sure that you give your students plenty of time to write notes for your lessons so they can study them and answer you promptly and accurately come test day.
When designing lessons, ensure your instructional strategies and course design both emphasize the knowledge and skills your students need to achieve the learning goals you set/identified earlier.
Let’s take a look at backward design lesson planning in action.
Imagine that you teach fundamental algebra to high school students. In this case, you want to make sure they understand how to do basic equations. Using the backward design for your lesson plan, you begin:
Want to try it for yourself? Check out this backward design lesson plan template from Vanderbilt University.
You might wonder what the true difference is between traditional and backward design lesson plans.
Traditional design lesson plans review standards or learning objectives (which can be federal, national, or personal). Then plan instructional activities around those objectives. At the very end, they implement assessments or tests.
Unfortunately, this results in tests or assessments that don’t always reflect what the students did or learned. We’ve all experienced an unfortunate class or two where the test didn’t seem to reflect anything we had learned in lessons or course materials up until that point.
The backward design model avoids that outcome. By focusing on the end goals you want to achieve, then emphasizing assessment types and content, you ensure that your lessons will always teach students what they need to know to pass tests.
This is the same philosophy that follows many standardized tests in public schools around the country. Public school teachers will often “teach the test” by focusing primarily on what will be on federal or state standardized tests instead of other content or modules in textbooks.
There are lots of advantages to using backward design for your lesson plans. For starters, it ensures that your students will never be flabbergasted or taken by surprise by testing materials. They will never sit for a test and not know what the test is talking about or what he wants them to do.
Furthermore, backward design for your lesson plans allows you to have a better understanding of how to teach students in such a way that your objectives are achieved. For example, if you design all of your lessons backward, you’ll quickly know:
In other words, by figuring out how you want your students to end up, you’ll be better equipped and prepared to teach them the right things so they achieve those optimal outcomes. Backward design can be useful for professional educators and for anyone who teaches students, both online and in person.
As you can see, there are lots of advantages to implementing backward design lesson plans into your curriculum or teaching schedule at the earliest opportunity. Fortunately, using backward design lesson planning is easy once you make a few classes or courses with this philosophy in mind.
In no time at all, you might see improvements in the performance of your students, the quality of your classes, and the ratings of your online lessons.
Backward design in a lesson plan means starting with the end objective, such as student-focused learning goals, and designing your assessments and learning materials afterward to ensure your students achieve those objectives.
The steps of backward design include:
Nahla Davies, Nahla Davies is a software developer and tech writer. Before devoting her work full time to technical writing, she managed—among other intriguing things—to serve as a lead programmer at an Inc. 5,000 experiential branding organization whose clients include Samsung, Time Warner, Netflix, and Sony.
