I’ve never been a fan of backwards design, learning objectives, or outcomes. Humans are idiosyncratic. You can’t plan for someone else’s learning. What you can plan for is how you’ll respond when someone surprises you.
Traditional approaches to backwards design start with the questions, “what do I want students to know or be able to do? how will I measure whether they know or can do those things by the end of a course?” The course is structured to bring students to that moment of measurement.
This sounds a lot like the “banking model” of education, which Paulo Freire critiques, the idea that there is content or skills in a teacher’s brain that can (or should) be delivered into a student’s brain. Backwards design flips how that work is structured.
I’d argue we should start by talking to students, asking, “what do you know? what are your goals? how will you know when you get there? what do you need to be successful? what challenges do you face?”
Where I’ve seen it implemented, talk of backwards design is often done presumptively before students have arrived on the scene. That is what I’m critiquing. I’m a fan of talking about trajectories with students, directions we’ll point ourselves in, course-correcting as we go.
And I have no issues with structure. Students struggle when they worry a rug might be pulled out from under them. Dialogue helps. It’s easier to improvise and experiment when the ground feels stable beneath our feet. But the ground doesn’t have to tell us what to do on it.
Ultimately, different students learn in different ways at different times. And teachers are also idiosyncratic, which means different approaches work for different teachers in different ways at different times.
My biggest issue with stuff like learning objectives, outcomes, or backwards design is the way they have been uncritically adopted and universalized at many institutions. I’d say the same about scaffolding, Bloom’s Taxonomy, learning styles, or Quality Matters.
Even if and when these are completely debunked, people and institutions cling to them. See the data about continued belief in learning styles in this piece: jessestommel.com/not-taking-bad…
I share some thoughts on scaffolding in this piece. (Spoiler: even if I find the origins of scaffolding very suspect, I know lots of individual teachers who talk about and implement scaffolding in useful ways. I’d say the same about backwards design.) aaup.org/article/human-…
What would it look like to design adaptively, to listen more intently, to reimagine our teaching as a creative act we take up together with students? aaup.org/article/human-…
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