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Backward Planning documents from Laulima

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Backward Planning documents from Laulima

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Backwards Design in Lesson Planning - Model Teaching

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What is backwards design? In this article, learn the three critical steps of backwards design in lesson planning and how best to use it in the classroom.

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Exit tickets - types, analysis

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Understanding students, adapting instruction, and addressing equity

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Assess students better with criteria for success

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Assess students better with criteria for success

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If you're a teacher, you probably already write assessments each class and put an objective on the board. Are you ready to take assessment to the next level?

Criteria for success, from The Skillful Teacher by Jon Saphier, is a tool used in most, if not all, of our classrooms. It helps us take assessments and objectives and make them actionable and real to students. We get so many questions about criteria for success; I wanted to address it so other teachers can use it too. Plus if you're visiting or teaching a sample lesson with us, it's good to know.

Disclaimer - this is just an intro. Assessing students is a huge, complex topic. You should definitely pick up The Skillful Teacher if you want to hone your craft.
Learn about the Five P's
In The Skillful Teacher, Saphier explains five P's that work together to make criteria for success an effective tool in your classroom.

Public - Just like handing out a rubric at the beginning of an assignment, CFS shouldn't be a secret. Students should know exactly what's expected in their work from the beginning.

Precise - the one element that makes CFS useful to kids is that they identify specific individual qualities of mastery, rather than general principles or skills. The criteria should be written in a plain language that is kid-friendly. They should be able to read the CFS and identify if it is present or not.

Prior - Prior means it is shared when the assessment task is described at the beginning of the lesson/unit/assessment/assignment. Saphier describes how CFS helps kids. "This enables students to focus on what is important during the learning experiences and to participate in assessing whether they are building the foundations for success in the end."

Printed - The criteria should be written down for students somewhere. We post it on the board next to the objective, but it can also go at the top of handouts, the top of an assessment or the beginning of a packet for a unit assessment. For a lesson, we suggest a simple bulleted list.

Present in Models of Work - In the case of larger assignments, students should see examples of the CFS being achieved as they get started on a task. It should be present and annotated in any exemplars you use.

How it's Used
You may have used your own version of CFS already, but didn't know it. When we make rubrics as teachers, we create a type of CFS. Imagine simplifying that for kids on a daily basis.

Most of our teachers use short bullet lists or checklists to share the CFS with students. They put it on the white board next to the aim for the day and on handouts students use. Students then have it in front of them to use as a short rubric for their classwork.

Criteria for success can also come in the form of a rubric or checklist for more extensive projects. A performance task, for instance, might have a much longer list of requisite elements. You could even add it to a student work packet and have students use it to self-assess as they work.
Bring It in Your Classroom
If you want to implement this in your own classroom, you can. I suggest starting with the five P's and building from there. Here are the next steps:

1. Start with your assessment and standards. Figure out for yourself what students need to do to show mastery. If you're properly backwards planning already, you're doing this.

2. Break down the individual components of the assessment piece. Are kids writing an introductory paragraph? What exactly do they need to get 100 percent? The exact elements are the criteria for success. It may be something like:

Your first sentence contains a hook to catch your reader's attention

You summarize the background knowledge in the second 2-3 sentences

You end the paragraph with a perfect thesis statement

3. Post this bullet list next to the objective on the board and include it on the printed notes or assessments students will be using during class.

4. Review the CFS with students before getting started with the lesson (just like you would the objective)

5. Especially in the beginning, have students check off elements of the CFS they meet.

An Early Elementary Example
Ensuring all your kids get it can be this easy:

In this video, the teacher uses her clipboard to quickly check off which students "got it", or reached the criteria for success. This is also a great way to check for understanding and hold kids accountable for learning.

This is obviously an early elementary example. In later grades, students should be able to use the kid-friendly language to figure whether they mastered the objectives for themselves. You'll hold them accountable and understand student mastery through the formative assessment at the end of the lesson.

How do you set your kids up for success? Are there ways you use criteria for success I missed?

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Assess Students Better with Criteria for Success

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If you're a teacher, you probably already write assessments each class and put an objective on the board. Are you ready to take assessment to the next level? Criteria for success, from The Skillful Teacher by Jon Saphier, is a tool used in most, if not all, of our classrooms. It helps us take assessments and objectives and make them actionable and real to students.

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CFS: What are they and how to you use them?

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CFS: What are they and how to you use them?

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Many of us have probably looked at some of our curricular objectives and thought, 'What does that even mean?' In class, even though we may put the objective into student-friendly language, our kids may be having the same experience. The information we are often missing is what The Skillful Teacher calls the 'Criteria for Success.'
Your class objectives are only a goal if students can envision it.
Criteria for success let the students know what the objectives mean, what it will look like if they're successful in meeting the objective.

Once they know what success looks like, they can evaluate their own progress as they work and know if they're moving in the right direction versus simply following your directions and waiting for you to tell them if they're right or not.

When we create our criteria, we are answering the questions:

What should we look for in examining students' products or performance to know if they were successful?

What attributes should we use to judge the effectiveness of the product or performance? What counts?

If our objective is 'Explain the water cycle,' for example, our criteria for success might be:

Student explanations include the terms evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and runoff.

In the explanation, students include enough description that it's clear they know what each of the key terms means.

Student explanations are written in complete sentences and in their own words.

If your objective is more rigorous, you might include student behaviors in your criteria. For example, if students are solving complex problems and you want them to rely on grit and team work during their work, your criteria for success might include :

Students are trying multiple methods to solve the problem and are probably experiencing failure repeatedly.

When faced with failure, students are discussing what went wrong with peers in order to determine another approach to the problem

For more on incorporating this into rigorous lessons, click here.

Once you have your criteria for success articulated, you need to communicate it to your students.
To communicate your criteria for success to students you can:
Tell them. For less rigorous lesson objectives like the water cycle example above, it might be easiest to just tell students at the beginning of class what they'll need to do to be successful so they can envision it and plan for it throughout the lesson.

Show them. You might perform a short demo for students or show exemplar models of mastery in order to give students a clear picture of what success on their product or performance looks like.

Let students discover them. If you use the 'show them' method, try leaving out the explanation of what makes the model successful and have the students share what attributes made it successful. This can be particularly powerful in a writing lesson. Students might also identify the 'gritty' behaviors or examples of team work displayed in a demo to add to the criteria for success.

Use a rubric. A rubric can be particularly helpful in sharing your criteria for success and can be incorporated into any of the previous three approaches. It's important to note, though, that the rubric by itself is not the criteria for success. Students need to deeply understand the rubric through your explanations or by using it themselves to evaluate examples.

So what are you teaching tomorrow? Pull out that lesson plan and make sure you're not only telling students what the objective is but allowing them to envision their success on the task with clear criteria!

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Criteria for Success - What are they & how do you use them?

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Many of us have probably looked at some of our curricular objectives and thought, 'What does that even mean?' In class, even though we may put the objective into student-friendly language, our kids may be having the same experience. The information we are often missing is what The Skillful Teacher calls the 'Criteria for Success.'

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When I taught seventh grade language arts, one of my favorite things to teach was S.E. Hinton's book The Outsiders. Every year, we began the unit with a discussion about the cliques that formed in students' lives, how these groups interacted, the unwritten rules that governed their behavior, and what happened when groups clashed or people formed relationships across group lines. After we did some reflecting, writing, and talking, we were ready to start the book.

The reading went fine, more or less. Some chapters we did in class (I would read to them, then they would read silently), and others at home. Some students became as absorbed in the novel as I'd hoped they would; others, not so much. Predictably, some fell behind in the book like they did with all assigned reading.

I checked students' progress with occasional quizzes, we did some work on plot and characters, setting and theme, and then, after a unit test over the whole book-containing mostly questions that asked students to identify characters, setting, and key plot points-we spent nearly three class periods watching Francis Ford Coppola's movie version of the book. And I got to drool over Matt Dillon in the movie's opening scene again and again and again. From start to finish, the whole unit took about three weeks.

In retrospect, I'm not sure why it was my favorite. Seriously. I mean, even though I loved the book, my students' response to it was mostly lukewarm. Maybe it was just the idea of teaching it that I loved. Maybe it was the connections I was able to make to the stuff students dealt with on a day-to-day basis. I don't know. I taught that book a few times, and even though I looked forward to it every time, I always finished the unit a little unsatisfied.

And it's only now, years later, that I'm starting to understand that dissatisfaction: I can't say with any confidence that my students actually learned something from that unit. Upon deeper reflection, I'm not confident that any of my students learned anything of lasting value from at least half the lessons I taught.

This is a hard pill to swallow, because I wasn't half bad as a teacher. I had decent relationships with my students and I believe most of them had good experiences in my classroom, but real, durable learning? I can't say how much of that actually happened.

I don't love admitting that.

But at least now I understand why my teaching didn't produce a lot of actual learning: I never set clear, measurable learning targets.

Things would have been so different if I'd known about backward design.

When teachers talk to each other about the stuff they're teaching, they often say things like this:
"What novels do you do in 8th grade?""Oh that'll be perfect. I can use this when I teach the American Revolution!"
"I don't think I can fit that in; we're doing moon phases next month."

We tend to talk about our teaching plans in terms of the broad topics we cover. This shorthand is practical; we're not going to drill down into specific skill and knowledge objectives while waiting our turn at the bagel table. But when I think about the lessons I gave my students, the ones I observed in my colleagues' classrooms, and the work I've seen my own children do, I think this shorthand might be a pretty fair representation of what many of us are still doing: churning out lessons that keep students busy with our content without ever getting clear about what we want them to learn.

Instead of starting with a topic, we'd do better if we start with an end goal, and that's where backward design comes in.

Traditional vs. Backward Planning

Traditional Lesson Design

For many years, teachers have been planning lessons and units of instruction like this:

Step 1: Identify a topic or chunk of content that needs to be covered.

Step 2: Plan a sequence of lessons to teach that content.

Step 3: Create an assessment to measure the learning that should have taken place in those lessons.

Notice that in this approach, the assessment is created after the lessons are planned. Sometimes it isn't created until most of those lessons have already taken place. The assessment is kind of an afterthought, a check to see if students were paying attention to the stuff we taught them.

For most of my teaching career, this is how I planned. It's presumably how most of my colleagues planned. I believe it's still how many teachers plan.

So what's wrong with it? Well, when we plan this way, we're more likely to include content and activities that have questionable value. When teaching the American Revolution, for example, if our goal is just to "teach about the American Revolution," we can throw in anything that has any relation to that topic: a coloring page of the Boston Tea Party, a colonial flag craft project, or a worksheet where students unscramble words like minuteman, independence, and Hancock.

This random approach creates two problems.

The first and most important problem is a lack of durable, transferable learning. One reason so many of us don't remember much of what we learned in school is that we learned it through this haphazard, topic-driven approach. These random activities are taking up precious time that could be spent on much more valuable stuff.

The other is poor student engagement. Our students know when they're being asked to do something pointless. If they don't see the relevance of what they're learning or a direct line between the content of your course and a desirable outcome, they'll tune it out. Sure, many students will do what you ask anyway, because they want good grades and the benefits that come from them. But they're not learning. If you don't believe me, ask them.

Backward Design

In their book Understanding by Design, which was originally published in 1998, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe introduced us to backward design, an approach to instructional planning that starts with the end goal, then works backward from there. The "full" version of Wiggins and McTighe's original approach is pretty complex and can be time-consuming to implement. If you're ready for that, I recommend digging into their book. For now, though, I'm just going to share the most basic version of backward design.

Here are the steps:

Step 1: Identify what students should know and be able to do by the end of the learning cycle.

Step 2: Create an assessment to measure that learning.

Step 3: Plan a sequence of lessons that will prepare students to successfully complete the assessment.

The difference in order is significant: Plan the assessment first, then plan only lessons that will contribute to student success on that assessment.

I was first introduced to this concept in my sixth year of teaching, and the genius of it completely blew me away. I used it when planning my next unit and experienced the biggest spike in student success I'd ever seen. On top of that, I was actually excited about teaching the lessons I had planned. For the first time, it felt like none of my class was wasted; everything actually mattered. There was something a lot more satisfying about doing things this way.

Let's take a look at an example to illustrate the difference between a unit planned the traditional, topic-driven way, and the same unit planned with backward design.

Before and After: The Lunar Cycle

The Before, Where the Final Product is a Test

At some point in their school careers, students study the phases of the moon. One pretty typical way to teach this is as follows:

A lecture or video about the phases of the moon, followed by a worksheet to label the phases.

An interactive activity like scraping the filling out of Oreos to represent the lunar phases.

Following a teacher's sample, creating a physical model of the moon phases using something like styrofoam balls.

A unit test that requires labelling the phases of the moon from memory and answering multiple-choice questions about the lunar cycle, eclipses, and seasons.

In many classrooms, teachers also have students track the appearance of the moon over the course of a month, so that might be added as well.

Following this plan, a teacher would feel pretty satisfied that they "covered" the topic of moon phases. But if we look at the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), the standard relating to moon phases says that grade 6-8 students will:

" Develop and use a model of the Earth-sun-moon system to describe the cyclic patterns of lunar phases, eclipses of the sun and moon, and seasons" ( MS-ESS1-1).

Note the language here: Students are meant to develop a model, then use it to describe these patterns. But in the plan above, students merely copied a model, and they didn't use it to describe anything; even if the model required some written captioning to explain what was going on, because the model was a copy, it can't be safely said that students were really the ones describing the system.

Then there's the test. If we assume that a large portion of a student's grade is based on the test, then students are not being measured on their achievement of that standard. The standard does not require students to memorize the phases of the moon. Nor does it ask them to "demonstrate knowledge" of how the whole system works. The standard wants students to develop a model and use it to describe the system.

It would be easy to blow off this distinction, to say Bah, same difference. The test asks students a lot of questions that would show an understanding of these concepts, so we're covered.

But not really. Asking a person to develop a model is a much higher-order task than asking them to copy a model. Describing systems and patterns is way more challenging than selecting the correct description.

Developing models and explaining things is the work of real scientists: They notice phenomena, study it, then figure out how to represent those phenomena in order to make it clear to other people. To say, "Look at this! It's interesting and it explains why things are the way they are!"

And that's exactly what the NGSS authors had in mind: "Any education that focuses predominantly on the detailed products of scientific labor-the facts of science-without developing an understanding of how those facts were established or that ignores the many important applications of science in the world misrepresents science and marginalizes the importance of engineering." (National Research Council, 2012, p. 43).

In other words, a superior education will teach students to think and practice like scientists. If we don't plan learning experiences that make that possible, we're giving them a sub-par education.

The After, Where the Final Product is a Model and a Presentation

So if we re-do this unit plan with backward design, we'll need to start by developing an assessment that would measure success with that standard. That means the assessment would not be a test where students merely label the moon phases, but a student-developed model of the moon phases along with some kind of presentation where students use that model to explain lunar phases, eclipses, and seasons.

When designing this final assessment, it's essential that the teacher crafts a rubric that clearly outlines specific, high standards for both the model and presentation. The rubric should list criteria for the accuracy and functionality of the model, plus the quality of the presentation itself. Here's an example of what that might look like:

With a good rubric in place, we then work backwards to determine what lessons students need to do excellent work on the final assessment.

Direct Instruction: Students still need to know the basics of the lunar system. Memorization is not the goal, so we're not grading for that, but students do need to know the information well enough to explain it and use the right vocabulary, so we can keep the lecture or video from the original plan. And having them work with the information a bit on some kind of worksheet or with some kind of online practice is fine, but I wouldn't give points for this work. If you need to motivate students to do it, require them to demonstrate proficiency (like scoring at least 80% on the match game with a set of Quizlet flashcards) before they can move on to the next step.

Active processing with models: Next, give students a chance to work with a model so that they experience the cycle in action. This will deepen their understanding of the earth-sun-moon system, which will better prepare them to give their own presentations. Something like this interactive model from CK-12 allows students to manipulate the time of day and the position of the moon to see how these variables change what we see in the sky. Working in groups, students could use the simulator to answer questions about the moon's appearance depending on what phase it's in and the time of day, then transition into making and checking predictions based on those variables.

Presentation practice: If students are going to do well on the final presentation, they'll need practice in explaining the lunar cycle in their own words. Using an existing model (such as the interactive mentioned in the previous step), have students explain the lunar phases, including information about the seasons and eclipses, to a partner or small group. Ask the listening partners to "coach" the presenter if their description has any holes or inaccuracies. Hearing their peers explain the system, along with attempting the explanation themselves, will help them use the language of the lunar cycle more fluently.

Model development: Now students begin developing their own models. The standard does not specify that this has to be a physical model, so you could offer students choice: The model could very well be made with styrofoam balls, but it could also be a hand-drawn diagram, a slideshow presentation, an animated video, a children's book, or even a short skit they present to the class or record on video. Many of these options, like the children's book, include the "presentation" piece right along with the model. Give students time in class to work on these models; this will ensure that they do their own work and will allow you to give feedback if a student is heading in the wrong direction. Remind them regularly that the explanation of the model is nearly half their grade, so they should consider scripting that out if their presentation is going to be "live."

Model presentations: Finally, students present their models. If you have a lot of students opt to give a "live" presentation this could take several class periods, which could be pretty mind-numbing since the subject matter is exactly the same for everyone. To cut down on that overall time, only have students present to the whole class if the class is actually participating in the model (like in some sort of skit or simulation). Otherwise, students can record their presentations on video or present to you one-on-one while their classmates work on something else independently.

With this "after" version, every lesson is designed to prepare students to give excellent presentations at the end. The whole time, they are using the lunar cycle vocabulary, correcting each other's misconceptions, and just like scientists, thinking about how to explain concepts to other people.

Some Questions About Your Lessons

Okay, so we've looked very closely at one small unit for a middle school science class. Now, take this same process and apply it to the things you teach.

1. What exactly do your standards require? Do they ask students to memorize and identify facts, or do they ask them to describe, explain, analyze, or create? (It's probably the latter.)

2. If it's the latter, how closely do your assessments measure those standards? Do they actually require students to do the describing, explaining, analyzing, or creating (which would likely require them to write, present, or create some product), or do they merely ask them to recognize when someone else does it in the form of an answer on a multiple-choice test?

3. Do you need to adjust your assessments so they more closely align with the standards?

4. If you do, the next step is to rework the lessons that lead up to that assessment. Does every lesson contribute to student success on that assessment? Could some of your lessons be omitted because they don't connect directly to the assessment? Are you missing anything? For example, if your assessment requires students to write in academic language and support their ideas with evidence, you should include some lessons that give students practice with that kind of writing.

5. Finally, will the assessment be weighted heavily in your gradebook? (It should be.)The lessons and activities leading up to the final assessment are there to give students exposure to the knowledge and practice with the skills necessary to perform on that final assessment; ideally, they should receive no grades at all on those activities. If you absolutely must assign some points, be sure the final assessment is worth a heck of a lot more than those smaller tasks.

Like I did, you probably also have some favorite lessons and activities. Some of these might turn out to be not just fun to teach, but also solid in terms of equipping students with knowledge and skills that will last.

If it turns out that those favorite lessons don't really align with any standards, you might be able to revise them so they do. Or you might keep them for other reasons-not every minute of class time has to be spent on standards-based instruction. Some activities have value because they help us get to know each other better, they help students develop social-emotional skills, or they simply offer a bit of fun. But if a lesson doesn't do any of these things, if it's disguised as learning but is doing little more than keeping students busy, it's time for it to go.

Using a process like backward design helps us get better at making these decisions. By making this approach part of our regular practice, we'll be able to look back on a day, a week, or a year of teaching and say with a lot more certainty that when they were under our care, our students learned.
Reference:
National Research Council (2012). A framework for K-12 science education: Practices, crosscutting concepts, and core ideas. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/13165.

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Are we planning with clear, measurable, meaningful learning goals in to guide us, or are we just keeping students busy?

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Writing Criteria for Success from "The Skillful Teacher"

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Writing Criteria for Success from "The Skillful Teacher"

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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TLAC Guidance for Writing and Analyzing Exit Tickets

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TLAC Guidance for Writing and Analyzing Exit Tickets