Teaching for Understanding: Backwards Design?



My first experience as a teacher, by myself in front of a classroom, was leading tutorial groups for a large university freshman history class. I was given the material that would be covered in each lecture, but no guidance on what I was supposed to do with it in my individual sections. I didn’t know what I was supposed to get these students to do, compared to what they were already doing in the larger lecture meetings. This really showed in my planning, or lack thereof. I would set up activities or simply cover in more detail some of the material I thought was most relevant, but I really had no clear expectations for what the students would actually gain from their time with me. As the semester wore on and I gained a better understanding of where the lecture was failing my students and what they needed from me, I was better able to articulate my goals to myself and produce more effective tutorial sessions.

Reading Wiggins and McTighie (2008), I realize had I stumbled haphazardly into something at least resembling the process of backwards design. I had to figure out what success meant before I could help my students achieve that. In this particular case I figured out that what we really needed to do as a group was focus on our writing and work to create strong, well argued essays. After establishing that as my goal, I planned activities, workshops, and discussions centered exclusively around the process of writing, and saved any focus on content for when it was explicitly requested by the students and during exam preparation. Looking back, I think what Wiggins and McTighie (2008) describe as purposeful task analysis, identifying the desired results, figuring out criteria for mastery and then planning instructional time accordingly seems like a no brainer. However, when I was thrust in front of a class of 20 students with no experience and a handful of content, establishing explicitly articulated goals was the last thing on my mind.

Looking at the big picture of design approach as described by Wiggins and McTighie (2008), I think I was looking at what was worthy of knowing (ie. what would be on the test) without taking that important step towards what was worthy of understanding. I also never even dealt with how to determine and evaluate evidence of knowing and understanding. I assumed that could all be left to the exams assigned in the main lecture. It is no wonder that, in those first few weeks, quite a few students left my tutorials, never showing up again. I knew them only from their essays and their test scores. Their successes were in no part due to me. Their failures, however, were at least in part on my shoulders for failing to engage them in those critical first hours.

I think that as I have matured as an instructor, my own instincts have taken me in a path much in alignment with the notion of problematizing seemingly unproblematic knowledge. I found it much more valuable to focus on very tight ideas, some that might even be completely divorced from the content such as how to structure an argument, that when they clicked with the students it opened up a whole cache of knowledge that may have previously seemed inaccessible.


This sort of focus could be problematic in schools where students are meant to progress through a specific set of standards at a specific pace, and many of those standards might be the consumption, but know assimilation of content knowledge. When teacher performance is rated on how quickly students can cover knowledge, I don’t know how feasible it is for newly hired and precariously positioned teachers to really teach for understanding. I hope I am completely incorrect on this pessimistic assumption, and it is something I will look to as I work my towards my eventual licensure. As a teaching assistant, I was able to focus on whatever specific needs my students had, because they would be receiving the content regardless, and I was not held responsible for their failure to achieve in that regards. When both sides of the equation are completely dependent upon my choices, it is something I hope I am able to balance.

I think my most enduring understanding from this reading is the need to constantly maintain an awareness of what my objectives with any lesson are, and to have these clearly articulated both for myself and my students. It is a major failing of "learning by observing" in the profession of teaching that, as a student, one is rarely if ever exposed to the inner workings of a lesson plan. At least while I was growing up, teachers did not share their reasoning behind lessons. They were just things we did. When I first began to plan my own classes, it was not intuitive to me that I should have some grand plan beyond simply infusing my students with the knowledge I poured over them. The phrase "purposeful task analysis" as a synonym for lesson planning is one that will definitely stick with me and has already impacted my approach to teaching.

Comments

  1. AnonymousAugust 27, 2017 at 8:24 AM

    I agree this focus might be problematic in schools so focused on standards, where "saying the right things, in the right ways" is how they measure learning (Kumashiro 21). The pressure of that is sure to erase the teacher's desire to continually check for understanding. I know I was raised to be this type of robot, I am just now learning for understanding. Whereas in my HS years I was proficient in spitting out the "right answer" simply because I learned how the system worked and what it wanted me to do and say. I think being aware of the 'why' in lesson planning is also important, however our why needs to extend beyond "because it will meet x and x standard" we need to also include how our lesson will grow students as people

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  2. Abby BTAugust 27, 2017 at 9:34 AM

    Ethan,
    I appreciate that you shared your experiences in leading an undergraduate tutorial--conscientious pedagogy can be missing in higher ed, and you give a perfect example of the effects this can have on students. In terms of your concerns about schools and requirements to progress through certain standards at a certain pace--in my experience, this is where English as an isolated discipline has some advantages over other subject areas. Our standards are generally broad in scope, like write a convincing argument or analyze a text, which gives teachers a bit more freedom in giving our students what they need/want.

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