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Read Chapter 1: Surfacing Backward Design from Small Teaching Online. Come to the next session ready to apply backward design to creating your open pedagogy assignment.
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Comment Below
Consider the following questions and post responses as a comment below:
- How can you use backward design to create your open pedagogy assignment? Other learning experiences in your courses?
- Think about possible open pedagogy assignments you are considering. Describe how each assignment you might design relates to “Where do we want to go?” (described in the chapter above).
Bonus
If you have time and interest, here is a podcast episode interviewing the author of Small Teaching Online, Flower Darby.
5 thoughts on “Backward Design (Open Pedagogy)”
Teaching at BMCC has made me hyperaware of the need for backward design, although I’ve never thought of it in those terms before. The issue for me is that students seem to have a very difficult time seeing the process as cumulative rather than radically modular. The key must be to balance the overall learning objectives with the bite-sized chunks. How does STEM do it? (If they do.) Even when I take the advice of providing more clear assessment opportunities earlier, that seems to scare folks away. Has anyone had luck doing a class where you’re simply adding to or editing a few basic projects? I seem to be drifting in this direction naturally, and ideally, I would like to find productive ways for students to pursue fairly different projects without being overwhelmed (Right now I just have a growing list of what worked and what didn’t, with specific reasons noted). I can also imagine incorporating gamification, which I have completely shunned in the past, if I can figure out a way to make it a more-or-less universal symbol of progressing from stage to stage of a creative application project.
Using these frameworks as a way of revamping my public speaking course seems clear, with the presentations themselves the clear cumulative projects. It means having more steps, and stages toward the final speech.
For my Intro COM course, it is less clear. However, I would like it if the students could ask and answer specific questions (perhaps as a group) and build the syllabus around these. I would ideally have more modules on hand than would be needed, so I could switch them out depending on the class interests. The first few weeks would have to be redesigned for maximum efficiency: how does one foster a space in which students are free to discover their nascent opportunities for relevant engagement?
This reading expresses so well how important backward design is. I identify with the teacher who is improvising and getting by class by class, but I find that even when I plan every class down to five minute increments, sometimes I lose sight of the end goal. When I see that students are unenthused by a reading or exercise, I sometimes add an experimental activity, and then I am faced with the dreaded question, “Why are we doing this? How does it relate to the current assignment?”
Every semester, I become more aware of the importance of defining the overall purpose of the class, and the smaller purpose of each class. Each class has a list of CLO’s written into the syllabus, and they aren’t always student or even teacher-friendly. Here is an example of a CLO for one of my English classes: “Engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond.” These are excellent and well planned goals, but defining how they relate to our writing assignments is another thing.
I usually spend some time discussing the course learning outcomes with the students, asking them to paraphrase the CLO’s and to talk about how our assignments will address them, and I ask for suggestions for in-class activities that could help. I have received some good suggestions, but I still get the impression from the students that their main CLO is to get an A or at least to pass. A few students enjoy reading or writing, but mostly they want to get through this to get to the next thing: getting their degree and getting a better job and making more money. So much of what we do is centered around economics. I wish that I could put back a bit more of the freedom that students of my generation had to study because we loved learning, or were passionate about writing or art or science.
As an example, for English Composition classes, the main goals are:
being able to analyze texts
being able to compose thesis-driven essays using examples
using a consistent recognized format (MLA) for citations and structure
For English Composition, we have three in-class essays, and one final essay exam. As we work through these assignments, it often becomes a race against time for the students to finish all the work. To really address the course learning outcomes, it might be better to aim for less finished work, and spend more time brainstorming, reviewing, revising, and talking about the work the students do. If they can write one good paragraph, and even one fabulous sentence, they can feel a sense of accomplishment and understand something about the magic of being able to share an idea or feeling using words.
I’ve just realized the prompt says “One thought on “Backward Design”.”
My one thought is how important it is to make every class count toward the main goals of the class, and to make sure I can explain the reasons why we are doing everything!
Reflecting on the material given above, backward design can become a very useful strategy in creating effective learning experiences, and, more specifically so, open pedagogy assignments. By clearly defining the learning outcomes or objectives I want to achieve, what kind of knowledges, skills and competencies I would like to see my students acquiring or demonstrating, it seems like I have been practicing for the most part backward design in my teaching without necessarily realizing I am implementing this principle. Surely the models explained in “Small Teaching Online” provide support and guidance with OER assignments in mind.
I find particularly useful the simple structure the authors suggest: 1) Here’s what I want to do, 2) Here’s why I want to do it, and 3) Here’s how to do it. Most importantly, gathering feedback from students, as the authors recommend, and reflecting on what worked well and what could be improved could be the most valuable feedback to refine learning objectives and assignments. This looking back-looking ahead approach is highly cogent in terms of highlighting backward design and its benefits to align desired learning outcomes while embracing the principles of open education.
Stefanos I second your post as you took the words right out of my mouth for designing content for my courses. Thank you for your post.
“I find particularly useful the simple structure the authors suggest: 1) Here’s what I want to do, 2) Here’s why I want to do it, and 3) Here’s how to do it. Most importantly, gathering feedback from students, as the authors recommend, and reflecting on what worked well and what could be improved could be the most valuable feedback to refine learning objectives and assignments. This looking back-looking ahead approach is highly cogent in terms of highlighting backward design and its benefits to align desired learning outcomes while embracing the principles of open education.”
I enjoyed the reading, especially because I feel I already incorporated many of the suggested ideas for example the bullet points for each week/module goes, small steps assignment building up towards midterm and final. I understand how important it is for online courses. I teach in person and even though all modules of instruction follow a similar format to the one in the article, I still struggle with students thinking on their own and generating original ideas. I enjoyed the reading, however, it is geared towards helping students be clear on what, why, and how, when I am very focused on helping my students think on their own, coming up with topics, issues, and arguments based on their own experiences and interests. Most of the time I go back to the inquiry method of asking them the questions, what, why, and how. I admit I do it mostly in person during class discussions, however, I think the backward design should consider mind-exploring questions for the students to answer as well. These questions should not be part of the metadiscourse to the subject, however, on specific topics and issues relevant to students and the community. I would like some help with that.