Backwards Design

Backwards Design involves planning a lesson backwards or looking at the assessment first rather than how you are going to teach it.  Majority of my college courses focused on this so when I started this program, I found the aspects of backwards design quite easy.

It makes complete sense to have the assessment piece first, so that as teachers we can know exactly what we are going to assess our students on and what we want them to know.  I feel that backwards design is really becoming a part of the daily routine at my school being that we are using a standards based report card for the first time this year.  Because of this change, we need to have assessments that correlate directly with our report card and we are in the process of creating common assessments in all subject matters.  With this process and having all of our assessments designated for each subject area, we are using the assessments to plan our instruction and how we are going to teach it.  This process makes so much sense and I can't imagine how to teach without backwards design.