Backwards Planning

The following post was made for the week 3 discussion for EDLD 5368-Instructional Design.

I began my career after college in the Army, and one of the major timesaving planning techniques we learned was backwards planning. Backwards planning is a six step process: Identify the Critical Event; Identify all Preliminary Actions; Arrange the Preliminary Actions in Chronological Order; Estimate the Time Needed for Each Action; Scheduled the Critical Event First, and then Schedule the Preliminary Actions; and Check for Feasiility. I try to use backwards planning in just about every major life event, so I found this concept incredibly easy to wrap my head around.

That being said, I've only ever had one school teacher utilize anything similar to this. I grew up in a small town and had my dad for junior high history. He used to teach his classes from the end of the book first, going backward to the first chapters. This with the thought that the most relevant history for the students happened yesterday. They just needed to know what happened to make yesterday why it was the way it was. Once that was covered, students would be more apt to want to learn more about successive times in history working backwards. I realize this wasn't single lesson design, but it was close.

As for me, I would most likely design lessons like everyone else would design a lesson...learn the standards, assess the weaknesses, write a plan to teach the standards and reinforce the weaknesses, assess, rinse, repeat, etc. As Wiggins and McTighe point out: "more pointedly, how will we ever meet content standards or arrive at hard-won student understandings unless we think through what those goals imply for the learner’s activities and achievements?" Now, see step two from the Army backwards planning process. These two methods are obviously related in that visualizing the activities is the key component of backwards planning.

Describe Backward Planning. (n.d.) General Dennis J. Reimer Training and Doctrine Digital Library. Retrieved April 29, 2010 from https://rdl.train.army.mil/soldierPortal/atia/adlsc/view/public/9092-1/accp/is8700/lsn1obj4.html

Wiggins, Grant. Understanding by Design (Expanded Second Edition). Alexandria, VA, USA: Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 2005. p 14. Retrieved April 29 from http://site.ebrary.com/lib/lamar/Doc?id=10081770&ppg=26