Backward Design from a Student's Perspective

As a student who has taken a countless number of classes, lessons which often fell into the category of Wiggins's and McTighe's "twin sins": either "hands-on without being minds-on" or "coverage," I think the idea of backward design is not only refreshing but also frustrating. While it seems logical to start creating a lesson plan by deciding what students need to know -- isn't that the purpose of teaching after all? -- backward design really is counterintuitive. I have never taught a class, but it seems like the process of backward design would be too time consuming to use every day, especially after examining those design templates. Aside from the amount of work involved, another challenge I found was actually creating what I wanted to students to know, an obstacle which also happens to be ultimate goal of teaching. How do we decide what students will find enduring or not? Beyond that, how can we possibly assess it? We can assign projects/exams/papers to gauge the students' understanding, but how is that different from forward design? How do we know students will continue to use these desired results in later classes when we only have them for a semester?

While these questions are hard to answer, I think as educators (or future educators) we need to continue to consider them because undergraduate students aren't leaving San Francisco State with enough enduring, transferable skills. In an orientation I had a few weeks ago, I learned that the WAC/WID (Writing Across the Curriculum / Writing in the Disciplines) programs will be eventually replacing the JEPET -- in part because Bay Area companies were complaining that the SFSU graduates they hired couldn't write effectively. While these students had passed the JEPET, a test that is supposed to assess their ability to write academically, they weren't able to transfer their knowledge from the classroom into performance at work. It seems like the purpose of WAC and WID is to give students the context they need to apply writing skills to their areas of interest and hopefully their future jobs. While I'm glad these programs are being implemented, I can't help but wonder how English classes, not only composition but also literature, can assist students in acquiring more of these transferable skills, preventing a large-scale problem like this from happening again.