By Zalino Bona
First, I need to identify:
How these two processes
helped me understand the standards:
References:
One of the
most important activities of a teacher is translating a standard into learning
experiences. Unpacking a standard and backwards mapping help a teacher to do
this.
Unpacking a standard is the process of translating a
standard into lessons. Unpacking a standard helps me, the teacher, to be clear
about what the standard means. First, I need to identify:
-
What
students need to know
-
What
they need to do to demonstrate that they are meeting the standards.
I need to
pay attention to:
Nouns: They help me to identify the
concepts (character, plot, setting)
Verbs: They help me to identify the tasks
(explain, compare, analyze)
Identifying
the concepts and tasks help me to know what and how I need to teach the
standards.
Big Ideas and Essential Questions: The big ideas are core concepts or
principles. Identifying the big ideas helps me to know what is important and
what I should focus on. Essential questions help me to think about those ideas.
For example, a big idea in a fourth-grade reading class could be: Writers use
diagrams to help readers understand important ideas. The essential questions could
be: How do readers figure out what the diagrams mean? How do readers know what is important?
Backwards Mapping is basically a three-step process
of creating a lesson plan by starting with the end/goals in mind. First, I need
to identify what the desired goals are: what I want my students to know and be
able to do. Next, I will decide how I will know when students meet those goals,
and plan relevant instructional activities which will help students to reach the desired goals.
Learning
about ‘unpacking a standard’ helped me to understand the process of translating
a standard into a lesson. Identifying the nouns and verbs helps me to break down
the standard into manageable pieces: what students need to know and do to
meet the standard. Knowing how to translate a standard into a lesson helps
me to be clear about what I need to teach and to design activities that will
help students to accomplish the learning goals.
‘Backwards
Design’ helped me to see the importance of having clear and specific goals. It
helps me to think about what I should look at first; what I want to see at the
end of the unit. For example, if a fourth-grade writing literacy standard is: ‘The
student will use grade level, descriptive
vocabulary words,’ at the end of the unit, I will look for evidence of
descriptive words in the student’s writing. To help the student get to that
level, I need to plan lessons and activities which will help the student to
learn descriptive words at grade level and to use those words in his/her
writing.
Backwards
mapping makes a lot of sense to me because it helps me to focus on what’s
important. It pushes me to think more deeply about my lessons. While developing lesson plans, I need to be asking questions like: What is the goal of this unit? What
should I do to help my students reach the goal? What should happen in the
classroom? What skills would I need to teach? What would be the evidence that the
desired goals have been achieved?
Learning
about unpacking a standard has helped me to understand that it is important for
me to be clear about concepts and tasks that are encapsulated in a standard. Backwards
mapping helps me to think about how I would apply them in my classroom.
How is backwards mapping helpful? "We cannot say how to teach for understanding or which material and activities to use until we are quite clear about which specific understandings we are after and what such understandings look like in practice."(Wiggins and Mctighe) I think one
of the main strengths of backward mapping is that it is goal-focused. Keeping
the goal or a picture of the end design in my mind as I develop the lesson
would help me to know what I would need to focus on to help students to accomplish that goal. I
would also have a reasonably good idea about how I would assess their
performance as well as align instruction to help my students to reach that
goal.
I do have
questions about how it will be implemented in my classroom. A question that
comes to my mind is: Does this mean we may not cover all material? If we pick
and choose only what is needed to reach the desired goals, will there be gaps
in our students’ learning? When will they ever get to cover those sections that
were skipped? Will this in any way influence the outcomes of tests they are
required to take?
Backward Design. (Updated: December, 2013). Retrieved
from http://edglossary.org/backward-design/
Mctighe, Jay.
(December, 2012). Common Core Big Idea 4: Map Backward From Intended Results.
Retrieved from:
McTighe, Jay. (January, 2014). Greatest Lessons Learned. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUtzbJtS1aY
Wiggins, Grant and McTighe, Jay. (n.d.). Understanding
by Design: Backward Design. Retrieved from
.
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