Backward Design in Practice

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As suggested in the AALE infosheet Introduction to Backward Design, the concept of backward design operates at two levels:

  • Curriculum: aligning objectives for planning, classroom teaching and assessment
  • Classroom: designing a didactic sequence of lessons (= module; scenario)

Curriculum level 🗒️

Backward design can help provide transparency and coherence to the curriculum through the alignment of planning, teaching, and assessment. Such alignment can be achieved through using CEFR descriptors to set goals, inspire learning activities and assessment tasks, and provide a basis for developing assessment criteria. Descriptors can be used in lists and checklists to communicate aims to students and cross-reference available materials to these aims.  

To see practical examples of the way in which CEFR descriptors can be exploited to inform language course planning through backward design, read Chapter 4: Planning and teaching with the CEFR (from The CEFR in Practice: Brian North, 2014, CUP, pp. 107-120).

Classroom level 🏫

In the classroom, backward design relates mainly to the process of planning an action-oriented scenario spanning several lessons and leading up to the completion of a culminating task, which usually involves the creation of some kind of artefact, or to the planning of some other type of didactic sequence of multiple lessons. Here again the descriptors are used to define the communicative aims and students can be shown them in a ‘feedforward’ process. 

Backward planning then involves identifying the types of competences that learners will need but may well not have and to think of sub-tasks that, in a series of steps, will lead the students towards a successful completion of the culminating task:

  • Which steps/subtasks are necessary?
  • In which order should they come?
  • How long will each of them take?
  • Which relevant resources will students have at their disposal, what can they find online
  • What input will you as a teacher have to provide? When might it be better to intervene to do that?   

To finish off, watch the first 14:16 of the 18½-min video Presentation II – Scenarios on developing a scenario taken from a recent workshop. It discusses how one defines overall objectives for the scenario in terms of the task itself, and also relevant CEFR descriptors. It also shows how one develops steps towards the culminating task of the scenario.

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