Curriculum Academic Plan and Backward Design curriculum

What is curriculum as an academic plan?

The intention of any academic plan is to foster students’ academic development, and a plan,
therefore, should be designed with a given group of students and learning objectives in mind.
This focus compels course and program planners to put students’ educational needs, rather than
subject matter, first. The term “plan” communicates in familiar terms the kind of informal
development process recognized by a broad range of faculty members across academic fields.

Elements of an academic plan

Thinking of curriculum as a plan encourages consideration of all of the major elements, rather
than attention to singular aspects such as specific content or particular instructional strategies.

1. PURPOSES: knowledge, skills, and attitudes to be learned

2. CONTENT: subject matter selected to convey specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes
3. SEQUENCE: an arrangement of the subject matter and experiences intended to lead to
specific outcomes for learners
4. LEARNERS: how the plan will address a specific group of learners
5. INSTRUCTIONAL PROCESSES: the instructional activities by which learning may be
achieved
6. INSTRUCTIONAL RESOURCES: the materials and settings to be used in the learning
process
7. EVALUATION: the strategies used to determine whether decisions about the elements of the
academic plan are optimal
8. ADJUSTMENT: enhancements to the plan based on experience and evaluation

What are the advantages of Academic Plan Model

 Promotes clarity about influences on the curriculum. As an academic plan is

developed, educators are subjected to influences from many quarters. Both planning and
implementation occur in a specific context composed of influences from inside and
outside the institution. Once these contextual influences are recognized, faculty and
administrators can assess how the context will or does affect academic plans. Awareness
of this educational environment is important if meaningful plans are to be constructed
and enhanced over time. Any comprehensive model of academic planning must identify
the influences within the sociocultural and historical context to be recognized and
accommodated.

 Helps separate facilitators and constraints from educational assumptions. When

curriculum is viewed as a plan, faculty and administrators can recognize both facilitators
and constraints for what they are, rather than confusing them with basic assumptions.
This recognition is particularly useful in separating instructional process decisions based
 on constraints due to materials, settings, and structure from the decisions about desired
educational outcomes.

 Focuses attention on decisions to be made. In distinguishing the plan from the process
of planning, we focus attention on the decisions being made rather than the content of
those decisions.

 Guides planning at the lesson, course, program, and college levels. The definition of
curriculum as an academic plan is applicable at all levels. A plan can be constructed for a
single lesson or module, for a single course, for groups of courses (usually called
programs or majors), and for a college or university as a whole. Defining curriculum as a
plan urges faculty and administrators to consider the consistency and integrity of plans
within and among these various levels.

 Encourages explicit attention to student learning. The definition of curriculum as an

academic plan is consistent with current understandings of student learning. Attention to
the elements of the academic plan can help faculty members understand the importance
of student needs, clarify expectations for students, encourage student engagement, and
aid assessment of student achievement by clearly specifying educational purposes,
content, and processes.

 Offers a dynamic view of curriculum development. The academic plan concept

assumes that all plans are subject to evaluation and adjustment; iterative improvements
are an expected part of practice. Evaluation is more likely to be useful — and seems less
daunting — when it is viewed as a normal and periodic process that produces results
relevant to solving particular problems. Unlike the static definition of curriculum as a set
of courses, an academic plan implies strategic decision making as conditions — student
goals, social needs, accreditation standards, resources, and so on — change.

What is backward curriculum design?

Backward design is a process that instructional designers use to build learning experiences
around specific learning goals. When following a backward design process, instructional
designers set learner goals, or outcomes, before choosing instructional methods and forms of
assessment.

Backward design is a strategy instructors can use to maximize the likelihood that students
achieve the desired goals for the course. Imagine instruction is like archery. The teaching
strategies and instructional materials are bow and arrows, and what we want students to get out
of the course is the target. Backward design helps make sure the arrows are actually aimed at the
target. When instructors design their teaching without the target in mind, they often miss the
mark.

For example, many instructors would like for their students to develop critical thinking skills. If
the entire course is mistargeted toward covering factual knowledge, students won't learn to think
critically about the facts they are learning, how those facts came to be known, how the facts
relate to one another, and how they can apply their factual knowledge in new contexts such as
the next class they take.

What is the purpose of backward design?

Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, the pioneers of the framework, hoped it would help learning
designers create a course with measurable learning objectives, assessments that accurately reflect
those objectives, and content and learning activities to help students successfully complete the
assessments and thus meet the learning objectives.

2. How is backward design different than traditional curriculum design?

Backward design challenges "traditional" methods of curriculum planning. In traditional
curriculum planning, a list of content that will be taught is created and/or selected. In backward
design, the educator starts with goals, creates or plans out assessments and finally makes lesson
plans.

TRADITIONAL LESSON DESIGN

For many years, teachers have been planning lessons and units of instruction like this:

Step 1: Identify a topic or chunk of content that needs to be covered.

Step 2: Plan a sequence of lessons to teach that content.

Step 3: Create an assessment to measure the learning that should have taken place in those
lessons.

Notice that in this approach, the assessment is created after the lessons are planned. Sometimes it
isn’t created until most of those lessons have already taken place. The assessment is kind of an
afterthought, a check to see if students were paying attention to the stuff the teacher taught them.

But what’s wrong with it? When we plan this way, we’re more likely to include content and
activities that have questionable value. When teaching the American Revolution, for example, if
our goal is just to “teach about the American Revolution,” we can throw in anything that has any
relation to that topic: a coloring page of the Boston Tea Party, a colonial flag craft project, or a
worksheet where students unscramble words like minuteman, independence, and Hancock.

This random approach creates two problems.

The first and most important problem is a lack of durable, transferable learning. One reason
so many of us don’t remember much of what we learned in school is that we learned it through
this haphazard, topic-driven approach. These random activities are taking up precious time that
could be spent on much more valuable stuff.

The other is poor student engagement. Our students know when they’re being asked to do
something pointless. If they don’t see the relevance of what they’re learning or a direct line
between the content of your course and a desirable outcome, they’ll tune it out. Sure, many
students will do what you ask anyway, because they want good grades and the benefits that come
from them. But they’re not learning.

BACKWARD DESIGN
In their book Understanding by Design, which was originally published in 1998, Grant Wiggins
and Jay McTighe introduced us to backward design, an approach to instructional planning that
starts with the end goal, then works backward from there.

Here are the steps:

Step 1: Identify what students should know and be able to do by the end of the learning cycle.

Step 2: Create an assessment to measure that learning.

Step 3: Plan a sequence of lessons that will prepare students to successfully complete the
assessment.

The difference in order is significant: Plan the assessment first, and then plan only lessons that
will contribute to student success on that assessment.

Main Elements of the Backward Design Model

1. Determine Learning Goals & Objectives

To Establish
 - What learners should know & be able to do by the end of the course
- Transfer of knowledge to other challenges
- Distinguish “Need to know” from “Nice to know”
- Clarify for students the purpose of the course content

2. Plan Assessments

That are
- Ongoing
- High & Low Stakes
- Aligned with learning goals/objectives

3. Plan Learning Activities

That
- Are minds-on & hands-on
- Encourage exploration
- Align with learning goals/objectives

3 stages of Backward Design

Stage 1 – Identify the desired results

What do you expect students to know or be able to do at the end of the class, unit, or course?

The first stage of backward design is to write learning outcomes. Bloom’s (revised) Taxonomy
(Anderson, Krathwohl, and Bloom, 2001) is very helpful in writing learning outcomes.

Stage 2 – Determining acceptable evidence

How will the students demonstrate they met the learning outcome?

Before thinking about the lessons and instruction, Wiggins and McTighe (2005) encourage instructors to
determine how they will assess student learning. Assessing a multicultural group of students require
attention to the specific characteristics of the diverse students. Some topics to consider are:

 providing clear assessment instructions

 providing examples of successful works
 determining if writing skills are part of the outcome being assessed
 being aware of cultural bias

Stage 3 – Plan learning experiences and instruction

How will students gain the knowledge and develop the skills necessary to meet the learning outcome?
Now it is time to plan the lessons, determine reading assignments, method of instruction, and other
classroom activities to support student learning. With students’ needs in mind, instructors can choose the
most appropriate methods to help their classes meet the learning outcomes.

How is the Backward Design model similar to English’s Aligned Curriculum? How is it different?

Constructive alignment involves ensuring that the learning activities and assessments are well structured
to teach and assess the intended Learning Outcomes. We must evaluate the students so as to establish
their level of understanding the learnt concepts.so the alignment is required so that we teach and assess
what we intended to achieve. Backward design is more of designing teaching methods and activities that
may be used to achieve the intended learning outcomes. It’s more like we know the intended learning
outcomes and we need to map a way on how to attain them.

Why isn’t backward design used in all curriculum design processes?

Although this approach is widely accepted, the following are criticisms of the backward design approach:
Difficulties in dealing with issues of validity and reliability. Textbooks and content standards do not
always explicitly highlight the key concepts that students should learn.