Backward Design



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Step 1:

Identifying Themes, Enduring Understandings, & Essential Questions

Theme(s): As English teachers, how often have we designed our units around a particular text that we are teaching? This fact is evidenced by the language of our conversations, “I’m in the middle of my Huck Finn unit right now; what are you doing?” “I just started my unit on The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien.” Backward Design shifts us into thinking about theme-driven units as opposed to a text-driven units. This opens up a unit considerably so that we can take a multi-genre approach and use a variety of texts to gain multiple perspectives on the questions associated with the theme. This necessitates that we move away from a genre approach to teaching English toward a curriculum that focuses on the “big ideas and questions” that will engage students and will help them to see the relevance of the study of literature and language. Thus, our conversation might be, “I’m in the middle of a unit on Social Justice; what are you doing?” “I’m just starting a unit exploring the complexities of War.” While our budgets and our bookrooms may govern some of the choices of our “anchor texts,” these realities need not limit the breadth, depth and scope of the approach we take to design units that promote active critical inquiry.

Enduring Understandings: Knowledge and understanding are both central to learning. However, knowledge and understanding are not the same thing. To know the characters in a novel is very different from understanding how the characters change in the face of conflicts or obstacles. How do we move students beyond mere knowledge to enduring understandings?

In their book, Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe assert that there are six facets of understanding. According to Wiggins and McTighe, we truly understand when we:

Can Explain: provide thorough, supportable and justifiable accounts of phenomena, facts and data
Can Interpret: tell meaningful stories; offer apt translations; provide a revealing historical or personal dimension to ideas and events
Can Apply: effectively use and adapt what we know in diverse contexts
Have perspective: see and hear points of view through critical eyes and ears; see the big picture
Can empathize: find value in what others might find odd, alien, or implausible; perceive sensitively on the basis of prior direct experience
Have self-knowledge: perceive the personal style, prejudices, projections, and habits of mind that both shape and impede our own understanding; aware of what we do not understand and why understanding is so hard.

These facets of understanding can help teachers identify the enduring understandings that students will think deeply about throughout the unit. In the case of the theme of conflict and change, these might include:

Conflict and change are an unavoidable part of the human experience
How a person faces conflict reveals the nature of his/her character
Conflict can be an agent for positive or negative change
A person's point of view affects how they deal with conflict or change

Essential Questions: After you identify the enduring understandings for your unit, you then develop your essential questions. These questions are geared to help students take an inquiry approach toward the various learning experiences you will design. Look at your list of enduring understandings and develop 1-3 essential questions that cover all of them. You may have one “overarching” essential question or a series of related questions that will cover the full range of your enduring understandings. Good essential questions have the following criteria in common:

Open-ended questions that resist a simple or single right answer
Deliberately thought-provoking, counterintuitive, and/or controversial
Require students to draw upon content knowledge and personal experience
Can be revisited throughout the unit to engage students in evolving dialogue and debate
Lead to other essential questions posed by students

Overarching Essential Question:
What is the relationship between conflict and change?

Facets	Related Essential Questions
Explanation	How does conflict lead to change?
Interpretation	How does conflict influence a person's decisions and actions?
Application	What problem-solving strategies can people use to manage conflict and change?
Perspective	How does a person's point of view affect how they deal with conflict or change?
Empathy	How might it feel to live through a conflict that disrupts your way of life?
Self-knowledge	What personal qualities have helped you to deal with conflict and change?