Backwards Design

When my daughter, Colleen, is 25 she will email me a picture of herself on a beach South of Barcelona.  She will be pointing at a pod of dolphins splashing in the sandy shallows of the brilliant blue Mediterranean.  The email will also include a link to a news article about her boss at some European Union summit.  There will be a snapshot of two official-looking older people shaking hands and smiling at the camera.  Colleen will be in the background, smartly dressed and holding a briefcase.  She will be staring at the gilded wainscoting with her mouth slightly open.  I will laugh at the picture.  I will also be slightly annoyed that she won't make it home for Christmas.

My three children; Colleen 14, Morgan 4, & Quinn almost 2

Colleen is currently fourteen years old and a freshman in highschool.  I have 10 ½ years to get her from our little town in Alaska to where I want to see her when she’s 25.  3 ½ really as there won't be a whole lot I can do to influence her decisions after she graduates from high school.  Other than hope that everything I've taught her has sunk in.

In education this idea of getting your kids where you want to see them is called “backwards design.”  Rather than plugging along at the curriculum, doing what you think you ought to be doing, then testing on the material that you've covered, you decide your objective first.  What do you want your kids to know or, more importantly, what do you want your kids to be able to do? After you've decided your objective, you decide how you will assess or test whether or not your kids can do what you want them to do.  Then you figure out how to get them to that point.

Pile of building materials that randomly & holistically morphed into a 5 room, 32x20, 2-story addition to our home.  Not.

Think about this in terms of building a house.  One does not start with a pile of materials and begin randomly hammering & sawing, hoping for the best.  If that technique is used, one can imagine that a significant amount of time would be spent fixing problems that you, yourself created through lack of foresight.  Believe me, I’m in the process of building a house, I know.  The smart (and usual) way to go about constructing something is to plan first, then draw up your materials list, then begin, using your plans, measuring twice before cutting.

Throughout my teaching residency at a local high school, I followed the backwards design rule religiously.  I'm became a whiz at looking up national, state, Common Core, cultural, and district standards to figure out how to decide what my kids needed to do/know.  Then I dug through the internet and my methods text to decide how they could prove to me that I had been successful in my teaching.  Only then did I design the series of lessons/steps to get us to where we needed to be by the end of the unit.

Keeping in mind that most educators have invested the same amount of time and money into their own education as your average doctor or lawyer and, therefore, have some level of expertise in their field which should be acknowledged if not respected; parents, ultimately, know what is best for their kids

Backwards design works as well in parenting as it does in teaching.  Ask yourself, “Where do I want my kid to be in 10 years, 20, 30?”  “How do I want them to live?”  “What opportunities do I want them to have?”  Of COURSE you can’t plan your kids’ life out to the last detail but using the “they will rebel and do what they want anyway” line is something of a cop-out.

I know it’s hard.  Who can see the future?  But aside from being good, moral, compassionate individuals, your kids are going to need to know a lot more than how to tie their shoes.  So get to it.