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Session 1. Backward Design: Start with the End
Objective. Plan a short lesson sequence backward: state what students must be able to do, decide the evidence, and only then choose activities.
Most of us plan from the textbook page forward: read the topic, pick an exercise, add a game. It feels natural, but it can fill 45 minutes without anyone knowing what students should be able to do afterwards. Backward design asks three questions in a different order, and the order saves time. You end up with fewer activities, each with a clear job, and a simple way to see on the day whether the lesson worked.
Key ideas
Why plan backward
- Many plans start with the textbook page and the activity we like, and only later ask what students should learn.
- Backward design reverses this: first the destination, then the proof that students arrived, then the road.
- Wiggins and McTighe describe three stages: desired results, acceptable evidence, learning plan.
Stage 1: From the standard to a doable outcome
- Start from the curriculum standard and the textbook unit, and ask: what must students be able to DO at the end?
- Separate the essentials from the nice-to-know. A unit of 8 lessons usually has 2 or 3 essentials.
- Write the outcome as an action a student performs, not as a topic. 'Fractions' is a topic; 'add fractions with unlike denominators' is an outcome.
Stage 2: Decide the evidence before the activity
- Ask: what will I see or hear that proves a student can do it? A solved problem, a short explanation, a corrected error.
- Plan evidence at more than one point: a quick check mid-unit and a final task, not only the end test.
- If you cannot name the evidence, the outcome is still too vague. Go back and sharpen it.
Stage 3: Choose activities that lead to the evidence
- Now choose the explanations, practice and tasks. Keep an activity only if it moves students toward the evidence.
- The textbook is a tool, not the plan. Use the exercises that fit, skip or replace those that do not.
- Check the match: if an activity is fun but the evidence needs something else, the plan has a gap.
Backward design in three stages
Enduring outcomes versus coverage
A textbook unit contains many facts, but not all of them carry equal weight. A useful test is to ask which ideas a student would still need in a year, or in the next unit, and which can be looked up. Those that survive the test are your essential outcomes. Everything else is support or enrichment, and it can be shortened without harming learning.
This also changes how you read the textbook. Instead of asking 'what is on pages 40 to 52?', ask 'which pages help students reach the outcome, and which repeat each other?'. Skipping a repeated exercise is not skipping the curriculum; it is spending the time where it matters.
Evidence can be small
Collecting evidence does not mean writing a long exam. One well chosen task can show understanding: a problem with a short explanation, a corrected wrong answer, a table completed from a new example. The key is that the task asks students to use the idea, not only to recognise it.
Write down the evidence together with what a correct answer looks like. This 'answer sketch' takes two minutes, and it often reveals that the outcome was vaguer than you thought. It also gives you a quick way to mark and to see which part of the class needs another try.
Examples from the classroom
Fractions before Navruz
Scene. Malika teaches Grade 5 in Tashkent. The unit on adding fractions has ten pages of exercises. She asks what a student must do at the end and writes: add two fractions with different denominators and explain the common denominator. Her evidence task is to share a Navruz sweet tray between 3 and 4 family groups. Of 24 exercises, she keeps 9.
Insight. Naming the outcome and the evidence first let Malika cut exercises that did not lead there.
Cotton and the map
Scene. Aziz teaches Grade 8 geography in Fergana in a Russian-medium school. His plan was a lesson on cotton regions with a map to colour. Asked for evidence, he realises colouring does not show understanding. He changes the evidence to a short paragraph explaining why cotton grows in the Fergana Valley, using climate and water. The map becomes a working tool for the paragraph.
Insight. An activity is kept when it feeds the evidence; colouring alone did not.
A reading unit in Samarkand
Scene. Dilnoza teaches Grade 3 in an Uzbek-medium school in Samarkand. The unit has a story, vocabulary list and retelling. She decides the outcome is: retell the story in order with at least four events. The check is a retelling in pairs with a four-box strip of pictures. She drops the second vocabulary drill because it does not help students retell.
Insight. A concrete outcome with a simple check makes it easy to decide what to drop.
Common pitfalls
- Writing the outcome as a topic ('ratio') instead of an action students perform.
- Planning the final test last and discovering it measures something the lessons never practised.
- Treating the textbook order as the plan and every exercise as compulsory.
- Making the evidence so large that it never gets marked or used.
Turn a Textbook Unit Backward
- Read the sample unit in your Activity Kit (Grade 6 mathematics, ratio and proportion, 6 lessons) and the 'forward' plan built from it.
- Alone (5 min): in the planning grid, write one outcome in the form 'Students can ...' that the unit is really about.
- In pairs (10 min): write the evidence for that outcome (one task and what a correct answer looks like), then mark each activity in the forward plan as KEEP, CHANGE or CUT.
- As a group (10 min): compare grids with another pair. Agree on one outcome and one evidence task, and name the first activity you would keep.
Your facilitator will guide you through this activity in the session.
Questions to discuss
- What changed in the plan once the evidence was written down before the activities?
- Which textbook exercises matched your evidence, and which did not? What would you do with the rest?
- Think of a unit you teach soon. What is its one essential outcome, in the form 'Students can ...'?
Reflect
- In your last unit, did you decide the final task before or after the activities?
- Which activity do you love that might not lead to any evidence of learning?
- Which one or two outcomes in your next unit are truly essential?
Try it tomorrow
- Choose your next unit and write its one or two essential outcomes in the form 'Students can ...'.
- For one outcome, write a single evidence task and a sketch of a correct answer before choosing any activity.
- Cross out one textbook exercise or activity that does not lead to the evidence and note what you will do with the time.
Further reading and links
Plan backward: decide what students must be able to do, decide the proof, then choose the activities.