Backward DesignALP Winter Institute

2013

Robert Miller

Is an essay made up of discrete parts?

…or one happy unified whole working together to form a cohesive goal.

Perhaps in our rush to provide better assessment, we break things down too far?

Without thinking of the whole?

Do our students need all this?

Are they going to become English teachers?

Do we focus on writing a paragraph?

Something they have been doing since….?

….the third grade?

Where did it come from?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TAtRCJIqnk

I don’t want to focus on grammar because you are going to have a

section on that…but…

Is grammar the key? Is it the reason our students fail?

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled,

was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

—Introibo ad altare Dei. Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:

—Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit! Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and

blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus,

displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light

untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

So what is backward design, and how do we come up with

assignments that are unique and have a sdrawkcab design?

Wiggins and McTighe call it planned coaching. They add that

one starts with the end... They ask to what extent does the material

interest and engage students.

From the Mike Rose article in your packet…

“The young woman in the hoodie behind me whispers “cried” to her friend, whose head is resting on her folded arms. “Wrote,” head-resting woman whispers to herself as the teacher goes down a list of sentences on an overhead screen. “

“No one seems to be having any trouble with the exercise. The quartet behind me does it under-breath while catching up on their day-to-day. They might make errors in tense in their writing, but they won’t be writing anything longer than a paragraph until they take the next course in the remedial sequence.”

“Unfortunately, a number of students in such classes won’t make it through the

series to get to fuller writing assignments of the kind they have to do in their other

classes.”“The big question is whether we will truly

seize this moment and create for underprepared students a rich education

in literacy and numeracy…”

Huda and Mustafa add:“In sum, written-language acquisition

will be facilitated if learners are afforded rich opportunities for exposure to, production of, and

reflection on various types of discourse in the target language.”

So, what do we do in ALP?

• we don’t want the course to feel like third grade

• what do we ask students to do in 101?

• high challenge, high support

There are many ways to do this, but I am going to show you one example I use based on a scenario approach by

Greg Glau.

It uses difficult readings and requires critical thought, yet my ALP students

have done well with it!