In this step, you gather information about your students and select the standards for your unit.
What is Step One?
100
This is the road map for your teaching. It includes the learning goals for your students, all of your lesson plans and materials, and each type of assessment.
What is curriculum?
100
In the backward design steps, a teacher plans for formative assessments to go in this step.
What is Step Five (or in lesson plans)?
200
In this step, teachers create lesson plans that each have an objective and a formative assessment to measure student learning toward that objective.
What is Step 5
200
These are instruments or tests that teachers use to get information about their students and to figure out if students have learned what the teachers expected them to learn.
What are assessments?
200
Summative assessments--or the big projects students should be able to complete at the end of the unit--get written in this step.
What is Step Three?
300
In this step, teachers identify the 'big' ideas of a unit. Then the teachers write out the enduring understanding they expect students to gain from the unit. Finally they pose 'big' questions that frame the unit and that can be answered from the enduring understanding.
What is Step Two
300
These are the broad topics of your unit.
What are 'big' ideas?
300
Reassessment of students' academic capacities and affect would be used in this step.
What is Step One?
400
In this step, teachers identify the knowledge and skills that students have to master in order to complete the summative assessment.
What is Step Four?
400
This is a process of writing curriculum, whereby a teacher starts with her learning goals and summative assessments, and then writes the lesson plans that helps students arrive at those learning goals
What is backward design?
400
Getting-to-know-student strategies (like cogenerative dialogues, dialogue journals, community walks, student interviews, and home visits) would be used to help inform this step of backward design.
What is Step One (and/or Step Three)?
500
In this step, teachers create the summative assessment (or project) that aligns with the understanding and standards, and that students will be expected to complete by the end of the unit.
What is Step Three?
500
This is the deep conceptual learning that students should be able to develop by the end of the unit. It's not just the knowledge of individual facts, but it's being able to explain them and tie them together in one complete story.
What is understanding?
500
These two steps are the only ones of backward design where assessments aren't directly involved.