“…too many teachers focus on the teaching and not the learning”.
Grant Wiggins And Jay McTighe
This seems to be the problem when analyzing the teaching-learning process; teachers prepare their classes thinking about how but not taking into consideration what, even better the what is previously given by the ministry, however, is not always the answer for student’s reality, needs and interests.
The objectives then, are the answer, nonetheless, how often teachers really focus on them?
Backward design suggests something that it seems obvious, but at the moment of thinking about what we are doing, makes us wonder not only about our profession but how we are doing it; maybe because there are too many things to do, maybe because time is not enough or even worst, only because we “know” what to do but we do not know.
The obvious is, to design classes considering three main stages: identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence and plan learning experiences and instruction, in other words, it is a backward glance, in which we consider first what it is expected, what concrete evidence we have to achieve the goals and finally prepare and think the best method to use, the materials needed, the activities, strategies, procedures we are going to use with a particular group of students, in a particular reality.
If we think about it, everything is done on the other way around; we usually think of how we are going to teach a content, which material or method we are going to use and finally on the results we expect from that; as the text says: “a typical episode of what might be called content-focused design instead of results-focused design” (p. 15).
This new focus is an alert…something is telling us that we need to start thinking clearly… I wonder if the Chilean problem (that a common student cannot speak English in spite of his/her 8 or 9 years of English instruction) is because teachers are focusing on how but not on what… maybe you can help me.
