"Backward Design"chapter 1

Chapter number 1 from the book called Understanding by design, is focused on the importance of how teachers design their process for teaching students. The chapter contains a well organized explanation of how we create a previous design of our classes, showing us concrete and real examples that teachers can apply in their own classes in order to create effective lessons where studentes are going to be able to reach clear understanding.

Backward design, as the chapter is called, is esencially what teachers must do before a lesson is started. The use of an organized design is always going to bring positive results in every sense, since students performance is going to increase and also our job as teachers is going to be easier. Most of the teachers are tired and they do not have expectatives of their students but with a previous and well organized designed, units and concepts are going to be easier and more quickly to teach because we are just going to follow our plan.

In the following paragraphs, we will analyze the three more important ideas to identify the different designing tips that we must be aware before we start teaching in a class.

Firstly, we must say that as teachers we are designers since we must organized and plan every class and also we must be aware of a long term planning. Designing can be a quite long process but in the future the results are beneficial for everyone. It is true that teachers are designers but they can not apply and follow what ever they want to, teachers must follow specific standards of the goverment and then regarding in the school you are working in. Most of the time teachers do not design their lessons so they never obtain desired results. Teachers need to know that it is important to have a clear objective to start figuring out how are we going to do it and what are we going to use in our classes. The chapter emphasize the importance of knowing what are our desired results as a base for our planning, it is impossible to start a teaching design if we do not know our purposes. A clear example of this important idea, is when a student is bored making an activity and he starts doubting about the importance of the activity and what is the real purpose if it, for this we can not have no answer, we must know what is our purpose in order to give the student the importance of that lesson and not just telling him because is going to be in the final test.

Secondly, the chapter shows three different stages that are very useful to follow when designing our lessons. First, as we identify in the first paragraph, teachers must identify desired results in order to know what students should know and what are they going to be able to learn. At the beginning of the term, there are many lessons that teachers want to teach in order to reach what the school expects but we must choose by highlighting priorities and responding to students needs. Then, we must collect and select evidence to identify the desired understanding because that is what we are mainly looking for. To show evidence we must identify how many quizzes or evaluations are we going to test in order to judge students´ performance. It is very important that students are aware of this decisions because they are also part of the class and it is good that they know the rules from the beginning. The third and last stage implies the learning plan, which is focused on the sequence of each class that is going to help us to reach effective understanding. It is important to say that textbooks are not the main resource in the class, it is a support but it is not the only one. This last concept is very useful for teachers since after each class we can go back to our backward design and identify what do I have to do for the next class, letting teachers far away from improvising.

Thirdly, we must put emphasis in the importance of the three stages to design work and it lies in the fact that they are a necessary reference for our classes and that it accessible for us every time as we wish. When we are teaching wemust be guided for a rubric where we can follow the expects to accomplish our real purpose, reach understanding. Also is useful in the way that this kind of rubric can be shared with other teachers in order to critique the rubric or in other cases to share it in order to help a colegue with his rubric. In every sense we analyze design work we are going to conclude that is necessary and fumdamental that every teacher design their own rubric to be an effective teacher.