Backward Design

Trying to design a lesson plan "backwards" - a la Grant Wiggins' and Jay McTighhe's advice in Understanding by Design - means first focusing on:

1) the big ideas or questions you want students to be able to understand and engage with.

Then, figuring out how you'll:

2) assess whether they understand (AKA, what evidence will show you that they have learned).

And only then:

3) designing your class plan.

Trying to apply this process to teaching Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" proved to be trickier than expected (just as Frost apparently said about that poem, in fact). What I like about the backward design process is its focus on  learning (as opposed to just teaching - which often means teaching more by habit than by design). This focus comes primarily from having to first spell out the big issues and questions you want your students to be able to understand and engage with. This encourages you to work with students on questions that are actually part of your own work or the work of your discipline; often scholarly work and the lives of professors seem like mysteries to students, but this process might make it more clear why the work/their work/your work is engaging, relevant, and important.

At the same time, this isn't easy! I struggled to get from the big questions & assessment phases to the concrete class design - largely because, like an ESL student who has just learned all the ways she can make a grammar mistake in English - I felt extremely aware of all the ways I could make a class plan too top-down, too unfocused, too "activity"-oriented, etc. to make up my mind on what would actually work...