 Hi, my name is Tracy Takahama Espinosa and I'm very excited to be able to work with you about a concept called Backward Design. Now, before we begin, I could just hear you screaming on the other end of this video. It's like, ah, you are teachers. We have so much on our plate. Not another new concept or another new idea. I can just see it in your eyes. You're just thinking this is going to be kind of stressful. You've spent a lot of time looking at visible learning, which is fabulous. But you know, there's also things like making thinking visible. These are different thinking routines that are fabulous as well. There's also thinking in specific content areas. And there's also creating cultures of thinking. All these things are all coming out of the Harvard University. Project Zero grows that we have out there. But then on top of that, you've got other people who are looking at, you know, teaching for understanding. And then we have other people who are talking about understanding teaching. So I can understand how you might be a little bit overwhelmed by all these ideas. What I think we can agree on is that nobody's perfect and we all need to sort of grow, right? And so part of this idea is that we have this really poor tradition in the professionalization of teachers. We think that, you know, a teacher is a teacher is a teacher. We don't have real hierarchies in teaching like you might have in other professions around the world. So, you know, whereas in banking or in the military or even in supermarkets, you have hierarchies of people who come in and they have different roles, not only based on how long they've been there, but the things that they know. So here's my thinking on this. If you're a new teacher, you know, we expect that you might have a low level of content area knowledge, but you're going to get better at it, right? And you might also have some basic teaching tools, but you're going to get better at it. So part of the idea of growing as a professional teacher is that we learn different ways of approaching maybe the same old problem, right? The same concepts that we've always had. So what I want to do is just sort of remind us, you know, sort of in this macro context of things. There's a lot of ways of thinking about great teachers. We know that wonderful education boils down to the quality of the teacher. So we really do care very much in investing and how teachers grow and learn in their own profession. But there's a lot of things going on there and maybe in one of the most simple but maybe kind of elegant schematics of this. LD Fink had this idea that, you know, you've got to know your subject matter. If you don't know your subject matter, you're just not going to be a great teacher, okay? And you also have to understand how to manage student-teacher interactions in the right way. We know that if a student thinks that the teacher thinks that they can't learn, the student won't even try, right? So we know that that key interaction, believing in the student, it makes a difference if the student believes in himself, but the student believes in himself because the teachers around him believe in him, okay? We also know that classroom management is fundamental to excellent teaching, right? So you just have to have all these things going for you. But on top of that, you know, how do we structure our classrooms? How do we design what we're doing? Not only physically but also just conceptually. What is the curriculum that's out there? What are the standards we're looking for? What are the types of things we're out to achieve? So what we're going to look at together is really just this one element of this greater idea here. So what we're going to do today is going to be a leg up in improving your classrooms by understanding a better classroom design, by understanding how to do backward design. So what is backward design? It comes from Wiggins and McTye's work that basically was stolen from business. So in business you're always looking at, okay, how do I make the end deal or the big profit at the end of the day or how do I grow my company? Well, this is sort of the same kind of concept. The idea is at the end of the day, what do I want? Where do I want to be, okay? And once I know that, then I have to decide, okay, what am I going to accept as an indicator that I'm achieving that? How am I going to measure, for example, I really want at the end of the day to be the best store in the city, okay? So how am I going to know if I'm the best store in the city? How am I going to measure that? Is it by the number of customers, the number of sales? I have to decide how I'm going to measure that, right? And then third, I have to decide then, what am I going to do about that? What activities do I do to help me reach that goal? So basically, in this first step, you're just setting your objectives. And you know, we always talk about that a lot. You hear the words objectives or you hear standards, you hear certain things thrown about. Similarly, what I wanted you to think about just in the most simple concept, at the end of the day, what is it that you want? What is it that you want to have achieved? Sometimes I tell people that backward design can be used really at any level. It's not just, you know, for businesses and it's not just for academic planning. It can be like a philosophy of life. So really at the end of the day, what do you hope you have achieved in life, right? At the end of the day, you know, what have you reached? So think about it like that. The second step is just really how do I evaluate what I'm out to achieve, okay? So what am I going to accept as evidence? And it's really interesting to see you can have, say, same school. You can have teachers teaching the same topic. They have to share the same objectives, okay? But they don't have to share the way they evaluate. They can choose different tools that can measure progress towards that objective in different ways, okay? Similarly, they don't have to have the same activities. So at the third step here, once we know how we want to measure things, then we have to decide then what do I have to do in order to provide the evidence I need in order to be able to measure if I'm achieving my goal. And that's it. That's backward design. And a lot of you are probably rolling your eyes and saying, well, I already do that intuitively. I know you do. But here's the key point here. When we are able to clearly identify objectives, and that means breaking them down into a different way than you might be used to. So what I'm really looking forward to doing is, when we get together, to talk a little bit more about this whole idea of deciding the objectives. I know you guys have textbooks that guide you. I know you have standards or whatever. But at the end of the day, it's really cool to think about this. If you look at objectives, objectives are nothing more than the combination of knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Knowledge are things like dates, facts, formulas, grammatical rules, right? Skills is being able to apply the knowledge. And attitudes, though, attitudes are really at the core of what we teach, right? How do you teach kids perseverance? How do you teach them to believe in teamwork or to have a high sense of self-esteem or to be self-motivating? Those are the really bigger things, the bigger questions. And we don't always put that down in our lesson plan, do we? So when we're together, we're going to talk about how we look at knowledge, skills, and attitudes in the context of setting objectives within backward design. So I hope that by the time we finally get together, you are not pulling your hair out, but you're actually saying, wow, this is a very useful tool. It's not only useful within my job as a teacher, but it's really useful in life to sort of think about this. I always go into meetings, for example, and I say, okay, wait, wait, first of all, what's the objective of this meeting? Okay? Okay, and how are we going to know if we were successful in this? Okay, terrific. Now let's have the meeting. Why? Because it saves us all time when we have a really clear north in front of us. So remember, I told you this could sort of also be almost a philosophy of life, right? Well, in the intermediate stage between philosophy of life and a lesson plan, there's this other idea about, you know, asking you why teach? You know, why are we educating? What is the goal of formal education? Why are kids going to school? What is the point, right? It's not just a past test, believe it or not. There's a lot more there as far as preparing them for life, you know, fitting into society, you know, how do we do that within our roles as teachers? We are the most powerful tools out there to improve education, but how are we looking at that ultimate objective of helping students understand their place in society? So that's kind of like this medium philosophical level we're also going to look at. So I am really looking forward to working with you. And if you have any questions before we start, please go ahead and send me an email. I'm always happy to talk to teachers who care about their teaching practice. Thanks a lot. See you soon.