"an Effective and Agonizing Way to Learn": Backwards Design and New Teachers' Preparation for Planning Curriculum (Report‪)‬

The past decade or so has seen increasing emphasis in K-12 schools around the country on standards and standardized testing, particularly since the advent of the No Child Left Behind law in 2001. At the same time, our knowledge about student learning has become increasingly complex, creating a potential conflict for conscientious teachers--administrators push for the kinds of teaching that translate directly into better test results, yet teachers also work to engage diverse students in the kinds of learning and thinking required for our contemporary era. This situation calls for teachers to have a sophisticated knowledge both of their content and of how to guide students in learning that content, what Shulman (1986) calls "pedagogical content knowledge." Yet some research on new teachers suggests that new teachers feel "lost at sea" when confronting the complexities of planning curriculum (Kaufman et al., 2002). In the tradition of self-study and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), this article describes a pedagogical approach that has met with some success in my own work with pre-service teachers. Although I began with a broad inquiry into the effectiveness of my own preparation of future teachers, I discuss here a narrow range of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions related to effective teaching--the ability to design and plan curriculum. I suggest that using the Wiggins and McTighe "Backwards Design" framework has helped my former students develop the skills to plan curriculum.