Backward Design Planning

My first reaction to this new way to approach lesson planning is - "It's in the title, this seems very BACKWARDS."  All of the planning I have been doing and all of the planning I have seen so far has been the "traditional" way to plan lessons to teach.  Look for your Subject, find the specific objective you want to address, create the lesson, teach, and assess.  Now all of a sudden someone says, "hey what if we look at this through a new lens.  What if we look at the big ideas - the overall learning and work backwards to create our lessons."

When I left class on Tuesday I felt a little confused on how this would work.  After further reading and reflection, it makes sense.  To relate it to when I was a manager and we had to create business plans, we started with the Annual Business plan.  What is the goal/objective for our business this year.  We then created a Monthly business plan.  How can we break these annual goals into 12 smaller objectives?  Then we broke it down to weekly business plans.  What are we going to do this week to help us achieve our monthly goals and objectives?  Finally, we had our daily business plans.  What are we doing today that will help us along this path?

This seems like the same approach.  While it seems confusing and awkward right now, if it makes sense for a business to reach it's goals - why would it be any different for a teacher to reach their goals.  Create the annual plan - what are the students going to learn this year?  Now break it down monthly, weekly, then daily.  It is a new way for me to look at planning but I hope my experience with business planning can help me with this.

When a novelist creates a novel - most have the ending in mind.  Then they create the events that lead to the ending.  Teachers know the ending to the story - now we have to create the path for our characters (students) to get there.  With practice and patience I think we can get our characters to their happy ending.