Everything You Need to Know About Backward Design and Curriculum Mapping 3.0, with Jay McTighe

10:27PM Jan 13, 2023

Speakers:

Jay McTighe

A.J. Juliani

Keywords:

curriculum

tasks

standards

teachers

kids

teaching

learning

design

goals

assessments

performance

book

mapping

question

tests

people

grant

state

authentic

develop

Hi, and welcome to the backwards podcast where we talk about how to reverse engineer any goal through planning, pivoting, most importantly, execution. What does that look like in education, in business, in sports in life, I'm your host, AJ Juliani. And I'm excited because for this first episode, you know, I have had the opportunity to build a number of different things over my life, whether that would be building a sports team, as a football and lacrosse coach, or building curriculum as a teacher and an administrator, building online courses, building out books, or most recently, building out businesses as an entrepreneur. I think in all of these examples of building something out, there are some common tenants that help you have success in the midst of everything surrounding you, really trying to pull it down. And so in this first episode, we talk with one of my personal heroes, who many of you have probably heard of, many of you probably haven't at all, if you're not in education, and that is Jay McTighe. Jay McTighe, along with the late, great Grant Wiggins, wrote a book called Understanding by Design, and the book and the practices in their book, and the training that I underwent as a teacher who was developing curriculum for the first time a number of years ago, really changed my perspective, because it made so much sense. The basic building blocks of Understanding by Design are that you have to plan backwards. And so this idea of backwards design, backwards planning, you'll hear Jay talk about in this podcast comes from many different areas, right, Ralph Tyler, 70 years ago, with curriculum design, in the army and business; Stephen Covey, talking about backwards planning in the Habits of Highly Effective People. And so this notion of backwards design has been so important in my professional life building curriculum as an educator, build the lessons projects, those different types of things, but also in my personal life. And so one of the things that we're going to focus on this podcast is trying to get to that intersection here with Jay, a number of our guests on this backwards podcast are going to be educators who build and design curriculum or learning experiences. But we're also be branching out and talking to people in all different types of fields. Because backwards design, and reverse engineering goals doesn't just happen in learning definitely doesn't happen just in education. It happens in all kinds of fields, in all different types of societies, cultures, organizations, at all different levels of success. And so this first talking with the person that did the first training to kind of get my mind wrapped around this to take you from the idea of naming your desired results and outcome. From there thinking about what would be evidence that you've reached those desired results or outcomes? And then from there backwards plan an even more insane what activities tasks do you need to do to get to a place where you can demonstrate that evidence? This episode is also a little bit of a longer one, I think, Jay and I had a really deep and rich conversation. And one of the things I was trying to do was to ask him questions about some of the nuances that we see in backwards design, specifically, curriculum design, meaning, should every teacher be teaching the same thing? Where's the art of teaching in that? What the performance tasks look like? Why do standards exist, instead of just performance tasks, and so we have some really long conversations about what that looks like. And Jay shares all kinds of insight from his years of experience, especially what he's working on now, which is really focused on that idea of curriculum mapping 3.0, and how to make performance tasks, more of the end desired result than just a standard. So I want to turn this over and get started with the interview. As always, you can learn more at AJ giuliani.com, where you'll be able to find shownotes, resources, links, and all that kind of good stuff. Jay McTighe, thank you so much for being here.

Great. Well, I'm happy to be with you. And it's a topic near and dear to my heart, as you know,

I am sure it is and I I kind of wanted to open up with a question that I wanted to ask you the first time we did training, right? So you know, I'm a high school English teacher at wisetech and school district, montgomery county. I'm in this training at our local intermediate unit. And I feel like I'm a curriculum nerd already. I'm an English teacher, right. You know, we're already into the you know, these big questions and understandings. And I do I think it was a couple They training with you and grant. And I mean, I'm telling you, my mind was just this makes so much sense, right? It made so much sense to me as somebody who coached sports, as somebody who ran businesses on the side, both in college and after college. And so I just want to open up by kind of, you know, asking, what was the brainchild of Understanding by Design out of it come to be? What is that creation or origin story, so to speak?

Yeah, well, I'll try to keep it succinct. But I've been in this profession, 49 years, and I have a checkered career in the sense of I've had eight jobs in education, and only one of them existed before I got it. So I've had an characteristically odd career path, but I'm trying to summarize. So I started teaching in 1971, I decided to teach upper elementary grades for two reasons. One, there were lots of jobs available for men in elementary ed, but I didn't have the patience to work with very, very young kids. I mean, there's a special place of heaven for primary grade teachers. Yes, there is I wanted to teach the oldest kids I could teach without having to specialize in a single subject. Because I liked different subjects. I liked making connections among subjects. And I just couldn't see myself teaching six periods of the same thing. Day after day. Early in my career, I got involved in quote, gifted education, and our school district at the time, was picked as one of five sites in the nation to develop model programs for Gifted and Talented Students. This was an early 70s. And I was selected as one of five teachers to work on that. So I got a chance and very young age to work with national leaders, like Jim Gallagher, Paul Torrance, Sandra Kaplan, the top these are the top people in the field at the time, and it was an emerging field make a long story short, my my time and gifted education, we were doing things that today would be called Project based learning, authentic learning, independent passion, project type things. We did Socratic seminars around Junior great books, and so forth. And a lot of higher order thinking and critical and creative thinking was sort of the norm program coordinator in which I worked with 85 schools developing and implementing gifted programs, did this month long Summer Residential Governor's School program in the summer, and then became a program administrator. So now I'm, you know, mid career, I became increasingly of the position that the things that were happening in gifted education, really were important and needed to be spread beyond just the top 3%. Because at the time that this is in the in the mid 80s, that kind of the general mantra was higher order thinking for the very bright and basic skills for the rest. And there was a lot of back to basics, you know, worksheet, low level stuff going on, in general, mainstream education. So I had an opportunity, or somebody actually reached out to me from State Department in Maryland, and asked me, if I would come meet with him for lunch, she said, I have an idea I want to put forth for you. And his idea was, he said to me, the things you're doing in gifted education need to spread. And I have a position at State Ed Department. And I'd like to reserve it for someone who would come in and try to promote that. And it was a perfect timing in terms of where I was philosophically. So I went to state ed in Maryland not to be a bureaucrat, but to work on what was called a thinking Improvement Program. It was tied into the emerging shift from behavioral psychology to a more cognitive constructivist view of learning. So it all fit together. So I worked in the State Department on thinking skill work, broadly speaking. And then when our state like many states, in the early 90s, started on the first generation of standards, I was picked to be on a team of five people to implement Maryland standards based reforms, which involves coordinating the development of Maryland state standards at the time. But the more unique part of that job was we decided that we wanted to to really break the mold on state assessments. So in Maryland for nine years, during the 90s, we had only performance based state assessments. We had no multiple choice items on Maryland state tests for nine years. Now, back to I would say, the pendulum went a little bit too far. Nothing wrong with multiple choice. It just that it Candice has everything. But we had nine years of performance based assessments. My own two children went through Maryland schools during that era. And I saw the impact of those assessments on what they did in school, what they brought home. They were doing a lot more writing. They were doing true reasoning and problem solving and math. They were doing hands on science, because the state was assessing these things. So it helped me understand the power of assessment. If the if they're good assessments, they can drive good teaching and meaningful learning. During that era. I met Grant Wiggins, we had him as a consultant into Maryland because he was working at the time with a coalition of essential schools until It sizer. And grant was one of the people that popularized the term authentic assessment. So we had him in as a consultant, he and I are the same age, just hit it off right away, and got to be friends. And then over a couple of years, I would start seeing grant at conferences, and I was doing some consulting then. And as was he and somebody from the group ASCD, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development at the time, got us together for dinner meeting and basically proposed that we collaborate on a book, they thought it was going to be a book on assessment, because that's what we were both concentrating, right? When I met with grant for breakfast the next day and said, What do you think he said, why I'd be open to a book, but I certainly want it to be more than just assessment. And Grant told me that his doctoral work at Harvard was on curriculum. And I said, and I want to focus on on teaching and the kind of, you know, engaging kids in higher order thinking and more, you know, apply the learning instructionally. So, it was at that breakfast meeting that the ideas of UbD were born alone. So it's a long answer, but that was

and and so, you know, you and grant come from a little bit different backgrounds, and you're praying kind of a different, you know, view on this. At what point in time you started writing this book, and you know, he's talking about curriculum, you're talking about, again, that that teaching that's applied learning that and at what point in time, do you come up with this, like idea for for backwards planning, in the sense that backwards, reverse engineer this this type of idea in the military, but you're really took that idea, and made it something that I think, impacts not just curriculum, and we'll kind of talk about that, but also many other things in education. How did that come to be in that writing process?

Yeah, well, if you think about it, the title of our book, Understanding by Design, essentially captures its two key ideas. The first part of the title is our position, which remains to me to this day, that a modern education should prepare students to ultimately be able to transfer their learning to write to be able to apply their learning to new situations. And if anything, the current pandemic, is a sobering reminder of we're preparing kids for a world that's increasingly complex, interconnected, and in fact, unpredictable. And so to navigate such a world, you have to be able to transfer your care, learning rote learning, just giving back what was told you is not sufficient, but you can't transfer something that you don't understand. So the first focus of UbD is always teaching for understanding and transfer, and assessment that gives us evidence of those things. Recognizing that factual knowledge is important. And basic skills are critical. But those should be considered the floor, not the ceiling. The by design, part of our title then refers to backward design. And how we came to that was was is quite literally not original. The curriculum nerds who are listening to this will know that Ralph Tyler, in 1949, wrote a classic book on curriculum at the University of Chicago. And he essentially outlined the three essential questions for curriculum planning, right? What do you want kids to learn? How do you know they've learned it? And how are you going to help them learn it? So that's essentially backward design. People have come along with, you know, the PLC work. That's so good with a fourth question. And what do we do have some kids aren't learning? Right? You know, Rick, to fours? Contribution. That's a long way of saying, AJ, that backward design is not new. It's not original to us. And we're honoring Ralph Tyler, who is certainly a giant. Having said that, we put it together in a form with understanding Yeah, in the form of a three stage design process. I'd also like to briefly mention other notables that were influential. William Spady, in the 1990s talked about outcome based education, which developed controversies around it, but his idea was you design down from desired outcomes. And you know, of course, Covey's book Habits of Highly Effective People, one of his habits is effective people playing backward with the end in mind. So that's a long way of saying backward design is not a new idea. It's not original to us. If we did anything, it was just honor those folks. And bring it into a more precise process for curriculum planning, which involves three stages do you

think and I always interested in this because, you know, we have all these experiences that lead us to where we're at, like growing up as a as a kid or in some of those instances, early in your career. Are there moments situations where that made a whole lot of sense, because you do have the the people in this world say, hey, let's just take the spaghetti, throw it at the wall and see what sticks right? I mean, which is just kind of the opposite of a backwards design, right? It's just kind of like, let's throw it to the next. But is there any of that any, you know, any formidable experiences that you think led you to kind of really say this makes sense. And I can apply this to education?

Well, you mentioned earlier your experience in coaching. And both grant and I were coaches. And so if you think about coaching, or sponsoring almost any extracurricular activity, or where my wife is in art, visual art, in those areas, backward design is like is like the norm. In coaching. If it's a team sport, you're always coaching with the game in mind, which involves authentic performance, you plan backwards from the game, you do a task analysis of what the game calls for, then you take the players you have on your team, and you find out where they are in terms of their knowledge, skill and understanding. And then you plan your practices forward, but it's always with the game in mind. And I like to give a little nudge to teachers sometimes by saying, Look, coaches plan backward. The theater director, plaque plans backward from the opening night of the play. And that's the norm. But you don't hear you don't hear coaches saying, I don't have time for the games that they take all afternoon. I'll never get through the playbook. Right. But you hear understandable reasons, thinking their job is to cover the textbook or the novel or all the standards that are laid out in grade level standards. And so just the experience in coaching that both grant and I had said, No, that's not the right model, the right model is being clear about what you want kids to be able to do in authentic ways with their learning, plan backward from that, find out where the students are. And then you build your lessons, ie practices accordingly. For us it it did make natural sense. And there were good models out there. The one thing I'll add, however, is I was never taught to plan this way. Nor did I do it in my early years of teaching. Mine was kind of a ready fire aim model.

But it made so much sense. And I think about going through the training with you and grant. And if I had been a first year teacher, I'm not sure I would have appreciated as much as being later on in my career and getting that training for a number of different reasons. But one of the biggest reasons and a question I have to ask you is because of the standards, and because the way curriculum is presented a lot of times in education. You know, it's it's kind of like you need to do or cover this. And I know you're kind of arrayed against that term cover. But this notion that we have to cover we have to get through. I think, you know, there's this like, you know, good and bad side to standards. How did your training and the work that you've just been doing over a number of decades now, you know, deal with that situation? Because there's so many folks that are saying, but this is what I'm getting to cover? I feel like my job is to do that.

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And that that's the the mindset that is prominent, promulgated by the standards by high stakes test pressures, and by administrators telling teachers don't get behind, and in some cases, launching rigid pacing guides, so you got to be on pace. So just a couple of thoughts on that. Thought number one is recognized by Bob Marzano, in his often quoted phrase, the most significant factor that impacts learning and achievement at the school and district levels, not classroom, school and district is a guaranteed and viable curriculum. And that came from his meta analysis of research over a number of years, Bob chose the word viable in his statement to make a point that every teacher knows in their gut, there's too much content jammed into standards, and not enough time to teach them all. Well. This came from Bob's analysis with his colleague, John Kendall. Back when they worked at the macro Regional Educational Lab, they did an exhaustive analysis of state standards that were out at the time, and just concluded there's way too much content in here. While there have been attempts in in later iterations of the standards, to try to trim them a little bit to avoid the mire wide inch deep problem of curriculum. The reality is there's still too much content. And in subjects like history and science, by definition, the contents growing daily. So Grant Wiggins, and I have always thought that the reality of too much content not enough time is a curriculum problem. And it calls for clarity and priority about what's most important. So this is kind of a little thing go out. So point number one is there's too much content. Point number two is that not all content is of equal value. And you can look through the standards and say look, some things are really foundational and essential, but other things may not be particularly in subject It's like history and science where there's so many possibilities. So, Grant and I have always believed that you need a prioritizing lens to avoid the problem of too much content, which leads to a coverage oriented approach to teaching, which can result in superficial and disconnected learning. So the lens that we bring in UbD is at the unit level, our original plan was you focus on the quote, big ideas of the content that you want kids to really understand that will enable them to transfer, you frame those ideas through a central questions. And then you focus your assessments not just on tests of knowledge and skill acquisition, but you include assessments that call for application, hence, performance based assessments, and then you teach with those ends in mind that without a prioritizing frame, kind of lost in the weeds of trying to cover everything. And you know, I'd say if that's your goal, then just talk faster in class. Right? That's not going to develop deep, meaningful, lasting learning.

Yeah. And do you find in a lot of your work, you know, I firmly believe that a lot of kind of the trickle down is that if colleges are still looking for GPAs, and LSAT scores, and these things that are a lot of times multiple choice based, are easy to get there, through that, then all sudden, high schools are trying to pump out content that gets kids prepared for the GPA for SAP, AC T, all that kind of stuff. And then it kind of keeps on moving almost like an backwards design that way for what the colleges are expecting. And one of the biggest questions I get from teachers all the time is we can't change the standards. And in choosing what's important, there's lots of people that have different ideas what's important, right, and to kind of go back to your comment about Marzano is guaranteed and viable curriculum. A lot of people make that out to seem like it's the same exact lesson has to be taught the same exact way, the twin or triplet problem, right. And so in your work with curriculum, how do you get around that, right, so allowing the teacher to be an artist and a designer, but also making sure that they have those core components to their practice?

These are great questions. And I'm going to parse them a bit, because there are a couple of different ones embedded. The first point that I heard you raise was around what is a reality that there's not only too much content in state standards, the second point was about testing, and scores. And these are valued by colleges and real estate agents and so on. So that's the system we have to operate within that. So let me take the testing. And I'm thinking now of state accountability tests. Sure, yeah, right. Now, the assumption is that because most state tests and other standardized tests, in general, our multiple choice format, or use of multiple choice format, that they're assessing basic knowledge and skills. And so you have to cover everything in case there on the test. And if we don't cover it, the kids won't do well, and our scores will drop and the world will collapse. So here's the untested presumption that the best way even some people would say the only way of making sure kids do well on test scores is to do a lot of practice testing. And so in fact, there's there's been a whole cottage industry of benchmark or interim assessments that mimic the the look and feel of the state test, and a lot of classroom assessments even in subjects like English, and the arts have kind of morphed in the formatting of the state test with the idea that we'll have to practice it. There's the underlying challenge to that understandable conception. First of all, he has a question, what are the most widely missed items on state tests? You can find out in the states that publish their results? The answer to this or you could look at Nate, the National assessments, the most widely missed items are items in reading that require inference and interpretation, not just literal meaning in mathematics, they are problems that require reasoning, not just recall. In other words, people are often deluded by the fact that the format is multiple choice. That doesn't mean the items are well level. And if you're familiar with a depth of knowledge frame, the four levels of cognitive complexity, the most widely missed items on state tests and unnamed are D, okay, three, not do k one. So one of the things that grant and I have observed over the years was to often the local assessments, classroom assessments in any benchmark or interim assessments that are used, some of which are purchased from, you know, as off the shelf instruments are often lower level cognitively, than the state tests and are therefore in that is the following. The best test prep, I believe, is teaching for understanding, not just coverage. which can be superficial learning, right? And give kids lots of practice applying their learning in different formats. And even as you know, we can create multiple choice items that are assessing understanding to some extent. But we also contend that we don't need to be limited to multiple choice. The state test uses that format, because they're testing 10s, if not hundreds of 1000s of kids. But classroom assessments can and should be broader in scope should include more open ended and performance based assessments along with multiple choice. And that that's the best test prep the analogy that grant love to use, and I now quote, practicing for a standardized test to raise the scores, you know, doing a lot of multiple choice test prep, is the equivalent to practicing for your annual physical exam to become healthy.

I like that, right? Yes.

And the point is, you're mistaking the measures for the goals. If you read the opening pages of standards documents, in any subject, they will declare, I almost guarantee it, that the goal of teaching the standards is so kids can apply their learning to new situations, but people often don't read the opening pages. So when you get into the grade level standards, that's where all the weeds are. And you're so much content, and you feel you have to cover it all. And grant and I have been saying for 20 some years. No, you want to focus on the larger ideas and processes, teach in ways that kids understand them and give them lots of practice flying, they're learning. That, to me is the best test prep. So it's a long answer to but it's a very real problem. And unless and until people are comfortable with this approach, they're going to be confined or constrained to just do more test prep, low level coverage teaching. And we've had 20 years now of state test results to show that ain't gonna shoot the scores up

now. Otherwise it wouldn't have right we would have seen the test prep work,

not that it can be just God awful boring for kids. And the best teachers don't want to spend their life doing test prep. Yeah. So

the family, I don't think the families do either, I think about a lot of your current work with defined learning and around performance task. And to me, that's the heartbeat of a lot of this work, which means if you have performance tasks that are engaging, are empowering, our authentic, then teachers will have tasks that lead up to those activities that lead up to those to kind of get kids ready for those performance tasks. And I think, you know, the students will be a lot less bored. How is that work kind of transformed a lot of schools and different, you know, organizations that you work with?

Well, I am an advocate of the increased use of performance task. And I want to think about it a couple of ways. The first is, for much of my earlier career, you know, that's maybe 15 or so years ago, I was talking about performance assessments and performance assessment tasks. And that's what we did in Maryland, at the state level. But I've started shifting my language a bit to just talk about authentic performance tasks, that were the idea being that creating rich, authentic tasks that reflect the standards and what you want kids to be able to do with their learning, or not just assessments in the sense of something you do at the end of teaching to get a grade, I'm saying no, this should be how you focus in frame teaching and learning. So again, it's like extracurriculars, it's like the game in athletics. Everyone knows what the game is, and they understand what they're doing in practice is going to help them in the game. And so there's a motivational aspect, I believe, to having rich, authentic tests that you present to kids and say, Look, in four weeks, you're going to do a TED talk, or you're going to attempt this this investigation, you're going to present your findings and so on, such that when we're planning backward and learning the stuff that you're going to need to do in the task, kids have a greater purpose and an understanding of why we're doing it. You rarely hear kids in when teachers are using authentic tasks or in project based learning. You really hear kids saying, why are we doing this? You know, whoever uses this, right? Because an authentic task or a relevant project conveys that right off the bat. The the other part that goes back to your earlier question is my contention is when a curriculum is framed more around authentic performance tasks and projects and the way I've described it, those themselves can serve a prioritizing frame. Just like the coach doesn't have to cover every play in the playbook to prepare for the game. Teachers don't have to cover every frickin grade level standard and test them in isolation, to honor the standards in terms of the larger goals. Being a bit more radical on this and let me describe that and then I'll stop stop talking. It's perfect. I want to hear it. This is really a backward design manifestation And I've been recently writing about and proposing that we're ready for a new conception of curriculum mapping in education. And I'd say it's curriculum mapping 3.0.

I know I know the UB UbD 2.0. Very well. Yeah.

So this is critical mapping 3.0. So brief history, curriculum mapping 1.0 was driven largely by my friend Heidi Hayes Jacobs book, mapping the curriculum, which came out in the late 80s. And she proposed a process called diary mapping, which veteran teachers will remember. And the idea was, as a teacher, you should write out on a calendar, the topics or skills you teach for how long across the calendar for the year. And the idea behind this was a good one. It was based on Fenwick Englishes earlier conception of curriculum, where he said, Look, it doesn't matter what's in the curriculum guides, what matters is what teachers are actually teaching. So we need to find that out. So diary mapping was simply a way of finding out who's teaching what, and then the real intent was. So you, as a high school English teacher, you map out your year for ninth grade, or 11th, grade, whatever. And then you get together with other ninth or 11th Grade English teachers and just look at your maps or for fourth grade teachers, we look at our subjects across our maps. And that helps to get horizontal alignment, we may find out as English teachers, that nobody's teaching the research report, even though it's in our curriculum guide, we assumed other grades were doing it, then the idea was you could also a vertically to check for alignment. And I've been in schools where they did that. And they found for instance, in elementary, gosh, we never realized we have three dinosaur units, kindergarten, first and third grade, but the each teacher doesn't know what the other is doing. But the parents know, then you'd have a dinosaur last year, right? That was die remapping 1.0. And you remember that the curriculum planning software curriculum mapping software, like Rubicon Atlas, map protect has emerged during that era to make the mapping process more efficient and effective. Then, when the standards hit big time in the early 90s. I remember Grant Wiggins, and I used to say to ourselves, diary mapping is stupid. If you have standards, right should switch and Heidi Jacobs talked about this switch to consensus mapping. So when you have standards, then you should get together with all high school English teachers, or all fourth grade teachers, as a team, look at the standards and then agree on the curriculum map that you're going to use to implement the standards. That made sense. And that's a better use of curriculum mapping, in my view. But here's my third iteration of this curriculum mapping 3.0. If you think about it, diary mapping and consensus mapping is mapping inputs, right? It's mapping what we're going to teach or what we're going to cover, right? I'm saying, why don't we shift our curriculum thinking to let's map out the performances we want kids to be able to do with their learning? And so what if we had maps of performance tasks from simpler ones, and scaffolded ones for young kids to increasingly sophisticated? For older kids, we would start within disciplines since that's where most teachers in most schools live. But we would recognize that the more authentic the task, the more likely it's going to spill out of its subject silo. And we're going to see more integrated or interdisciplinary tasks, including in this gives the context for project based learning, which is almost always multidisciplinary. And so imagine that we had a map of those tasks within and across subjects, and that our teaching was not just covering stuff, our task as a teacher was preparing kids for increasingly sophisticated performance on the test that matter. And think about it that's really backward design. We're planning backwards from desired performances, not coverage of content,

especially because the performances are demonstrating understanding and competencies. Right. So then you're already including them kind of when you're saying what this performance is, you're saying what the competencies that are going to be demonstrated in that performance?

Absolutely. And you raise a really important point. It's a subtle but but powerful is a subtle, but powerful implication. Every major subject, every major discipline area has two strands, if you will think of a DNA image one strand refers to the content of the discipline, right? So the declarative knowledge, the facts, concepts and principles of science or mathematics, but it also has the process or procedural strand, which are the practices or the processes. And this has become very overt as you know, in the math and science standards. They have content and practice. Yes. And in every subject, he has those two. Now in English it's interesting because English language arts, if you will, is essentially a procedural oriented discipline, right? We're developing kids abilities in listening, speaking, reading, writing and research. So then you say, Well, those are the processes or the practices, what are the content. And arguably, literature is the content of ELA. And so you can build on literary themes across the grades. But to your point, this is why I said earlier that the standards are telling us we should be doing focusing on performance, because it's the fusion of content and process. Yes, that's what performance tests call for. In the absence of that framework, you can just march through content, test content in isolation, but never have kids really using or doing the content. That would be like the coach, going through the playbook and having individual tests on isolated skills and plays. And the kids never played the game.

You know, it's it's so interesting, you're saying this, because, at least in my head, I'm thinking two ways that this happens, right? The first way is, it's local, developed the performances that I think some schools and districts are already kind of saying, you know, this is what we want every eighth grader to be able to do, right, those different types of things are, you know, these are the characteristics of a graduate, but instead you have performances, and the other would be more of the state and national, I think of Canadian, you know, provinces, how they create kind of their whole curriculum, and then kind of turn that over to the school is very different than in the States and some other international things are, you know, as you're kind of thinking about this curriculum, maximum 3.0, which route? Are you kind of feeling like, it's not like you're throwing the standards out the window, you're saying the standards are only there to get us to these performances? So why not have the performances being those things that are kind of created? And the focus is on?

Yeah, well, I, I am essentially making that point. And so you brought up another point that I want to come back to an earlier question, which I forgot, but now remembered again, which is the question about where is the kind of the balance between having agreed upon curriculum and assessment structures and systems and teacher autonomy and creativity and academic freedom? So I'll come back to that. With respect to your reasoning question. There's another element that's in the mix. And it's in the mix, in some cases, more in some schools and districts and others. And that is the whole movement to identify what people are calling a portrait or profile of a graduate. And my friends at EDD leader 21, which was an offshoot of the Partnership for 21st century skills, have done extraordinary work internationally, in promoting the idea that subject matter learning is, is critical. It's important, we're not getting rid of the disciplines. But we recognize in the world we are in today, there are a set of skills that kind of cut over across disciplines, and often called 21st century skills, critical thinking, innovation, the ability to work with others in various team and group contexts. The ability to communicate well, using various media, global or or even local citizenship is one of those wellness as an example. And so the idea is, if a school or a district declares or identifies the profile of the graduate, that includes some of these cross disciplinary skills or competencies, then they really have an obligation to be teaching and assessing those. Otherwise, they're just words on a paper or, you know, a banner in the hallway. And so that's a long way of saying, You're not going to assess cooperation, design thinking, or habits of mind with multiple choice tests, you're going to see evidence of those capabilities in more authentic tasks, and projects. So that's another argument for why we really shouldn't be shifting, I believe, thinking around just covering lots of content and hoping it sticks to framing more deliberately around the kind of performances we want within and across disciplines. So we actually have evidence over time of kids growing in their ability to work effectively in teams, communicate using multimedia, develop an argument and support it, and drawing on knowledge from the disciplines, but not by recognizing that's not the end and Beall

and it also allows, which I know Ed leader 21 talks about as well but allows the development of portfolios for the students who can then showcase their performance tasks and how they were able to demonstrate this to colleges, career, whoever, right, you know, teachers that they're going to have, you know, all those different types of things. They actually have them. You know, we have the technology now, it's not too difficult to to showcase them on portfolios, much the way an art student would do it or a music student would is they're applying to the school.

Exactly right Legos. was fond of saying that he was a student should graduate from high school with a resume of accomplishment? Not just a GPA and A and C time credits. And I was like that and the question, therefore what would be in their resume of accomplishment, it wouldn't be the quiz on Thursday, or even the state test score, probably it would be authentic work that showcases their writing their problem solving their design thinking, their ability to work in teams, their production of worthy products, which is around it in authentic performance test.

Yeah, and I love that notion, the resume of accomplishment because I think a lot of times, kids start feeling less and less accomplished with each a they get, or each B they get, or each C they get, it becomes just kind of I have to continue to get that it's not like they feel accomplished. You know, to get that, I do want to tie back to that earlier question that you're going to answer about the agreeable curriculum, because what I see in kind of you talking about here is there's going to be various types of performance tasks. And I think choice and voice is obviously important. You've talked about that in your work as well. You fight that continuum of everybody doing the same 17 Step project as their performance tasks, versus a project that could have 17 different outcomes that all demonstrate the same level of understanding. And I think that is sometimes where in this work, and I know you've done a lot more than me, but in my conversations with teachers and curriculum, supervisors, and everybody, a lot of it, it kind of goes back to how you view that continuum of where students and staff should be.

I'm going to answer this in two ways. The first is a backward design answer given the theme of your podcast. In understanding by design, we propose three stages for backward design. Stage one is identifying desired results. Stage two is is determining the assessment evidence we didn't use the word assessment is just determining the evidence that kids have achieved the goals or the results you're after. And then stage three is what do we do to get them there. So day to day teaching, lesson planning is all part of stage three. So in those three stages, we're basically saying in stage one, if you're using an understanding by design, your goals or your desired results should be more than just a long list of grade level standards, you should identify what you want students to be able to do with their learning, which we call transfer goals. What are the understandings that students will need to transfer? And through what essential questions can we develop and deepen their understandings? And then, more specifically, what are the knowledge and skill objectives that more discrete pieces that are going to be the foundation? So that's stage one? Now to answer the question about where is academic freedom in this? Is everything going to be standardized? My argument is we ought to agree to agree on stage one, as a teacher team, or as a faculty, yes. And so if we're in Pennsylvania, and we've adopted the standards, Pennsylvania standards that were public school, we're obligated to those, we can't say, oh, I don't like the standards, I'm gonna walk away from them. So there's not a lot of teaching freedom there. Nor would I say there's teaching freedom in a school that says, our mission is to develop not only subject based learners, but we have identified the four C's, and we want to have kids get better at working in groups cooperate, for instance. So if the school or the district has declared that in their mission, than if I'm working in the district, I really have an obligation toward those ends as well. So that's a long way of saying I don't think there's a lot of teacher freedom in stage one. And I don't apologize for that. If you don't agree with a fundamental goals, you shouldn't you're not a good fit. Right. Now, stage two, backward design is a little more nuanced. My argument is that the logic of backward design says if you agree on the goals, you should be able to agree more or less on the evidence of those goals. You don't have a coherent system, if we agree on the goals, but every teacher is doing their own thing on assessment, there's no agreement. Having said that, I am very much against standardizing any and all assessments, what I am in favor of is a small number of what I've called Cornerstone performance tasks that I mentioned earlier that are going to honor the standards that are going to call for understanding give kids opportunity to transfer their learning, and that we ought to agree on a few of those. Maybe it's only a couple of year that get at the most important outcomes for a course or a set of standards. And because they're performance based, we would also want to agree on common criteria or rubrics so that we're going to look at student work through the same lens. But if you think about a few of those a year, then the teacher has complete freedom, you might say, to bring in other both informal and formal assessments into The Mix, right, we're just going to agree on a small number that reflect our most important goals. Then when we get to stage three, which is how you teach, how you organize your classroom and plan your lessons, and even the resources you choose, that, to me is where teacher autonomy and academic freedom reside. I don't want anybody micromanaging my teaching. And I agree with your observation that sometimes the biggest fear of teachers, if we impose UbD, or some framework is going to tie their hands or make them have to do everything in a robotic, standardized way. And I actually object to that. So I'll finish this up with in the words of an old country song, there was a line that said a river needs banks to flow. So in the spirit of backward design, I like to say whether it's at the teacher level, or the district curriculum level, the banks of the river using UbD, our stage one agreement on our on our broad goals, our priority standards. And if if it's in the mix, the 21st century skills that are part of our portrait of a graduate, and the other bank is at least some agreed upon evidence of those things. We're not going to standardize everything that we need some. And within the banks of the river, there's freedom and flow. And we want to celebrate that we want teachers to teach or their strengths to their style with the kids they have.

Yeah, no, I love it for so many reasons. As a teacher, I think there's a lot of people that want that freedom, but also want the clarity of what they're working towards. Right. And I actually think almost every teacher would want that. Yeah, I do think sometimes teachers in many systems get hampered, in part because the resources are then picked for them, you know, stage four, and it kind of it makes those banks a little bit tighter, you know, it makes I think that that choice a little bit, you know, it's harder to have some of that freedom when the resource is everybody kind of doing the same thing.

Yeah. And I wouldn't say on the resource question, whether it's textbooks or software or some prescribed program. Granted, I've always said that the textbook is a resource, not the syllabus, right? In the same way that the playbook is a resource to the coach, you don't have to cover it play by play. And note No, Coach, I know does. So let me come back to the other part that I wanted to mention, which to me is very important and interesting. And it's in the performance task realm. And so we'll call it both stage two and stage three, because the performance class can and should be rich learning experiences for kids. But we'll also assess what they do on the tasks which will help us know where we have to work I have written about in a recent book, the idea of what I call task frames. Here's an example. argumentation is one of the interesting standards that you find in ELA, mathematics, science and history. Right? The ability to develop support and critique arguments is in all four standards. So in terms of priority, that's a high priority standard. So I've developed and some other groups have also some task frames. So let me try to depict this without sharing my screen here is an issue or a question. Your task is to research find out information about this issue or this question. Consider different perspective or points of view. Decide on your own position on the issue, develop an argument including reasons and evidence for your position, consider objections, other perspectives and counter them, and communicate to a given audience in the in the given format. Right. So if you remember the old Mad Libs books, Oh, yeah. You plug in the tails. It's kind of like that. That was a fairly multi dimensional example. But if you think about it, if your goal is argumentation, critic research, critical analysis, developing and supporting an argument and effective communicating it to an audience, which covers a number of big standards, you could potentially give kids voice, what both teachers and kids voice and choice. So you could give teachers choice about the issue or the question, yes. Or you might give kids three or four issues in history, social studies, or science. So there's choice there, they have choice about what position they take, they have choice about how they support their argument, what evidence they use, and that will be evaluated. But then you could also potentially give them choice of audience and communication medium. So if it had to be writing, you could still give them choice. You could do a policy brief. You could do a blog post, or you could do a letter to the editor to inform viewers, readers the newspaper. You could also choose audience, your goal is to convince fellow students, your goal is to convince the school board, your goal is to convince your state representative. So that's a long way of saying it I've created a whole set of these tasks, frames and different subjects. They're tied to the big ideas and the processes of standards. And they also reflect what people outside of school do with learning. And so to summarize, my position is you can use these task frames to give you in a structured way, the evidence you need, while still allowing appropriate choice for teachers. And they should have choice of some of these things, as well as voice and choice for learners. As grant like to say, we can have high standards without standardization, and other kind of banks of the river thing. It's a kind of freedom within structure idea. Yeah,

that's practical. You know, I do in a lot of my my training work with teachers design sprints, it's the same thing. There's limitations on the sprint, but where each group takes it, you know, will be different, but they're all going to be creating, you know, say it's a public service announcement, design, Sprint, they're all going to create that public service announcement. But maybe, you know, we do it on the global goals. One group has goal to one group has Goal four, but that group is creating a video, this group is creating an infographic right? They have exactly what you're just saying they're the choice, but still the end goal, is them demonstrating that public service announcements.

Yeah, that's right. Now, here's the Other Backward Design wrinkle. So think about backward design. If the goals are clear, the tasks have freedom built in, like we just talked. But my argument in that context is the rubric, or rubrics we're going to use should be agreed upon, and they should reflect the goals, right? So in my example, or we could take a PSA for that matter. Irrespective of what topic you pick what issue you decide on, or your audience or even your medium, whether you do it as a video, a podcast, or have an article, your PSA needs to have these qualities or your argument argument needs to be supported these ways. And that's one of the ways that we allow freedom, but still get clarity about the evidence we need and the qualities in student work. No, I

love it, I got to follow up kind of just final questions for you. The first is given the state of where we are right now in education. Obviously, a lot of us have experienced remote learning, virtual online teaching for the first time. There's all kinds of hybrid, concurrent, parallel, high flex, whatever you want to call the model of kids in class and kids at home, happened at the same time. And I've said multiple times and people that I've worked with and articles that I've written and podcasts I've been on that I think that the work of curriculum has always been important. But now it's imperative. It's kind of like an in your face. If there was ever a time to revise curriculum, now would be the time to revise curriculum. What are just your thoughts on kind of the current state of where we are in education? And the role that backwards design plays in kind of where we move forward?

Yeah, another great question. It is a backward designed question. In that sense, in my view, everything should flow from clarity about our goals. And, you know, just the reality of the pandemic has made it even more important to be able to be clear, and to be able to prioritize our goals, because as many schools shut down last March, we know there's been a huge, well, significant, and in some cases, huge loss for students, particularly often disadvantaged kids. And so we haven't been able to cover all the content that we're used to kids are behind. And my response is, let's not just accelerate our coverage more rapidly to try to catch up, let's step back and be really clear about what are the most important ideas and processes. And let's teach those for understanding. Let's focus on giving kids lots of opportunity to transfer and apply their learning through authentic tasks. And that that's what the world needs. And that's, that gives us the focus that we need in the present. A related point. That's an interesting one is, I mean, I just read an article today and EdWeek, about math teachers finding that traditional math tests aren't effective in virtual learning, because typical math tests where you give the kids problems, and there's multiple choice where there's one answer where you don't know who's helping them, or you know, they've got the formula right in front of them. And so the article was saying that math teachers are realizing they have to have problems where the kids have to explain their reasoning. Or maybe you give them a flawed problem and ask them if they can find the error and correct it. These are much more robust assessments. And so that's been my advocacy. While we're still in the remote virtual or hybrid mode, which is, let's hit the pause button on traditional tests, particularly effects and skills, with the exception of very young kids who obviously need basics, but with kids who have more The basic skills, why don't we use this as an opportunity to give them some more authentic tasks that they can work on on a synchronous time? Let's make our criteria known. So they know the success criteria in advance. And let's try to de emphasize the fixation on grades as much as we can just take a pause on that. What if we could engage kids around interesting, relevant tasks where they have voice and choice? And let that be the driver? More intrinsically motivating tasks? versus how many points is this worth? Or how many words do you want? The one example I want to offer, which I think is an interesting one is to think about boy and girl scouts. The Boy and Girl Scout organizations, as everyone knows, has merit badges. To earn a merit badge, the scout has to perform a set of tasks, right? They're authentic tasks, the criteria for judging the tasks are known, the scout does his or her work, and then presents them and if they meet the criteria, they get a badge. Well, what's interesting, I found out was of I think they're like 159 merit badges that the Boy Scout organization puts forth. And of those 60 of them can be earned, virtually. On your own, here's the task, send the evidence and when you're ready. And so the idea that we can't do this, unless we're in person I don't think holds. I think, with the exception of very young kids, we can present kids with some open ended interesting, challenging, relevant tasks. And potentially even through meeting room options. They could work in a team on it, perhaps I may have dodged your question a little bit. But those are my thoughts about where we are in the in the virtual world. And I would hope that some of the things that people are finding are possible would in fact, enrich in person learning when we when we get back to that at some point in the future?

Yeah, no, I think it just everything you're talking about are focused on the goals. What are the goals right now, if our goals have shifted, because the pandemic has shifted what is important what we're focusing on, then we have to shift those goals at the school level, at the district level at the state level, and especially in the classroom level, and the community level, right?

That's right. And everything backward design says, playing with the end in mind, and clarity about the goals, clarity about the end will drive everything else and help you stay focused. Otherwise, without banks, you got to floodplain. Right.

No, I'm with you there. I think, you know, obviously, the the conversation today was was wide, wide ranging, you hit on a lot of those different things, I did want to give you an opportunity to just share maybe a little bit about and you already kind of talked about curriculum mapping 3.0, and kind of what you're currently working on. But I always want to ask folks like, what are you currently working on? What current problems are you solving? And where can people learn more about that from you? Right, you know, people that are listening to the podcast or watching this interview?

Yeah, so thanks. I'm gonna try to be succinct. But there are three main areas of my work now that I'm still enthused by, even as I turned 71. Last week? Well, Understanding by Design uses backward design as a unit planning framework. That was its sort of hub. I've been doing a lot more work and what I call macro curriculum. What does the backward design look like? And what does UbD look like an entire district curriculum level. And I've written a book a co written a book called leading modern learning that presents the frame I'm using is a blueprint as a blueprint is developed before we start constructing high rise buildings. My argument is we need a curriculum blueprint before teachers start cranking out units or curriculum teams start building courses. So in this book, I've articulated a macro view of UbD. It's pure backward design, but it's bumped up to the system level or the program level. So I'm excited by that. And I've been working with schools and districts of the last couple of years on that. The second thing is what I mentioned. And I have also a new book entitled developing authentic performance tasks and projects. And the subtitle of that book is to promote meaningful learning and assess what matters most to get it both of those pieces. Yeah. And then, and so I continue to be interested in that. And the task frame idea is one that I'm particularly excited about, because it fits with the first idea, use it to map the curriculum, curriculum mapping 3.0 using task frames around authentic tasks and projects. And then the final thing I'm working on with a longtime colleague named Harvey Silva. We've written a book called teaching for deeper learning. And it's it's the book that I want to write with Grant before he sadly passed away unexpectedly. And it's, it's in stage three. It's really what does it mean to teach for understanding and to engage kids actively in making meaning? And this brings me way back to my instructional roots where we started the podcast. So if you think about it, leading for modern or leading modern learning is kind of the the big picture view of UbD and backward design. The second book I mentioned is around the performance tasks not just as assessments but as how we organize and map the curriculum. And then the book with Harvey Silva is what does it mean on a day to day level to teach in ways that develop and deepen student understanding and prepare him for transfer. So that's what I've been up to.

I mean, it's just it just astounds me again, half birthday, 71 years old, your work and contributions to the field of education have definitely been valued by folks like me, and many, many others. And I appreciate kind of what you're doing. Where's the best spot right now people listen to this. They say, Oh, I wanna learn more about Jamie tie and his work, what's the best spot to get to connect with you to ask you questions, that type of thing.

You know, well, my website is just literally my name, Jay mctighe.com. C, Om. And on, there are a list of books, including the ones I just mentioned. And I'll send you links to those as well, if I might. And then there's a section of resources with lots and lots of goodies, a bunch of articles I've written and I've written some current articles about virtual teaching and assessment that are there. videos of myself, Grant Wiggins, and other people I respect like David Perkins, and Dylan, William, and so on. And then a lots of UbD resources, examples of essential questions from different subjects, resources for performance tasks. So there's a lot of goodies there. And then my, my email address is listed on the website. So if people want to reach me directly, they can do that. And then I become more active on Twitter. So just @jaymctighe is where I put out the day to day stuff.

Great. I just want to thank you, again, for being on the podcast. For anybody listening. We'll have links to all that in the show notes. And on the blog post that we'll put out there. Jay, thanks for everything that you're doing. I'm looking forward to hopefully, continue this conversation maybe for part two down down the road, because there's still plenty of stuff that I want to ask you. But just thanks again for all you do. And thanks again for being on the podcast.

It was a pleasure, AJ and good on you for putting this on. I look forward to hearing some of the other episodes.

Right, thanks. As always, you can learn more at AJ juliani.com where you'll be able to find show notes, resources, links, and all that kind of good stuff.