Lesson 2: When designing learning outcomes, consider Backward Design (back-mapping)
One of the unique challenges of my role is that there is no particular curriculum that I must follow. As the only English teacher in a Moroccan elementary school whose goal is not only to teach English but to teach subjects in English (ELA), I'm in my dream position. I have been given the green light to decide on the learning outcomes, I can work within the school's pedagogical framework, and I can build the syllabus and lesson plans from the ground up. It's a lot of flexibility, but that flexibility is also a double-edged sword: if you're not careful, you could become overwhelmed.
In this second half of the school year, I've been consolidating the curriculum and the syllabi I've used this year, along with their lesson plans, and creating a large departmental handbook that can be used in upcoming years by English teachers who join the team. While I'm the only one right now, the school is rapidly growing, and I won't be able to manage all of the grade levels on my own for long. So, this is the best way to centralize the resources, policies, and approaches that I've been using while also providing a framework for new teachers to be able to integrate their own approaches as they come along.
A core pillar of this legacy project is instructional design and curriculum mapping. I'm currently meticulously auditing our learning objectives to bridge the gap between elementary foundations and secondary school learning outcome requirements. Because the school wishes to allow its students the opportunity to continue their middle and high school studies in English, French, or Arabic systems as they please, my job is to make sure that our students are ready for whatever English-language system they may want to go in to, be it American or British (Cambridge, IB, National curriculum, etc.). To that end, I've been using a method called Backward Design to do this (or, as I like to call it, backmapping).
Backmapping is when you take a learning outcome that the students need to reach at a certain point and working backwards to break it down into a sequence of learning objectives they need to reach at each level of their studies. Since I have also been experimenting with spiral curriculum design methods, it's important to note that backward design can also create a framework that strongly supports spiral teaching methodologies.
For example, for English Literature A-Levels, students many need to be able to analyze how a writer uses atmosphere and symbolism to reflect a character's internal feelings.
By backmapping from this learning outcome, I may say that in Grade 6 (Year 7/middle school entry), students need to be able to understand techniques and authorial intent, how authors use metaphor, similes, and personification, and may also need to analyze poetry with a focus on word choice. From there, I can go back to Grades 3-5 to look at what students need in order to get up to those learning outcomes.
At Key Stage 2 (Grades 3-5), the focus shifts toward Inferential Reasoning and the structural mechanics of the PEE (Point, Evidence, Explanation) paragraph. This means they can explain how actions tell us the emotional state of a character, and can write a structured paragraph to present their argument. But what do they need in order to get to that level?
We go back to a Grade 1-2 level, and decide that students will need to have a good understanding of emotion and feeling vocabulary as well as show an understanding of how a story's environment can change as a reflection of a character's emotions (ex: when a character is sad and it's raining). They'll also need to explore a range of different adjectives and understand how adjectives work, grammatically speaking.
This is the general gist of backmapping or Backwards Design. From here, the best thing to do is to create a vertical alignment table where we can clearly see the progression of these competencies from one grade level to the next.
Since I'm working in a trilingual environment, cross-curricular mapping is also important for me here, and it's something I'm trying to fold in. Where are the concepts that the students are learning with me introduced in the Arabic or French lessons? For example, if they're learning about herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores with me in English, when are these introduced in Arabic or French science lessons? If they've already been introduced, then the content knowledge only needs activating, and I can build upon their foundation, and even use translanguaging skills to ensure understanding. If they're introduced first with me in English, then I need to ensure both content knowledge and language acquisition.
Needless to say, this is a large undertaking, spanning all of my elementary school grade levels as well as two preschool grade levels (Pre-K and KG). However, when it is complete, it will be a robust system that any teacher in the school can refer to and benefit from, and will only continue to improve as it is refined year on year.