Curriculum planning: starting with the end
How to use backwards planning to design a secondary English curriculum
If you are contemplating where to begin with your curriculum design, a great way to start is to begin with the end goal in mind. What do you want your students to know, what do you want your students to be able to do, and where do you want students to be by the end of the curriculum journey? In other words, begin by planning out the overall objectives of your curriculum. You can then work backwards from here: in order to reach this end point, where do students need to be by the end of the term, the half-term, the week, the lesson? Moving on from this, your curriculum planning becomes more specific and detailed, moving from the ‘what’ questions to the ‘how’ questions: how are you going to teach students this knowledge or this skill and ensure they remember it; how are you going to ensure they reach the endpoint you have specified?
This process is often referred to as ‘backwards planning’.
According to Wiggins and McTighe (1998), there are three stages of effective backwards planning: decide on the desired outcome; decide on acceptable evidence; plan learning experiences and instruction. These stages apply not just to how we would plan an entire curriculum, but also how we would plan the smaller components within said curriculum, for example a unit of work or an individual lesson.
Stage 1: Deciding on the desired outcome
The ultimate desired outcome for all students of English (in all schools and at all key stages) should centre around developing a knowledgeable and effective literary critic who can understand the power of language to shape the world around us: how we present ourselves, how we interact with others, how we document our lives and our experiences in the written and spoken word.
When planning our curriculum, we need to decide what an effective literary critic looks like to us: what knowledge and skills should students have by the end of the 5-year journey that would signpost them as a successful critic of literature? For example, you might decide that students should be able to: read an unseen text and respond with a perceptive understanding; find specific evidence and examples to support their viewpoint; deconstruct the choices made by a writer and consider the potential impact of these choices. Deciding on the desired skills of an effective literary critic is a useful starting point for curriculum planning.
I would advise avoiding outcomes that concentrate on what you want students to know by the end of their study. This is difficult to check or measure and can therefore be a difficult end-goal to work towards. Instead, it is better to focus on what you want students to be able to do by the end of their study. This ensures that your end goals are measurable and focused on what pupils can independently produce, which can thus be appropriately assessed. This therefore makes it easier to decide and plan more minute criteria that will inform you of whether students are acquiring the desired skills/knowledge throughout their period of study.
Wiggins and McTighe (1998) also suggest a series of useful questions that we may consider in this stage of our planning: what should students encounter; what should students master; what should students retain? For example, you may determine that you want your students to: encounter the text ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’; master the skill of identifying language used by Shakespeare to indicate power dynamics between men and women within the play; and retain ideas around patriarchy and the use of language to display power. It is the latter which is arguably the most important component to consider: what is the enduring understanding that it is imperative our students retain in order to be successful later on?
As an additional advisory note, it is also imperative at KS3 that we avoid perceiving desired outcomes at KS3 in the prescriptive way that is unfortunately common in secondary schools – as inextricably linked with GCSE outcomes. A KS3 curriculum should not be about merely ‘preparing students for KS4’. Instead, ask yourself: what should a successful student of English be able to independently do by the end of Key Stage 3?
Stage 2: Deciding on acceptable evidence
The second stage of backwards planning asks the curriculum planner to consider: what are you going to accept as evidence that pupils have acquired the knowledge you wanted them to, or developed the skill you intended? What evidence will you accept that students both know and remember what they need in order to move on?
Once you have decided on the desired outcome(s) of your curriculum, you must ask yourself: how will I know that students are on the way to achieving these outcomes? Wiggins and McTighe (1998) press the importance of the acceptable evidence directly matching with the desired outcome: in order to avoid frustration and inefficiency, it is imperative that the assessment directly reflects the learning goals.
It is also imperative at this stage to consider the importance of independent practice. Students must be given the opportunity to independently apply the knowledge and skills they have gained. The only way for pupils to really hone their skills and confidently embed their knowledge is to practice independently with the chance to make mistakes, work through these mistakes, and eventually improve.
Stage 3: Plan learning experiences and instruction
The final stage is when the ‘finer details’ begin to be ironed out. If Stages 1 and 2 contemplate the ‘what’, Stage 3 considers the ‘how’: how will the desired knowledge and skills be taught? At this stage, one must explore which strategies will best equip students with what they need to know and which tasks or activities will give students the opportunity to experiment with their new knowledge and skills.
A common error made in the design of curriculums, units of work, or even individual lessons is deciding on what you want pupils to do before you decide what you want them to be able to do. To leave the planning of learning experiences and instruction until Stage 3 is to ensure that lessons, activities or tasks are not merely time-fillers, they always explicitly move students towards the ultimate desired outcome.
Anticipating difficulty
An additional principle of effective backwards planning which is not originally discussed by Wiggins and McTighe (1998) but I feel is nevertheless essential is anticipating difficulty. When initiating your curriculum planning, you should consider the following questions:
Where do you anticipate that students will encounter difficulty reaching the desired outcome?
What gaps might students have that need filling, or what misconceptions might need addressing, in order for them to successfully reach the end goal?
Whilst deciding on an end-goal is important, taking stock of your starting point is also vital, and we must be realistic here, focusing not on what pupils should know but instead on what they likely do know at the start of their journey. This is perhaps particularly important following school closures and the widespread impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ample time and consideration must be put into what knowledge and skills students may not have mastered that they otherwise may have, under ‘usual’ circumstances.
In anticipating difficulty and using this to plan an effective curriculum, communication is key. Talk with your KS2 feeder schools about how you can avoid repetition (a common complaint is that the Year 7 curriculum is not challenging enough due to secondary educators lacking knowledge of KS2 content) and how you can address misconceptions that KS2 teachers may have noticed in their students but not had the time or resources to address. Talk with your team and draw on their experiences: what knowledge/skills do pupils often struggle to master? What experience do they have with effective ways to address these difficulties? These conversations are incredibly useful to ensuring you have anticipated difficulty.
The concept of anticipating difficulty is sometimes misinterpreted as being at odds with the notion of high challenge within a KS3 curriculum. This must not be misunderstood. All passionate KS3 teachers and leaders want to develop an ambitious, challenging and rigorous curriculum – anticipating difficulty does not contradict this. Put simply: if we don’t acknowledge the misconceptions or gaps that students have or the difficulty that they might face/are facing in reaching the end goal, this ambition (both yours and theirs) will be futile. This is about being reflective practitioners who focus not on what should be but on what is, thus delivering a curriculum that serves its students well because it acknowledges the reality of their educational experiences thus far, and their likely experiences in the near future.