As the Foundations of Instructional Design course draws to a close, I reflect on my overall thoughts on the backward design process. My understanding of instructional design has been increased and deepened through using the process to plan a unit. In the first stage - Identifying Desired Results - I was able to practice writing essential questions that went broader and deeper. I feel like I have always been good at aligning my lessons to state standards and writing good student learning objectives, but I know feel better able to introduce essential questions to my students and refer back to them throughout my units. I am hoping that this will help my students better understand and transfer the social studies content to other curricula. In the past, I have also used a form of backward design to plan assessments prior to planning lessons and learning activities, but I haven't always made sure that my objectives were truly aligned with my assessments. I think that the practice I have had during this course will help me to check my assessments in the future to make sure they are not simply assessing content knowledge, but also skills, understandings, and transferability as needed.
I wasn't a huge fan of the GRASPS format for performance tasks. While I love using performance tasks in social studies, I felt that the GRASPS framework was a little long-winded and somewhat repetitive. I will continue to use performance tasks in my teaching, but will probably not continue to use that framework.
Moving forward, I will look at my future units and probably use a simplified/modified format to unit planning. I don't think it would be beneficial to completely "reinvent the wheel" or start from scratch. I do think that starting with the standards the district has already outlined for us in our social studies units and looking forward to the district-wide standards based assessments, I need to revisit the learning activities that I currently use. Some are unnecessary. Some of my lessons are activity-based or coverage-based. If I can find ways to connect them to the essential questions, standards and assessments - redesigning lessons and assessments as needed - I know that my current units could be strengthened with just a little time and effort on my part.