Designing for Hybrid Learning Clarify Purpose & Revise Learning Goals

Backward Design

We will use backward design to help us align purpose and learning goals with the design and build of our hybrid courses. This is not new to us. We are familiar with “beginning with the end in mind.” This same approach is essential to effective online course design. As Nilson & Goodson write, “The power of design comes from leading students to a meaningful destination” (p. 23).

Where do we want to go? → The course outcomes & learning goals
How will we know if we’ve arrived? → The assessments we’ll use to guide student progress (formative) & measure how close they get to the destination (summative)
What will we need to help us get there successfully? → The course materials, learning activities, instructional scaffolding, and practice students need to meet the learning goals, as well as the feedback and guidance provided to help them along the way and the obstacles we remove so that every student can succeed (adapted from Darby & Lang, 2019, pp. 8-9).

Our Social Context

Since all learning is contextual, to begin our backward planning we need to consider the complex, dynamic social context that we will be living, learning, and teaching in next year. First, our personal and professional lives, as well as those of our students and families, will continue to be affected, and disproportionately so, by the ongoing global pandemic. Second, protests against the violent oppression of black people have ignited anti-racist activism and a movement for social change within and beyond our community. Before continuing the design process, we need to pause and consider how all of this should impact the purpose, goals, and design of the courses we teach and the school community we belong to.

Over the spring, student feedback posed questions about the purpose of their learning: “What’s the point?” “Why should I care about this?” “What does this matter?” We need to communicate a clear sense of purpose that helps to engage and motivate our students by making learning relevant and connected to the world outside the “St. Mark’s bubble.” Nothing makes this clearer than the ongoing work of our Pathways student leaders and their petition demanding that St. Mark’s take action to become an anti-racist school. As UCLA Professor Pedro Noguera reminded us in a tweet on June 1, “Our students are watching.”

Revise Learning Goals for a Hybrid Context

In addition to this complex and evolving social context, the shift to a hybrid context also requires us to rethink our course goals for two primary reasons.

First, as we learned during Remote Learning, we will not be able to cover as much content or transfer exactly what we do in our on-campus, in-person courses to Canvas and Zoom. Just as we need to be more deliberate as we work to develop relationships in a virtual setting, we need to deliberately scaffold the design of our hybrid courses to help students connect to our content and successfully reach the learning goals we set for them. As Nilson & Goodwin state in Online Teaching at its Best, “Dense content becomes a barrier to significant learning because it leaves too little time for an instructor to show its relevance and build in opportunities for students to apply it. … We need to think differently about content and shift our focus from covering it to getting students to use it” (p. 23). It might be helpful to think “narrow & deep” as you revise course and unit-level learning goals.
Second, as the first part of this module emphasizes, we need to give more time and space over to relationship and community building, as well as to supporting our students in this new way of learning. St. Mark’s students will all go through an orientation to hybrid learning to help them prepare, but this process and our support will need to be ongoing, especially over the first half of the year.

In short, we need to pare down our learning goals to what’s most essential to craft a meaningful, achievable learning experience for students as well as a sustainable teaching experience for faculty.

Recalibrate Course Outcomes & Learning Goals

We will follow this backward design process to recalibrate our course outcomes and learning goals for the year ahead:

Think Big Picture: What’s the purpose of the course? How will you communicate this purpose in a compelling way on your course homepage & first day sheet? What are the big, overarching essential questions that will “drive” the learning in the course?
Identify Course Level Goals: Use the Know-Understand-Do (KUD) framework to articulate the most essential outcomes of what students will know, understand, and do by the end of the course. New to KUDs? Here’s a KUDs: Overview & Introduction doc with information and examples.
Identify Unit Level Goals: Use the Know-Understand-Do (KUD) framework to articulate the learning goals for each unit in the course, making sure they align with the big ideas and tie back to overarching course learning goals.

Here are some resources that might be helpful as you revise course and unit-level learning goals:

How to Compose a Learning Objective (Goucher College)
How Fink’s Taxonomy Can Improve Your Curriculum (Medutopia blog)
Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy Action Verbs (Northeastern)
Writing Good Learning Outcomes (UC Davis)

Time to Design!

After considering the dynamic context of the 2020-21 school year, document the purpose and learning goals of your course in your Hybrid Course Plan doc.

Instructions:

Return to Your Hybrid Course Plan Doc: Work collaboratively or solo, based on your role in this course
Complete section 1.3. Clarify Purpose & Revise Learning Goals on your doc. This intentional (re)design work will guide your “build” process in Module 2.
Success criteria for this task:

Once you’ve completed these steps, you’re ready to move on to 1.4: Adapt Assessment & Prioritize Feedback.