Backwards Planning, from an Educator, for All: a 7 step process

I’ve been trained as a teacher and worked in education since I was approximately twelve years old, and backwards planning is a phrase that regularly emerges in meetings. Instead of creating lessons that build into tests etc., backwards planning starts with the goals for students, then creates assessments, and works backwards from there to lesson plan and place all of this on a calendar — before state testing.

If you want to try backwards planning, take out your calendar and your journal (or a scratch piece of paper) and follow these steps.

1. Brainstorm Your Goals. Sometimes this is simple — like, for our family, the goal was to get to Switzerland with all that we needed and no more. It’s not always that simple. Maybe you have a language learning goal or a fitness goal or a legacy goal. You may have several goals. If so, try to group them into categories, and backwards plan for each of those categories. Decide when you plan to achieve this goal and write it down.
2. Determine What Marks a Completed Goal. You’re probably not going to be taking a test or writing an essay to earn a passing grade, so what will you do? How will you know you have or have not accomplished your goal? If you’re like me, I like to manufacture a test of sorts. For a fitness goal, I might set a date for a fitness test, which also means I have to research different tests.
3. Create Benchmarks Along the Way. These are status checks or mini-goals within the major goal, because life happens, things happen, plans do not always work the way we expect them. We can underestimate our progress or overestimate our progress. Record the dates for these check-ins.
4. Write the Lesson Plans, Fill in the Process. With the previous steps, you’ve got several dates recorded. Now, the day-to-day details come into play. What items have to happen on any individual day to get to the benchmarks?
5. Establish Ground Zero. When does the plan begin? Some plans have a step before they actually begin, where you need to establish your current location before you can build.
6. Sanity check. Is this plan do-able? reasonable? achievable? If not, revise it because you will give up if you can’t feel successes along the way.
7. Go Time.