After you design a major assignment, backwards design suggests breaking down the complex tasks for the sequence as a whole into smaller, component pieces and skills. This may make it easier for you to choose strategic readings, activities, and materials.

Breaking Down the Assignment and Project Goals

Starting with smaller, manageable pieces and building to more difficult, independent writing projects is sometimes referred to as “scaffolding.”

For starters, then, consider the complex tasks students should be able to master through their major writing project. You can scaffold your students’ learning by identifying the knowledge and skills they will need to develop along the way in order to reach the major sequence goals. Functioning like the scaffolding around a building that’s under construction, scaffolding in a writing class provides a structure to support skills and knowledge-in-process with short, low-stakes assignments. These shorter, more focused assignments can provide students with a place to practice, confront difficulties, and build confidence.

As an added bonus, creating a series of assignments and activities that build on one another makes it more difficult for students to engage in plagiarism.

Scaffolding a Sequence with Backwards Design

Try using the following questions and lists to generate a scaffolded plan for each sequence.

What Do You Want Students to Know and Be Able to Do?

• For the sake of coherence, have a “big picture” view of course goals for the semester.
• If you have a course theme, consider how it expresses the course goals, or adds to them.
• Review the English 100 outcomes for the individual sequence.
• After the semester begins, consider working with your students to help them set personal learning goals for the sequence. Imagine, now, what these goals might be.
• What would it look like for students to hold onto the core of these learning goals after the semester ends, when they aren’t working on your assignments anymore?
• Make a list and order the various goals and desired skills.
• Design the major projects for each sequence so that they challenge students to grow in response to your core goals and rely on earlier incremental work.

How Will Everyone Know if They Are Meeting the Goals?

• Consider how you will assess the total process students engage in when they create their portfolios, rather than only final written products.
• Make sure students fully understand how the projects (“in-progress” and “as a whole”) will be evaluated.
• Use minor writing assignments, in-class writing, workshops, and class exercises to provide ongoing feedback and discuss assessment.
• Students can also continually assess their own learning, if they understand the sequence goals and how to tell if they are reaching them (e.g., through writer’s memos, in-class reflective writing, and conversations in workshops and conferences).

Which Day-to-Day Assignments and Activities Would Be Most Useful?

• In each Sequence, identify what students need to know and what they need to be able to do, in order to achieve all the learning goals.
• As you plan, consider the benefits of both repetition and occasional surprise.
• Find/develop activities that help students develop the knowledge and skills you’re aiming for and encourages them to own what they learn — connecting it to their larger lives or approaches to writing.
• Make use of this guide.
• Identify readings in the course reader (and elsewhere, if desired) and handouts that support these learning activities.
• Check the activities and materials you’ve chosen for a sequence for coherence. Do they focus on related goals? Do they fit together?
• Clearly communicate to students how each part of a lesson or sequence is working toward course goals, how it connects with what came just before, and how it connects with the next step in their learning process.

Finding Ideas and Inspiration

Talking with other instructors about teaching can make course planning more efficient and more intellectually exciting. All of the English 100 course directors are experienced writing teachers and we’re available and eager to talk with you about your teaching ideas or questions. Your English 100 colleagues, past and present, as well as others who have taught Comm-A or Comm-B are also among your resources. Talk to them.

Collaborative curriculum planning has been highly successful for many English 100 instructors. Some partnerships last an entire semester. Many more instructors team up for particular activities or lessons during one or more class sessions or planning periods. LessonShare contains examples of team-teaching lessons, and you may notice that different instructors who have made use of the same activity have posted multiple revised versions of it.

Other Sources of Local Inspiration

• Teaching with a Theme (see samples on LessonShare)
• Using the Go Big Read book (https://gobigread.wisc.edu/)
• Consulting with the Morgridge Center for Public Service about leading a short-term service-learning project with the class (http://www.morgridge.wisc.edu/) Please be sure to discuss your ideas for Service Learning projects with the E100 Director or Associate Director before the semester begins.