Backwards Planning

I am in the process of creating a new Greek Civilization course for the fall semester, and there are a few key curriculum planning strategies that I recently received from my participation in the Klingenstein Summer Institute (KSI) that I have found to be incredibly helpful:

1. Backwards design: I learned about this before KSI, but one cannot underestimate how much the formulation of unit understandings and essential questions must come first when designing a course. It is only by articulating clearly what you hope students will understand that you can then work backwards to frame your lessons. 

2. Design with deeper understandings in mind, NOT content: While it is incredibly important to have a good knowledge base of the subject matter that you are going to teach, the trap that expertise can set is that you may prioritize teaching facts, especially if you have a passion for the content. The problem that can arise is that you'll just want to share what you know and love without really thinking about why you are sharing it. Exposing students to your passion is great, but exposing them to material for the sake of exposure is pointless. In other words, instead of worrying about the facts, it is important to craft your units based on what your students will understand. And what the students will understand should be something that stimulates inquiry rather than a 'correct' answer. In order to do this, at KSI we practiced creating units based on student misconceptions. Here are some photos of some of the unit understandings that we developed in our curriculum group.

                        

We brainstormed some common general misunderstandings in history (listed below), and I am currently using this list to help guide my unit understandings. As you will see, a misconception is not generally specific to a time period or topic.

• If a document has bias then it must simply be unreliable (i.e. students don't investigate why sources have bias) 
• Content without context (e.g. students only memorize dates for the sake of memorizing dates)
• There is no need to make connections between historical terms/events/phenomena
• There is one right answer; tell me what I need to know
• Presentism & its opposite (i.e. students interpret the past through their own lens OR think history is irrelevant)
• Inevitability: students ignore contingency (i.e. students believe there was just one outcome)
• (Note: this is a difficult misconception when we also want them to identify patterns)

• Anecdotal evidence -false analogies
• Monolithic behavior (e.g. all Chinese behave like this…)

• Post hoc ergo propter hoc (--> logical fallacies and false causation)

• The textbook is THE authority - that history is not an argument...what is a 'reliable' source?
• Great Man Theory

• History is handed down to us as is (i.e. students don't understand that we create history from analyzing primary sources, which come from a variety of sources (textual, oral, archaeological etc.)

• Benefits of Interdisciplinary work

• Compartmentalization of history (American history is not connected to any other history)

• Myth of progress

• History as good guys and bad guys - history as one single narrative (nationalism/identity/testing/simplifying stories for elementary kids)

With all of this in mind, here are the first two units of my course that I've drafted so far:

1. Greek Myth:
1. Misconception:
1. Greek myth is just a bunch of fun stories
2. Unit Understanding:
1. Students will understand that the norms and worldview of a culture can be reflected in its mythology.
3. Essential Questions:
1. Why do humans develop myths? To what extent does mythology provide a worldview for a culture? 
4. 5 class days, 1 day of summative assessment
1. Sourcework: Hesiod, Homer, Campbell's Functions of Myth
2. From Myth to Reality?: The Archaeological & Textual Evidence
1. Misconceptions: 
1. History is simply handed down to us.
2. History is a single narrative
2. Unit Understandings:
1. Students will understand that archaeology and textual evidence is analyzed to present various understandings of a civilization.
2. Students will understand that people migrate for a variety of reasons.
3. Students will understand that while a culture has shared characteristics, it can also have pluralistic aspects.
3. Essential Questions: 
1. How can we interpret archaeological evidence? Why do people migrate? Can we talk about culture monolithically?
4. 4 class days, 1 day of summative assessment
1. Sourcework: Article on Heinrich Schiemann, Comparing Homer's Odyssey with inscriptions from Greek colonies, Archaic artwork, Olympus case study, Herodotus

From this point on I hope to craft lessons that will help students evaluate primary and secondary sources with these unit understandings and essential questions in mind. I am not sure my understandings are open-ended enough, and I hope my second unit in particular is coherent, so I will continue to work on them. But so far what I like about this structure is that it forces me not to think about the content until I am clear with what exactly I want to assess. So now I can begin to consider what formative and summative assessments I'd like to create, and that will hopefully help ensure that my lessons role model and build toward both content and skill objectives.