Curriculum design principles and backward design as a trade-off

Curriculum design: the trade nobody writes down

Curriculum design principles are usually presented as a method to follow. They are better read as instruments for keeping one trade honest, and curriculum documents are written as lists of what will be covered, which conceals the only decision that matters. Teaching time is fixed. Every topic added to the list takes its minutes from the topics already on it, and below a certain number of minutes a topic is not taught but mentioned: named, perhaps illustrated, never practised, and therefore not retained or usable.

Stated as a trade, the design question becomes answerable: how many things can this course teach to the point of use, and which are they? That question has a number attached and can be argued about with evidence. "Is this topic important?" has no number attached, which is why curriculum meetings that ask it never converge and always end with an addition.

The rest of this brief is about the instruments the field has built for keeping that trade honest, and about what each one costs to run. Curriculum design principles that cannot survive a timetable are decoration, so each is stated with its running cost.

Backward design, and what it demands

Backward design inverts the intuitive order. Instead of choosing content, then activities, then a test, it starts from the outcome, derives the evidence that would demonstrate it, and only then designs activities whose job is to produce that evidence. Wiggins and McTighe's formulation is the version most institutions adopted, usually in template form.

The templates are where it goes wrong, because the method's real demand is not documentary. It is that the outcome be stated as something a learner does, at a specified standard, and that somebody be willing to remove an activity that does not serve one. A course that fills in the template and keeps every activity has performed the paperwork and skipped the method: the point of working backwards is that it licenses deletion.

The second demand is that the evidence be decided before the teaching. Once activities exist, they generate their own assessment by default (you test what you did), and the outcome quietly becomes whatever the activities happened to produce.

Constructive alignment

Biggs's contribution is a property to check rather than a process to follow: the verbs in the outcome, the verbs in the teaching activity, and the verbs in the assessment task should be the same verbs. If the outcome says evaluate, the seminars should have learners evaluating something, and the assessment should require an evaluation rather than a summary.

Misalignment is easy to detect once you look for verbs, and it is almost always the assessment that has drifted. A module whose outcomes promise analysis and whose exam rewards recall has taught recall, whatever the documents say, because learners reverse-engineer the assessment and study for it. This is the sense in which assessment is the real curriculum: it is the statement of what counts that learners actually believe.

Spiral sequencing and its overhead

The spiral, returning to the same material at increasing depth, has good theoretical support. Distributed practice beats massed practice, and a second encounter allows the first to be re-encoded with more structure available, which is exactly what the cognitivist account of expertise predicts.

Its cost is coordination, and it is a real cost rather than an implementation detail. Each return has to know precisely what the previous pass established, or the spiral degenerates into repetition — the same content at the same depth, which learners experience as being taught something they already know. That failure is endemic where different teachers own different passes and nobody owns the sequence. If a curriculum cannot name who holds the whole spiral, it should probably be linear.

Four sequencing logics, and when each fits

Sequencing decisions also travel badly between systems: what holds a sequence in place is the assessment at the end of it, which is the argument of the comparative and international hub. The last failure is the most common and the least examined. Curricula are full of prerequisites nobody has tested — material placed early because it seems foundational, holding up material learners could have engaged with immediately. Checking one such assumption per revision cycle is cheap and often frees weeks.

Assessment as the real curriculum

If learners study for the assessment, then the assessment is the operative statement of what a course values, and every other document is aspiration. Three consequences follow, and they are design decisions rather than observations.

Frequency changes behaviour more than weighting. A single final assessment concentrates all study at the end, which is the worst possible distribution for retention. Several smaller checkpoints distribute practice, and they do so whether or not they carry marks.

Feedback that arrives after the next submission is not feedback. It is a grade with commentary. For feedback to function, there has to be a subsequent opportunity to use it, which is a sequencing decision made at design time and impossible to retrofit.

What is easy to mark drifts into the assessment. This is the quiet force that pulls courses towards recall, and the only defence is to decide the assessment format before the workload is known and then argue about the workload separately.

The principles that survive contact with a timetable

1. How many outcomes this course can teach to the point of use, given its hours. Write the number down before writing any content.
2. What evidence would demonstrate each one, in enough detail that somebody else could design the task.
3. Which sequencing logic governs, and which prerequisites are real rather than assumed.
4. Where practice and feedback sit, and whether any feedback arrives in time to be used.
5. What is being dropped, stated explicitly. A design that drops nothing has not made the trade; it has deferred it to the teacher, who will make it in week nine under time pressure.

Those five are the curriculum design principles this brief will defend. The fifth is the one institutions skip, and it is the one that decides whether the rest of the design survives contact with the timetable.

Works referred to

1. Understanding by Design — Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, expanded second edition 2005.
2. Enhancing Teaching through Constructive Alignment — John Biggs, Higher Education, 1996.
3. The Process of Education — Jerome Bruner, 1960, for the original statement of the spiral.
4. Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction — Ralph W. Tyler, 1949.
5. Model-Based Approaches to Learning — Sense Publishers, 2010.
6. Teaching Chemistry: A Studybook — Sense Publishers, 2013, as a worked example of subject-specific sequencing.

Questions readers send

What is backward design in one sentence?

Decide what learners must be able to do at the end, decide what evidence would show they can do it, and only then choose the activities, so that every activity is answerable to a specific piece of evidence.

Is constructive alignment the same thing?

They overlap and answer different questions. Backward design is a sequence of design steps; constructive alignment, in John Biggs's formulation, is the property that outcomes, teaching activities and assessment tasks all address the same verbs. You can follow the steps and still end up misaligned if the assessment quietly rewards something else.

How much content should a course drop?

Whatever it takes for the remaining content to be practised and assessed. The useful reframing is that coverage without practice is not taught, only mentioned, so the decision is not between more and less content but between mentioning many things and teaching a few.

Does a spiral curriculum work?

Revisiting material at increasing depth is well supported, because it distributes practice and allows earlier ideas to be re-encoded with more structure. Its overhead is coordination: every return has to know what the previous pass established, which is why spirals fail in institutions where nobody owns the whole sequence.

Who should design the curriculum — the teacher or the institution?

A separation of concerns works better than either extreme. Institutions can usefully fix outcomes and assessment standards, which are the things that need to be comparable; teachers need control of sequence and activity, which is the part that has to respond to the specific room.

Where to go next

1. Learning theories The four families of learning theory compared on the same three questions: what each one can explain, what it cannot, and which teaching decisions it licenses.
2. Adult education What adult education research supports and what it only asserts: the six andragogical assumptions checked one at a time, plus the participation evidence.
3. Teacher development Which forms of teacher professional development change classroom practice, by how much, and how long the effect lasts before it decays.