Education Commons^™

Backwards By Design Project Assessment Write-Up, Michelle Saint

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

In Fall 2012, I taught Phil 355: Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. I used this course as an opportunity to test a new pedagogical technique. I will call this pedagogical technique the Incremental Exercises Model (IEM). Below, I will quickly summarize the course and its learning goals. Second, I will explain my previous method of meeting these learning goals. Third, I will explain IEM and how I implemented it in this particular class. Finally, I will provide some concluding observations about the successes and failures of this technique.

Backwards By Design Implementation Report, Kristina Luce

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

As part of my participation in the Backwards by Design Retreat during summer of 2012, I chose to design the first course of the three-part series of courses on writing required for the Art History Major. A/HI 271: Introduction to Writing and Critical Thinking is also a GUR.

My goal overarching goal was to implement the idea of a threshold concept within the course, and during the retreat I identified that concept as:

In academic writing, well-grounded claims are understood to emerge out of evidence, but in art historical writing, as in any interpretive writing, it is essential to understand …

A Process For Engagement With Threshold Concepts In Spanish Composition, Sean Dwyer

Backward by Design Mini-Studies

Numerous practices and assignments discussed at the 2012 Backwards by Design Curriculum Workshop appeal to me as sources of creativity in the classroom. Some will suit courses I teach in the future. For this year, I faced an issue: I am working with students whose classroom vocabulary is equivalent to that of a three-year-old, because I am teaching first-year Spanish.

The most applicable idea, one that energized me greatly, was the identification of threshold concepts. Working backward from that identification, I sought ways to implement practices that would, I hoped, bring those concepts permanently into my students’ approach to writing …