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Steps in Planning Backwards: Early Lessons from the Schools

Author(s): Joe McDonald Source: Coalition of Essential Schools, Feb. 1992. Ordering Information

A number of schools within the Coalition of Essential Schools have begun to explore a strategy of schoolkeeping called "planning backwards." It takes aim at the dailiness of schooling -- that necessary churning-on in the life of a school which can easily drift into a numbing habit of self-absorption. In planning backwards, a school pauses from dailiness in order to create a vision of its graduates performing as the school hoped they would. Then the school takes stock of its efforts to fulfill this vision. Finally, it reorients its systems as necessary. From a vision of all its graduates using their minds well, the school plans backwards to these graduates' first days in school assessing the efficacy of structures, curricula, communications, the tempo and tone of school days, methods of teaching and learning, and more -- all by the light of the vision.1

Viewed backwards, an effort to turn out graduates who use their minds well depends upon good quality systems for goalsetting, standard setting, and accountability. These must be systems that enable fluid and substantive communication, that encourage and support collaboration, that respond quickly and effectively to the intellectual individuality of kids, and that maintain norms of continuous self-scrutiny. Early lessons from schools planning backwards suggest that schools may acquire such systems by taking four steps. In a jumble of metaphors here, I dub these steps defining a vision, building a platform, rewiring, and tuning.2 The first involves planning and deliberation. The second two are bold action steps. The last involves long-term maintenance.

Defining a Vision

Most high schools today are caught unawares in the rush of certain kinds of stories. One such story uses the old device of two parallel plotlines. In the first, kids study "vocational" subjects and end up in plumbing or hairdressing; in the other, kids study "academic" subjects and end up at Vassar or Penn State. The problem with the story is that it reflects our bad habit of dividing the technical from the intellectual, the practical from the theoretical. Life mixes up these things and schools should too. The fact is all kids in high school need more access to serious intellectual activity, and all need more firsthand experience with work as it is done beyond the secondary labor market of malls and fast-food franchises. Kids shouldn't have to choose between these opportunities.

There are also the "scope and sequence" stories. One of the most powerfully entrenched of these concerns a multi-year voyage toward calculus. Students of mathematics at nearly every juncture of the voyage ask their teachers, "Why do we have to do this stuff?" The teachers respond, "So you can continue on to the destination." Yet only a minuscule proportion of kids ever reaches the destination, and many still continue to wonder what the journey was about. After perhaps a year of college, they drop the study of mathematics forever.

To escape the grip of such stories, schools planning backwards have tried setting aside temporarily what is broadly called curriculum and instead simply imagine the school's candidates for graduation using their minds well. In its mind's eye, the school struggles to acquire a vision of integrated intellectual performance, unfogged by Regents exams, state curriculum requirements, Carnegie units, and SAT formats. Perhaps, in this vision, candidates for graduation are able to deal well with questions posed by expert strangers on matters they have spent months studying independently. Or perhaps they can discuss several tough texts in a graduation seminar, then write about the texts with skill, conviction, and insight. Perhaps they do this in two languages. Perhaps they show the sculpture they've created, the boat they've built, the technology they've contrived to solve a problem set before them -- or, even better, one they've set themselves. Whatever the particularities of the vision, the kids who animate it handle themselves in ways that make their teachers proud -- the math teacher who detects the application of quantitative reasoning, the history teacher who hears evidence of historical imagination, the art teacher who glimpses the underlying aesthetic sense, the advisor who knows exactly how far this kid has come.

These activities are what the Coalition of Essential Schools calls exhibitions. They originate as articulations of a school's vision -- movies for a mind's eye, portraying graduates using their minds well. These exhibitions, as orientations for a school's work, are an enormous improvement on "mission statements" and "visioning slogans" because they offer concrete images of real kids, because they have the power to stimulate teaching in ways that statements and slogans do not, and because they also function as assessment tools.3

Having imagined such exhibitions, the school then struggles to make them actual, by planning backwards. The struggle encompasses all the school's plans, all the way back to the student's first day in high school. What habits must teachers seek to instill, what practice must students have so that they can perform as well as in the vision? What assessment mechanisms along the way may provoke as well as record growth? In the most productive circumstances, such deliberations proceed against the backdrop of a new image for curriculum. What if curriculum were no longer a set of "streams" which kids enter so that they may be carried along to diverse destinations? What if it were instead a great scaffold, whose rigging all kids must climb to a significantly high point, though each in his or her own fashion and time?4

One way that schools ensure a whole vision, uncontaminated by what I call above the old gripping stories, is to invite all their stakeholders to participate in its fashioning. These include teachers, parents, and students, of course, but also some others whose greater remoteness from the dailiness of the school enriches as well as limits their counsel: business interests, scholars, partisans of local culture, champions of moral and political aims for schools.5

Building a Platform

The purpose of a school's vision is to orient the school's first moves, then to guide all subsequent ones. Yet, except in the cases of new schools whose first cohorts are still years from graduation, schools planning backwards must also dare to compare their new visions of the ideal graduate to the real kids they will graduate this year. In the metaphorical lingo of planning backwards, this is called building a platform. On the school's platform -- erected at first atop the same old curriculum, the same isolated teaching cells, the same hierarchical information systems -- current candidates for graduation are asked to exhibit by the light of the vision. Initial platforms tend to focus on some essential intellectual skill: writing a paper, reading and discussing a tough text, framing a problem, and so on -- one that obviously inheres in the school's vision, one that the whole faculty agrees is so fundamental that all graduates should possess it. Building a platform means daring to inquire whether students about to graduate do possess it.

So a platform is, first of all, an assessment device -- one that stands apart from senior course work, apart from the warm relations of students and teachers who have come to know each other well after years of working together. The platform design may involve public recitals, may resemble the presentation and defense of a doctoral thesis, may fill the gym with displays and artifacts (as in an art exhibit or a science fair), may command an expertly scored performance (as in an Olympic trial or the road test for a driver's license).

In the schools that have built them, these platforms are often partly ceremonial -- the intellectual equivalent of the senior prom. But the best of them are also rigorous: they "count" in the sense that seniors must pass them, and in the sense that teachers and soon to be seniors take great interest in the platform's processes and products. This interest proves generative intellectually and helps the school build an intellectual identity. Its kids may come to acknowledge proudly that their school puts intellectual demands on them, that it is more than the sum of its athletics and social life.

Just as significantly, the platform functions also as an instrument of institutional evaluation. Set apart as it is from the rush of school life, it provides a kind of observation deck upon which the faculty can stand to view its collective efforts -- to see the school's systems at work. This is a rare opportunity in schoolkeeping, yet it seems fundamental to the exercise of professional responsibility and reflective practice.6

Rewiring

What does the faculty espy from its platform? As I suggested above, it espies at first the same old curriculum, the same isolated teaching, the same hierarchical information systems -- but now by fresh light. In this light, questions emerge which could not emerge before. How do our ninth-graders' experiences in speaking and writing jibe with the demands of the twelfth-grade platform? What other platforms do we need to erect along the way to graduation? How can we keep better track of kids' progress? How can we show them what they are progressing toward? Now that we've watched our work collectively, how can we make the work itself more collective?

I do not mean, of course, that these questions emerge spontaneously, nor that a school's answers to them arise readily and without dispute. The early lesson from schools planning backwards is simply that they do emerge. And that is really something, since such questions are as rare in school as clean chalk trays.

Furthermore, an early lesson from the schools is that these questions lead to major overhauls of the school's systems. Those of us studying the phenomenon call this rewiring. We choose this metaphor in place of the common term restructuring in order to suggest that schooling is composed of networks for the exchange of energy and information, but networks that are typically inadequate to the load they should bear.

To understand the problem, one might well consider the point of view of a parent who wishes to know how her fourteen-year-old daughter is progressing in school. First, the parent is forced by the design of the school's wiring to qualify her question. Does she wish the answer in terms of expectations for the collegebound? By reference to the weighted grade-point average of the other kids in her class? By reference to the norms of the California Achievement Test? Or is she interested in affective measures of progress?

Yes, responds the parent to this last question, hoping for a more personal and integrated account. Well, comes the answer down the wires, make the rounds of your daughter's eight teachers on parent's night. Start each four minute conference with the question, "How's Gayle doing?" Then listen as the teachers of math, history, Spanish, and so on quote from their grade books and recount anecdotes from experience. Put all the information together yourself, knowing that nobody in the school routinely integrates this information, that even Gayle only rarely has access to it in any comprehensive form (which is the main reason, by the way, apart from any fear that she may not own up to the truth, why you cannot simply ask Gayle herself how she's doing). Meanwhile, ask her guidance counselor, for whom Gayle is likely to be largely a statistical profile, how she should be doing, and you'll get norms or threats of them: "We'll know more next year after she has taken the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test."

This account of a high school's wiring from the point of view of an inquiring parent is not an indictment of teachers nor of guidance counselors. It is an indictment of a system of information exchange where the wires run mostly parallel, where professional collaboration in an effort to provoke and assess the intellectual development of a single student is consequently quite rare, where nobody -- including teachers and kids themselves -- has the resources needed to hold in mind a detailed and integrated vision of where his or her work aims or ought to aim.

How does a school rewire? Quite early lessons suggest that a few quick steps are useful: the invention of new junctures at which, for example, teachers come together to exchange graded papers and discuss grading standards, or at which parents and teachers and members of the larger community come together to share perspectives on achievement, or at which classes combine across grades and levels to discuss the same texts or problems or to get involved in the same activity. But such efforts -- even regularly undertaken -- are not enough by themselves. More painful efforts must follow. For example, the school must dare to confront habits of isolated teaching and assessment and must force collaboration in the interests of kids. It must dredge its standards up out of secrecy and provide kids and parents with exemplars to consult. It must give teachers the time and the resources they need to communicate with each other and with parents. It must end batchprocessing of kids in tracks and must invent ways instead to honor the fact that kids differ as much within batches as across them. This will entail alternatives to the nearly exclusive reliance today on curriculum driven large group instruction, alternatives such as the addition to the curriculum of project work undertaken individually and in ensembles, the provision of studio and workshop time and space, the opportunity to enter intellectually oriented apprenticeships, and the cultivation of learning resources both within the community that is the school and also within the community outside the school.

This is, of course, a very demanding agenda. Few schools within the Coalition have yet taken up much of it. Early lessons from the pioneers, however, suggest that a useful strategy is to extend, embellish, and diversify the original platform. So, for example, one school in the Coalition began with a simple platform: in addition to completing all course requirements, all seniors must write a persuasive essay to a particular standard of performance in order to graduate. Since then, the school has extended this platform to include other writing-performance demands at other points in time, as well as a final math assessment. Soon it hopes to institute portfolio-based assessment in writing also, and a schoolwide project-based assessment in science. These may seem small steps given the scope of the agenda above, yet each entails new opportunities for communication among the faculty, new reporting and transcription systems, new mechanisms for standard-setting and keeping, new windows on the school's operations -- indeed, new commitments to assuring a quality education to kids who have never before enjoyed such assurance. These are all innovations in wiring, and their consequence is wiring better suited for the long haul of changes to come.

Tuning

At the Coalition of Essential Schools, we claim that if schools can get the wiring right -- including plenty of junction boxes inside the school and plenty of lines running to the outside -- then this wiring will serve well for quite some time. The exchange of information along the wiring, however, like telephone usage, is apt to shift continuously over time in terms of function, volume, and parties participating.

Some of this exchange of information involves what we call tuning. This is the process by which a school attends responsibly to its outside stakeholders. These include parents, of course, but a school has other stakeholders, too. One might argue that every citizen in the world has a stake in every single American school's outcomes -- whether, for example, its graduates have the skills and the ethics to participate responsibly in a global ecology, economy, and culture. In any case, every American community certainly has a substantial cultural and economic stake in its schools' work. And every American business has a stake in the quality of the schools its future employees attend. Finally, every American scholar and scholarly agency has a stake in how schools treat scholarship.

Tuning involves inquiry and response. What does the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics currently suggest should be the emphases of the mathematics curriculum? The school listens, then tunes to the newer frequency. What has been the experience of the class of 1990 in its first years of college or work? The school looks, then adjusts the preparation of the class of 1992. Which five human skills does the local business community most prize in a new worker?7 Which five human attitudes does the local cultural community most prize in a new adult? What might local professors of composition have to say about a sample of a school's senior essays? These are all tuning questions: teachers invite good people to answer them, then mull the answers over.

But how can schools possibly manage to tune themselves in this way, given all the other demands on their time and resources? One way is to exchange custody as well as information. The faculty at Central Park East Secondary School, a New York City public high school, gains time and tuning opportunity by sending its students off each week for a morning or afternoon of community based learning through community service.8 Another way is to integrate distance learning into the curriculum. Thayer High School, in rural New Hampshire, plans to connect its teachers and kids to remote others via electronic mail and video integrated into regular instruction.9 A third way is to cultivate a network of local critical friends. This is the strategy explicitly employed by the schools associated with New York's Center for Collaborative Education and, at least implicitly, by other innovative regional networks -- for example, the Philadelphia Schools Collaborative, the Southern Maine Partnership, the Illinois Alliance of Essential Schools, the Jefferson CountyþGheens Academy partnership, and the League of Professional Schools in Georgia. In effect, these communities of schools follow the lead of successful communities of teachers like the National Writing Project affiliates, the Foxfire networks, and the regional chapters of Educators for Social Responsibility. The former organizations do for schools what the latter do for individual teachers.

Conclusion

In introducing the four dimensions of planning backwards described above, I have called them steps. The metaphor works insofar as these four may best be taken up in the order in which I have described them. In this order, the metaphor also signifies that the four proceed from least to most difficult: defining a vision is at least one level of difficulty easier than building a platform, which is in turn much easier than rewiring. As I have suggested, only the most daring schools in the Coalition have seriously begun to rewire. Tuning is hardest of all, because American schools are deeply isolated from other worlds, including the one just outside their doors. Whenever I walk or ride past a high school building in the middle of a schoolday morning, I am astonished again at the contrast between its placid exterior demeanor and what I know to be the teeming life contained inside.

The steps metaphor breaks down, however, when one considers how -- unlike steps -- the four dimensions of planning backwards overlap and even circle back upon themselves. A school would be foolish, for example, to insist on establishing a complete and coherent vision before it dared to build a platform. In platform-building especially, the early lesson from the schools is that impetuousness is a virtue -- to do this work, one must quickly find a place to stand in order to observe. Another lesson is that platform building entails rewiring, so that schools timorously approaching this step may find pleasantly that they have already taken it. Finally, any school interested in planning backwards, one that seeks participation in the conversation about change that we call the Coalition of Essential Schools, has already taken a step out of isolation and so may be said to have begun to tune up.

Footnotes

1. For a comprehensive description of planning backwards, see Joseph P. McDonald, "Dilemmas of Planning Backwards," Studies on Exhibitions, No. 3, Coalition of Essential Schools, Brown University, Providence, RI (published in Teachers College Record, Fall 1992).
2. The source of these early lessons is research on planning backwards now under way at the Coalition of Essential Schools as part of its Exhibitions project.
3. See Theodore R. Sizer, Horace's School (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992) for an imaginative account of one fictionalized school's vision, manifest in a rich collection of exhibitions. See also Grant Wiggins, "Teaching to the (Authentic) Test," Educational Leadership 47 (April 1989), 41þ47.
4. The streams image comes from Britain and corresponds to our tracks. I've chosen the former because I think the curricular reality of American schooling too is much more that kids are carried along by powerful currents than that they power themselves along an arranged route. The scaffold image owes much to Howard Gardner; see his To Open Minds (New York: Basic, 1989) and especially The Unschooled Mind (New York: Basic, 1991).
5. For example, one school I know which had been chafing in the grip of the "all math is a step to calculus" story found support in the counsel of professors at its state's renowned engineering school. These professors expressed misgivings about the value of typical top- track mathematics; graduates of AP calculus, they reported, often demonstrated a resistance to application that was the ironic consequence of their success in school mathematics.
6. For a thorough description of three very different "platforms" now in place in member schools of the Coalition, as well as a longer treatment of the building phenomenon, see Joseph McDonald et al., Graduation by Exhibition (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1992). For a more complete account of the issues in assessment that platform-builders must confront, see Joseph P. McDonald, "Three Pictures of an Exhibition: Warm, Cool, and Hard," Studies on Exhibitions, No. 1, Coalition of Essential Schools, Brown University, Providence, RI (published in Phi Delta Kappan, February 1993).
7. For a national perspective on this question, see The Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS), What Work Requires of Schools (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor, June 1991).
8. For an insightful treatment of the possibilities inherent in one form of community-based learning, see Stephen F. Hamilton, Apprenticeship for Adulthood: Preparing Youth for the Future (New York: Free Press, 1990).
9. The centerpiece of the Thayer effort is a monthly, interactive cable (and satellite-dish) television program called "Here, Thayer, and Everywhere," which premiered on Mind Extension University in April 1992. For information, contact Elliot Washor at Thayer High School, 85 Parker Street, Winchester, NH 03470.

The Coalition of Essential Schools gratefully acknowledges the IBM Corporation and the UPS Foundation for their support of its research on Exhibitions.

The steps presented in this article are supplemented with supporting examples from three Essential schools in "Graduation By Exhibition: Assessing Genuine Achievement" by Joseph McDonald, Sidney Smith, Dorothy Turner, Marian Finney & Eileen Barton (Alexandria, VA: Association of Supervision & Curriculum Development 1992).

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