TITLE: Starting at the End and Working Backwards
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 28, 2011 4:11 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
A couple of weeks ago, many people were discussing
this response by Jeff Bezos
to a question at Amazon's shareholder meeting, in a nutshell,
"I don't see the company failing much these days. Is it
taking enough risks?" Understandably, most of the discussion
was about Bezos's description of how Amazon's corporate
culture supports long-term vision and incremental innovation.
Again, in a nutshell, "We are stubborn on vision. We are
flexible on details."
But the passage that jumped out to the faculty member in me
was this one:
We start with the customer and work backwards. And, very
importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long
periods of time.
First let me say that I do not believe that students are the
"customers" of a university or academic department. They
are a strange mix of many things, including product,
collaborator, and customer. Still, the idea of starting
with the student and working backwards strikes me as an
intriguing but uncommon way for faculty to think about their
curricula and courses. We talk a lot these days about
student outcomes assessment, which can be a useful tool for
accountability and continuous feedback
in curriculum design but which is usually treated as a chore
added on after the fact to courses we think are best.
Even when faculties do start with the student, they tend to
start at the beginning -- "the basics" -- and design their
first-year courses around what they think their students
need to know for the rest of the program. The real starting
point is the body of knowledge that we think constitutes the
discipline. We design courses around the topics of the
discipline and, to the extent we think of students, we think
of how to teach the basic ideas and skills they need to master
those topical areas.
The above is a generalization, both of how the faculties I
have been a part of seem to work and of how the faculties my
colleagues describe to me seem to work. But I do not think
that it is so inaccurate as to be not useful.
So that is the context in which I thought about Bezos's
remark and began to think. What if we start with what we
would like for our students to know and be able to do on
graduation day, and work backwards? Start curriculum design
not with CS 1 but with a capstone project course. What will
students be able to do in that course if we have done a good
job preparing them? Create one or more courses that prepare
them for the project. Recurse.
Yes, I know, education is about more than concrete skills,
and it is more complicated than stacking one block on top of
another. I am just trying think outside of the self-imposed
constraints that usually hem us in academia and see where we
might go.
I have written about something similar before, Dave West's
and Pam Rostal's vision of competency-based curriculum design
as presented at the
OOPSLA 2005 Educators' Symposium
and elaborated in a
ChiliPLoP 2008 hot topic.
But I don't know about any schools have truly started at the
endpoint and worked backward. If you so, please
let me know.
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