Tag: backward design

5 Easy Ways to Plan for Every Learner With UDL

Differentiation isn’t something you bolt on after the lesson is built. It’s a decision you make before you write a single activity.
⏱ 6 min read · By Matt Faulkner · Pedagogy / Planning

Picture the lesson plan taking shape on your screen. Content descriptor pasted in. Learning intention written. Main activity mapped out for the class. Then, right at the end, you add a line: “adjustment for Sarah,” or “extension for the early finishers.”

It feels like good practice. In practice, it’s also the wrong order. To illustrate, you built the lesson for an imagined average student, then patched it for everyone who didn’t fit. The patch usually works, for a while. As a result, you solve the same problem lesson after lesson — instead of solving it once at the planning stage.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) flips that order. Instead of building one pathway and adjusting it afterwards, you plan multiple ways in from the very first decision. Beyond that, it sits neatly alongside the backward design framework we’ve covered before. Same starting point — one extra lens over every choice that follows.

Why “Adjustments Later” Never Quite Works

The trouble with retrofitting isn’t the intent. It’s the timing. Every adjustment gets made under pressure, at the end of a planning session. In practice, that’s when your energy for creative problem-solving is lowest and the deadline is closest. Consequently, the graphic organiser gets left out — or the extension task becomes “read on quietly.”

At the same time, there’s a quieter cost. When adjustments arrive last, they read as exceptions to the “real” lesson. In other words, they’re not part of the plan — just a patch on it. Even so, students notice that framing, whether anyone says it aloud or not.

For example, we’ve covered low-prep differentiation moves elsewhere — the kind you reach for once a task is already built. UDL asks an earlier question instead. What if the task already worked for the widest range of learners, before any adjustment was needed?

What UDL Actually Asks You to Plan For

UDL, developed by CAST, organises planning around three questions rather than one. First, multiple means of engagement. Why would this student care — and does that reason hold for more than one kind of student? Second, multiple means of representation. Is the content available through more than one channel — text, image, spoken explanation? Third, multiple means of action and expression. Can students show what they know in more than one way, while still being judged against the same success criterion?

Put simply, none of those questions ask you to lower the learning intention. Instead, they ask you to widen the road leading to it.

UDL is not about lowering the bar. It’s about building more doors into the same room.

Where UDL Fits Inside Backward Design

If you already plan backwards from the learning intention, UDL doesn’t replace that process. In practice, it sharpens it. At Stage 1, ask whether the intention can be reached — and cared about — through more than one entry point. At Stage 2, ask whether your formative evidence has to look identical for every student. Even so, a spoken explanation can count as evidence too — just as validly as a written one. At Stage 3, build the variety in before you teach the lesson, not after you notice it’s needed.

That’s the shift in one sentence. Instead of asking who will struggle with this activity after it’s built, ask which students the design already leaves out.

A Year 4 Worked Example

For example, here’s what that looks like against a real content descriptor, rather than in the abstract.

🎯 UDL in Action — Year 4 Persuasive Writing
  • Curriculum anchor: AC9E4LY06 — Plan, create and revise written and multimodal texts, including persuasive texts.
  • Learning intention: “We are learning to persuade a reader using reasons and evidence.”
  • Engagement: Students choose their topic from a short, locally relevant list — not one topic assigned to everyone.
  • Representation: The teacher models the structure through a think-aloud, a labelled example, and a simple graphic organiser.
  • Action and expression: Students meet the same success criterion by writing a paragraph, recording a spoken pitch, or building an annotated poster.

In other words, notice what stayed constant — the content descriptor, the learning intention, and the success criterion. Only the entry points changed.

This Isn’t Differentiation Downward

For this reason, it’s worth being explicit here, because the two ideas get confused constantly. Differentiating downward means changing what a student is expected to learn — a simpler text, a lower target, a smaller ask. By contrast, UDL keeps the expectation identical for everyone and changes how students reach it.

Beyond that, this distinction matters for AITSL Standard 1.5 — and for the students in front of you. Planning for variability is not the same as planning for less.

Finally, once a lesson is built this way, a second question follows naturally. How do you adjust support in the moment, as students actually work through the task? That’s where frameworks like the Gradual Release of Responsibility come in — and it’s exactly where this series goes next.

💬 Your Turn! Think about your last unit plan. Where did the “adjustments” get added last — and what would it look like to build them in first instead? Share your experience below.

References

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). (2023). Australian Curriculum v9.0. https://v9.australiancurriculum.edu.au

Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). (2018). Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (Standard 1.5). https://www.aitsl.edu.au/teach/standards

CAST. (2024). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines (version 2.2). https://udlguidelines.cast.org

Novak, K. (2022). UDL now! A teacher’s guide to applying universal design for learning (2nd ed.). CAST Professional Publishing.

Rose, D. H., & Meyer, A. (2002). Teaching every student in the digital age: Universal design for learning. ASCD.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). ASCD.

5 Easy Steps to Fix the Missing Link in Assessment

Assessment · Planning

Assessment isn’t the last decision in a lesson plan — it’s four more decisions, and they only work as a chain.

⏱ 5 min read · By Matt Faulkner · Assessment / Pedagogy

Ask a room of preservice teachers what comes after “learning intention” and “success criteria” in a lesson plan, and most will say “the activity.” Ask what comes after that, and the answer gets vaguer — a formative check, added somewhere near the end, almost as an afterthought.

That’s not really anyone’s fault. Backward design tells you assessment comes before activities. What it doesn’t spell out is that assessment is not one decision. It’s a chain of decisions, and each link depends on the one before it.

Skip a link, and the chain still looks fine from a distance. It’s only when you go to use the evidence — for reporting, for grouping, for next week’s planning — that you notice something’s missing. This is the first of three posts unpacking that chain, starting with the two links most planning conversations skip.

The Missing Link in Backward Design

In our post on backward design, Stage 2 — “determine acceptable evidence” — sounds like a single step. In practice, it’s five separate decisions, and they only work as a chain.

Get the content descriptor right, and the learning intention should follow. Get the learning intention right, and the success criteria should follow. From there, though, teachers routinely stall. The assessment strategy gets chosen on instinct, and the record-keeping device gets chosen even later — often on the walk to the photocopier, five minutes before the lesson starts.

That’s the gap this post is about. Not the first three links, which we’ve covered in detail already, but the two that come after — and the discipline of choosing them together, not separately.

🧍 The Five-Link Assessment Chain
  • Content descriptor — what the curriculum actually requires
  • Learning intention — what students will know or be able to do
  • Success criteria — what meeting the intention looks like, in student language
  • Assessment strategy — how you’ll gather evidence
  • Record-keeping device — how that evidence is captured for later use

A Quick Primer: For, As and Of Learning

Before you choose a strategy, it helps to know which purpose you’re actually serving. Lorna Earl’s framework names three: assessment for learning, assessment as learning, and assessment of learning (Earl, 2003).

Assessment for learning is diagnostic and formative. It’s evidence you, the teacher, use in the moment to adjust what happens next. Assessment as learning hands that job to the student — self-monitoring against criteria they understand well enough to apply themselves. Assessment of learning is summative. It’s the judgement that gets reported, once the learning is done.

We’ve explored the for/as/of distinction in more depth before, so treat this as the short version. What matters here is simpler: know which purpose you’re serving before you pick a strategy. A strategy built for one purpose rarely does justice to another.

This isn’t just conceptual housekeeping. AITSL Standard 5 — assess, provide feedback and report — assumes you can name which purpose each piece of evidence serves. When for, as and of learning blur together, so does your evidence trail.

Worked Example: Extending Year 5 HASS Into Record-Keeping

Take the Year 5 HASS example from our backward design post. The content descriptor is AC9HS5K03 — the impact of colonial settlement on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. The learning intention: explain how colonial settlement affected Aboriginal Peoples’ lives, using specific evidence. The success criterion: describe at least two impacts, each supported by evidence from a source.

The assessment strategy was already chosen there — an exit ticket, collected before students leave the room. That’s assessment for learning: formative, immediate, used to shape tomorrow’s grouping. But an exit ticket from 25 students produces 25 individual pieces of evidence. Without a record-keeping device, all of it disappears the moment it’s read and set aside.

📋 Closing the Chain — HASS Example
  • Assessment strategy: exit ticket, two sentence starters
  • Purpose: assessment for learning — informs tomorrow’s grouping
  • Record-keeping device: a simple class checklist, one row per student
  • What it captures: who has two impacts with evidence, who doesn’t yet
  • What it misses: the quality of reasoning behind each impact — a limitation worth naming, not ignoring

Why Skipping a Link Breaks the Chain

A checklist works here because the question is genuinely binary — did the student meet the criterion, or not yet. Use the same checklist for something that needs to capture reasoning quality, and you’ll end up with a tidy spreadsheet that tells you almost nothing useful.

Compare that same lesson if the goal had been reasoning quality instead of two impacts. An anecdotal record — a few sentences noting how a student justified their answer — would have captured what the checklist could not, at the cost of more of your time. Neither device is wrong. The mismatch is choosing one without asking what the evidence actually needs to show.

That’s the trap. Record-keeping devices aren’t interchangeable, and a device that suits one assessment strategy can quietly undermine another. The mismatch rarely shows up until report-writing season, when the evidence you kept turns out not to answer the question you’re being asked. We’ll get into exactly which device suits which strategy in the next post in this series.

For now, the discipline that matters is simpler: choose your record-keeping device at the same time as your assessment strategy — not afterwards, once the marking pile has already landed on your desk. The same logic applies to a summative performance of worth, where the stakes for getting the record right are even higher.

“A learning intention without an aligned assessment strategy is a promise you can’t keep. A strategy without a record-keeping device is evidence you’ll never use.” — TeacherTalk

💬 Your Turn! When you’re planning, do you choose your record-keeping device deliberately — or does it get decided by whatever’s already open on your desk when the bell goes? Share what’s worked below.

References

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). (2023). Australian Curriculum v9.0. https://v9.australiancurriculum.edu.au

Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). (2018). Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (Standards 1, 2, 3 & 5). https://www.aitsl.edu.au/teach/standards

Earl, L. M. (2003). Assessment as learning: Using classroom assessment to maximise student learning. Corwin Press.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). ASCD.

How Smart Teachers Plan Backwards — and Get Better Results

Here is a question worth sitting with: when you plan a lesson, what do you plan first? If the answer is “the activity” — the game, the worksheet, the group task — you are in good company. Most new teachers start there. In practice, that instinct is also the source of one of the most common planning problems in Australian classrooms: lessons that are busy but not particularly purposeful.

The shift that separates competent planning from genuinely effective planning is deceptively simple. Expert teachers start at the end. They ask: what do students need to know or be able to do by the close of this lesson? From there, everything else flows backwards from that answer — the activities, the questions, the formative checks.

That approach has a name: backward design. Put simply, it means designing for learning rather than for activity. This post explains how it works, why the research supports it, and what it looks like in two real Australian classrooms — one in HASS, one in Maths.

Why “Covering the Content” Isn’t Planning

Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe introduced backward design in Understanding by Design (2005) — and it remains one of the most cited frameworks in curriculum planning. Their core argument is straightforward: if you design a lesson around an activity, the activity becomes the goal. If you design it around a learning outcome, the activity becomes the vehicle.

The difference matters more than it sounds. An activity-first lesson might be engaging and enjoyed by students. By contrast, a learning-first lesson does all of that and moves students measurably closer to a specific understanding. One fills time well. The other changes what students can do.

John Hattie’s research reinforces this. In Visible Learning for Teachers (2012), he identifies clear learning intentions and success criteria as among the highest-leverage moves a teacher can make — with an effect size of 0.75 on student achievement. That said, intentions only work when they are genuinely specific. “Students will learn about fractions” is not a learning intention. “Students will be able to add fractions with the same denominator and explain why the denominator stays the same” is.

The Three-Stage Planning Framework

Wiggins and McTighe describe backward design in three stages. In the Australian context, each maps directly onto the AITSL Professional Standards that preservice and early-career teachers are assessed against. For that reason, understanding the framework is not just good pedagogy — it is also good professional preparation.

🪜 Backward Design: Three Stages
  • Stage 1 — Identify desired results. What should students know, understand, and be able to do? This comes directly from the Australian Curriculum content descriptor and achievement standard for your year level. This is where AITSL Standard 2 (Know the content and how to teach it) does its work — you cannot write a learning intention for content you don’t understand deeply yourself.
  • Stage 2 — Determine acceptable evidence. How will you know students have learned it? This is your assessment — not just the end-of-unit test, but the formative check you build into the lesson itself. Exit tickets, questioning, observation, mini whiteboards. AITSL Standard 5 (Assess, provide feedback and report) lives here.
  • Stage 3 — Plan learning experiences. Only now do you choose activities — the ones that most efficiently move students from where they are to where Stage 1 says they need to be. This is AITSL Standard 3 (Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning) in action.

Notice the order. Assessment comes before activities. For most new teachers, that sequence feels backwards — even counterintuitive. In practice, it is the sequence that makes every other planning decision easier. Each activity can then be evaluated against one clear question: does this move students toward the learning intention, or does it just fill time nicely?

Stage 1 in Practice: Writing a Learning Intention That Works

A learning intention describes what students will learn — not what they will do. “Students will complete a fact file about ancient Egypt” is a task description. By contrast, “Students will identify two ways ancient Egyptians adapted their way of life to the Nile River” is a learning intention. The distinction is worth practising until it becomes automatic.

Hattie suggests sharing the learning intention with students at the start of the lesson — not as a compliance exercise, but because students who know where they are going are better placed to monitor their own progress. That self-monitoring is itself a high-leverage learning behaviour. For this reason, the learning intention pairs naturally with a success criterion: a student-facing description of what meeting the intention looks like in practice. The Australian Curriculum v9.0 achievement standards are the most reliable anchor for writing success criteria at the right level.

✏️ Learning Intention vs Success Criterion — The Difference
  • Learning intention: “We are learning to identify how the features of a place influence the way people live.” (The what of learning — teacher-language, curriculum-anchored.)
  • Success criterion: “I can name two features of the Nile River and explain how each one shaped life for ancient Egyptians.” (The how will I know — student-language, observable, specific.)
  • Not this: “We are learning about ancient Egypt.” (Too broad — students cannot self-assess against it, and neither can you.)

AITSL Standard 1 (Know students and how they learn) shapes how you write these. A success criterion pitched at the wrong level — too abstract for Year 3, too simple for Year 6 — will not function as a genuine reference point for students. In other words, knowing your cohort is not separate from writing good intentions. It is part of the same act.

Worked Example 1: Year 5 HASS

The following example applies backward design to a Year 5 HASS lesson on colonial Australia, anchored to the Australian Curriculum.

📋 Backward Design in Action — Year 5 HASS
  • Curriculum anchor: AC9HS5K03 — The impact of colonial settlement on the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.
  • Stage 1 — Learning intention: “We are learning to explain how colonial settlement affected the lives of Aboriginal Peoples, using specific evidence.”
  • Success criterion: “I can describe at least two impacts of colonial settlement on Aboriginal Peoples and support each with a piece of evidence from a source.”
  • Stage 2 — Formative evidence: An exit ticket — students write two sentence starters: “One impact was… because the evidence shows…” and “Another impact was… For example…” This is collected before students leave and informs the next lesson’s starting point. For more on making exit tickets work, see our post on formative assessment strategies.
  • Stage 3 — Learning activities: (a) Paired analysis of two short primary sources — a settler diary entry and an account from an Aboriginal perspective. (b) Structured discussion: what do these sources agree on? What do they show differently? (c) Individual written response using the exit ticket stems. The Venn diagram activity — which we’ve discussed before as an alternative to the overused KWL chart — works well at step (b) to surface the contrast between sources.
  • AITSL connection: Standard 1.4 (Strategies for teaching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students) and Standard 2.4 (Understand and respect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people) are both directly relevant here. Source selection and discussion framing must be handled with cultural care and, where possible, informed by community consultation.

Worked Example 2: Year 3 Maths

The same framework applies equally to Maths — where the temptation to jump straight to a worksheet or manipulative activity is especially strong. Even so, the three-stage sequence holds. Start with what students need to understand; build the assessment check; then choose activities that close the gap.

📋 Backward Design in Action — Year 3 Maths
  • Curriculum anchor: AC9M3N04 — Multiply and divide using a range of mental and informal written strategies.
  • Stage 1 — Learning intention: “We are learning to use an array to show how multiplication works and explain what the rows and columns represent.”
  • Success criterion: “I can draw an array for a multiplication fact, label the rows and columns, and write the matching number sentence.”
  • Stage 2 — Formative evidence: Mini whiteboard check — teacher calls a multiplication fact (e.g. 3 × 4), students draw the array and hold it up simultaneously. Teacher scans for: correct dimensions, correct orientation, students who have drawn repeated addition rather than an array. That pattern in the errors pinpoints exactly where re-teaching is needed. See our post on reading the room mid-lesson for more on using student responses as real-time data.
  • Stage 3 — Learning activities: (a) Hook: teacher places 12 counters on a document camera and asks — “how many ways can I arrange these into equal rows?” Students explore with their own counters. (b) Explicit teaching: name the array, define rows and columns, connect to the number sentence. (c) Guided practice: three teacher-led examples with student input. (d) Independent practice: students draw and label three arrays of their choice, then write the matching number sentence. (e) Mini whiteboard exit check as described above.
  • AITSL connection: Standard 2.1 (Content and teaching strategies of the teaching area) — understanding why arrays work (not just how to draw them) is essential before teaching this lesson. Standard 3.3 (Use teaching strategies) — the move from concrete (counters) to representational (drawn array) to abstract (number sentence) is the CRA sequence, and it should be deliberate, not accidental.

The Teaching-Learning Cycle: Beyond a Single Lesson

Backward design works for a single lesson. It works even better when it organises a whole unit. The teaching-learning cycle used across Australian curriculum areas — building the field, deconstruction, joint construction, independent construction — is itself a backward-designed structure. You begin with the end text or performance in mind and work back through the scaffolding students need to get there.

For new teachers, the most practical application is this: before you plan any lesson in a unit, write the end-of-unit assessment task first. Not after you’ve taught everything — before. That task becomes your compass. Consequently, every lesson can be evaluated against one question: does this move students closer to being able to do that?

Beyond that, this approach connects directly to what we’ve explored in our posts on designing a performance of worth and feedback that feeds forward — both of which assume a clear destination that students are working toward. Without a backward-designed starting point, those strategies lose their anchor.

A Note on Using AI in This Process

If you are using AI to support your planning — and there are good reasons to — backward design gives you a much stronger prompt structure. Instead of asking AI to “write a lesson plan on fractions,” give it your learning intention, your success criterion, and your formative check. From there, ask it to suggest activities that bridge the gap. That sequence produces something genuinely useful. By contrast, starting with “write me a lesson” produces something generic.

In other words, the quality of your AI output is a direct reflection of how clearly you have done Stage 1 yourself first. The framework does not become less relevant when AI is involved. If anything, it becomes more important.

The One-Page Planning Habit

For preservice teachers on prac, and for first-year teachers building confidence, a full backward-design unit plan for every lesson is not realistic. That said, the thinking behind backward design can be applied in under five minutes per lesson with a simple habit. Before you open any planning document, write three things on a sticky note.

🎯 The Three-Question Planning Check
  • What will students be able to do by the end that they couldn’t do at the start? (Your learning intention — one specific, observable thing.)
  • How will I know if they’ve got there? (Your formative check — exit ticket, whiteboard, observation, question.)
  • What is the most direct path from here to there? (Your activity sequence — chosen because it serves the intention, not because it fills the time.)

Those three questions, answered honestly before you start planning the rest, will improve your lessons more reliably than any template, resource pack, or planning app. They are the essence of what AITSL Standard 3 asks of you. Put simply, they are the difference between a lesson that covers content and a lesson that builds learning.

“Don’t ask ‘what will I teach today?’ Ask ‘what will students be able to do at the end that they couldn’t do at the start?’ The answer to the second question is your lesson.” — TeacherTalk

💬 Your Turn! Do you plan backwards from the learning intention — or do you start with the activity and work forward? And if you’ve made the switch to backward design, what changed for you? Share below — your experience is exactly what another new teacher needs to read this week.

References

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). (2023). Australian Curriculum v9.0. https://v9.australiancurriculum.edu.au

Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). (2018). Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (Standards 1, 2, 3 & 5). https://www.aitsl.edu.au/teach/standards

Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximising impact on learning. Routledge.

Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). ASCD.