Podcast Episode
Episode Description
In this episode, I sit down with Jay McTighe to revisit the core principles of backward design and why they matter more than ever in today’s classrooms.
We unpack the ongoing tension between content coverage and deep learning, and what it really means to design for understanding and transfer. Our conversation explores the power of performance tasks as a way to shift from simply learning content to applying learning in meaningful, authentic contexts.
We also examine how AI can serve as a design partner, helping educators clarify goals, rethink assessment, and create more purposeful learning experiences.
Check out Jay’s work!
Episode Transcript
This transcript was generated using AI transcription tools to support accessibility and provide a searchable, readable version of the podcast. While we’ve reviewed and lightly edited the content for clarity, there may still be occasional errors or omissions.
Catlin Tucker
Welcome to The Balance. I’m Doctor Catlin Tucker and today my guest is Jay McTighe. Jay is an accomplished author. I think he’s coauthored 18 or more books. He’s really well known for his work with Grant Wiggins on understanding by design for teachers. Whenever you hear backward design, that’s really what we’re talking about. I use many of his resources and books in my graduate courses with my teachers in training, and Jay is just one of the loveliest people, one of my favorite educators to chat with and learn from. So I asked him if he’d come back on the podcast to talk about all things education. So very excited to have him back. Well, I am so excited to have you back on the podcast. Jay. Gosh, it’s probably been like three years now since our last conversation. And when I invited Jay back on because I know he just finished a brand new book, it was actually Jay’s idea to kind of just have this be more conversational about education and kind of threading our work together. And then I thought that was going to be like, so easy. We’re not going to worry too much about planning. And then of course, Jay McTighe sends me a very thorough, “Hey, how about we backward design this conversation, or we approach it from a backward design?” So I want to give you a chance to just say hello. For anybody who hasn’t had the pleasure of hearing you speak or doesn’t know a ton about your work, why don’t you just share a little bit about that and then we’ll dive in.
Jay McTighe
Sounds good. Well, hello, everyone. And I’m delighted to be back with Catlin because I admire her work and have been following it closely. And so we did want this to be at least I want it to be a conversation back and forth. We certainly have some mutual interests and areas of belief about learning. You know, my background is long, and I’ll give you the short version. Probably the most relevant is my work with Grant Wiggins on the Understanding by Design framework, which the original book was published in 1997. But it’s still around. And the most recent book that I just finished looks at how the Understanding by Design framework can be applied effectively in the higher education world of college and university, both coursework and program planning. Thinking about an entire program. So there are a lot of details under the hood. But that’s basically my work, around Understanding by Design.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah, I have always been such a big admirer of backward design, Understanding by Design. Jay, you know, I use the books with my own graduate students. I even had the pleasure of bringing Jay into a virtual session once to like, answer questions for my students. And so I love the idea of kind of formatting today’s conversation by starting with that first step, identifying desired results. Thinking about that process in education and also kind of threading through now, the role that I can play in some of this work for us. So, you want to kick it off? You want me to start talking? What do you prefer? I feel like you should kick it off. You’re the guest.
Jay McTighe
I will highlight what Grant Wiggins and I have described as three stages of backward design. The concept, by the way, of backward design is not original to Grant or myself. It’s just a solid planning framework. But we stress it’s used in curriculum planning. And we propose there are three stages for planning anything. We’ll keep it to curriculum and teaching and assessment. So stage one is identify desired results. And I’ll say more about that in a moment. But what are the goals of learning toward which we are teaching, toward which our curriculum is pointed. Stage two is at the heart of the planning process for me because stage two asks us to think like assessors, not teachers, just yet. Stage two asks what evidence of learning do we need? Given the goals that we’ve identified in stage one? And because there are different goals for learning, there’s knowledge and skill objectives, there’s conceptual understandings, and there’s what I like to call transfer goals. We need different kinds of assessment evidence to determine whether kids are achieving those goals. And then stage three is where we plan learning and our teaching. So the teacher planning, including lesson planning, occurs in stage three. But backward design reminds us not to just march through a textbook or tick off a list of standards, or even plan cool activities for kids, unless and until we’re clear about those long- and short-term goals in stage one, and we’ve thought about the evidence we need in stage two. So that’s that’s backward design in a nutshell. Yeah. My thinking about that for our conversation, if we start with stage one, I’m thinking of at least three categories of learning goals that will be fun to explore. One is just learning goals. In traditional disciplines, the traditional content areas. But there’s a big question even there, which is what content is most worth addressing, since there’s typically too much content in state standards for different subjects.
Catlin Tucker
And always, always too much.
Jay McTighe
A second category would be encompassed by the profile work, the portrait of a graduate work, that some states and many school districts and individual schools have identified. Those competencies that cut across traditional academic subject areas. And the third is something that you’ve done such wonderful work in defining the outcomes and the skills important in an AI world for students. Yeah.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah, for sure. And threading. I love the idea of threading these things together because so often there are just far too many standards and too much curriculum in content that teachers feel that there’s this pressure to cover. And then you sometimes have the portrait of a graduate conversation happening and almost what feels like a different silo. Right? Like everything is so separated and it makes it hard to feel like we can actually kind of cultivate the kind of young people that we truly want to be sending out into this world to be successful.
Jay McTighe
So in my work with Understanding by Design and Grant Wiggins, we proposed that we can think about, categorically speaking, three types of learning goals. And I’ll summarize this briefly. One type, which is familiar, of course, to everyone we call acquisition goals, namely what knowledge. And I’m referring basically to factual knowledge or basic concepts should students acquire when they’re learning new material, and also what skills, including basic skills, should students acquire? So this category is very familiar. These are knowledge and skill objectives and state standards. Describe or identify in great detail what students should know and do. So that’s an important category and I think of it as foundational knowledge and skills. The second goal type I’d describe is understanding what do we want students to really understand deeply? both in terms of concepts but also processes. And I hope listeners would agree that a student might know something as in factually know it, but not understand it, or can’t effectively apply it. So understanding is more than just a lot of knowledge. And thirdly, we have transfer the ability to take what’s been learned in one situation and effectively apply that learning to something else, in fact, something they’ve never seen before. And my contention, Catlin, is that a modern education should ultimately be working toward transfer. If we know anything about today’s world and the world that our students will inherit in the future, it’s ever changing. We’re confronted with new opportunities and challenges that haven’t been predictable and rote learning won’t equip a learner to navigate novelty. No. Yeah, but if you think about it, you can’t transfer something if you don’t understand it. If all you have is rote learning, all a student can do is give back what was told to them in the way it was told or do a formulaic five paragraph essay kind of response. So I like to say understanding begets transfer or enables transfer. And so these three goal types categorically speaking, while not new and while interrelated, are not identical. And they’re distinctions matter. They matter in terms of how kids develop these capacities which has an impact on how we teach, a pedagogical implication. And I hope the listeners would also agree that the different goal types influence what and how we assess. Right. If I want to see if a student knows something, an objective test or a quiz will tell me that you can say, gee, I got 88% correct on this test, the facts. But if I want to see a student understands and can transfer their learning, I need more of a performance-based measure that has them apply their learning and explain what they’ve done to see they really understand and can apply. So those those broad categories, I think are useful, broadly speaking and compelling. Okay. I just said one more thing.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah. No, no. You’re talking and my mind is spinning.
Jay McTighe
It is, for unpacking standards.
Catlin Tucker
Yes.
Jay McTighe
My experience in looking at standards, both in the U.S., both national and state, but also Canadian provinces, Australian national curriculum and other sites is that the standards are often an unhelpful mix of different goal types, but they’re not always distinguished as such. One of the things we know from John Hattie’s research is that teacher clarity is one of the highest you’ll factors that influences student learning and achievement. And what dimension of teacher clarity is knowing exactly the kind of thing you’re working toward. Kind of learning goals and what those different goal types mean for how you teach and how you set.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah. And one of the things that I love about getting really clear on the desired result, the destination for learning in a unit or a learning cycle is that teachers, you know, there is so much in their standards, but then it’s almost like we can start to prioritize what are the standards, the skills, the knowledge that students are going to need if the goal is truly to develop a deep understanding, to be able to transfer this learning. And sometimes that helps us just weed out some of the unless they’re just distracting standards, right? They’re important, but they’re not the priority. Or like the the target standards that we need to make sure we are really the ones we’re explicitly teaching, We’re allowing kids opportunities to really grapple with. We’re collecting that informal data to track that progress, like how much, how much are they truly understanding? And so I think not just the teacher clarity piece, but also that ability to get really clear on where do we spend our time and energy here. If this is the goal that we want kids to get to at the end of this unit.
Jay McTighe
Yeah, absolutely. Well said. A slightly more radical view of how we think about content and how we prioritize it is to suggest that rather than thinking about all the content we must cover. And there’s too much. Think about our goal in terms of what we want our students to be able to do with the content they’re learning. So you frame your teaching around desired applications or performances. And that leads me to one of my favorite analogies. Think about athletic coaches for team sports. Right. The coach of team sports, whether it’s five year olds learning soccer or professionals or anywhere in between. The coach always has the game in mind. Right. And the game involves authentic performance. Every game is different, so the players have to transfer, if you will, what they’ve learned in practice, on the field, on the court and on the ice. So if the goal of the game is transfer of performance, the coach plans backward with the players he or she has. And in practice, they develop the knowledge base needed. Right. You can’t play without knowing the rules. There’s a place for knowledge for sure. You work on skills in practice, both individual skills and team skills. But the coach also develops understandings, also known as game strategy. But but here’s where the analogy goes. The coach always has a game in mind. And by the way, I’ve never heard an athletic coach of team sportss say to me and say, “Yeah, I don’t have time for those games. They take all afternoon. How can I ever cover my playbook? So true. But but you hear the equivalent by teachers that performance test that takes three class periods. Yeah. Or that project’s a week long. I’ve got too much content to cover. The coach understands that the playbook is a resource. The goal is not to cover it. The goal is to use it to equip the players for the game. And I would submit that whether it’s the textbook or even the standards should be thought of similarly. Our goal is not to cover every standard in the order it’s listed in a standards document. Our goal is to prepare students to use their learning well. Not all standards of equal value. And that’s our prioritizing frame the game. Yeah.
Catlin Tucker
How much do you think the leader’s role matters? Because I work with so many schools and teachers and there is that I just have to get through it. I just have to cover it too, which immediately my brain, I’m just thinking, what is the value of covering it? If students don’t understand, they’re not going to retain it. They’re they’re not applying it. They’re not using it any way that they see as useful, which can then obviously create that backward or that feedback loop of like, this is valuable. This is meaningful because I’m going to use it in this way. But I feel like so many teachers get the message that, like, you got to cover it, you got to get through it. You got to stay on pacing guide. So I’m curious where in your work, where do you think the big levers are in terms of shifting on a school campus or in a district? This kind of messaging that teachers get around? What is the actual value of the work we’re doing in classrooms? What should be the goal of student learning?
Jay McTighe
You know, you’re absolutely right in that I have seen it for really decades now. The pressure, often from administrators, to make sure you cover all the standards and the unwritten, often unspoken but implied message: it might be on the state test. Right? Right. So a couple of thoughts on that. First of all, let’s literally think about the word cover. One connotation is like a bedspread or a tablecloth. It skims the surface. Is that what we want to do? Skim the surface by talking faster in class so we can cover more. That’s not going to lead to deep, lasting learning where the kids can apply, right? And the more onerous connotation is to cover up. And Grant Wiggins and I have always turn that around and said our goal is to uncover the big ideas in the, in the subject matter and the content we teach. And by the way there’s a little riff on this. We use the word discipline right. Mathematics is a discipline. Science is a discipline. The arts are disciplines. What is the discipline? It’s more than just an accretion of a body of knowledge in a silo. A discipline refers to a disciplined way of thinking. And so when we think about covering stuff that implies kind of declarative knowledge, there’s a lot of facts to be covered as opposed to we want to uncover the discipline and we want to develop the discipline way of thinking as an artist, as a scientist, as a mathematician, because it’s the way of thinking that develops and invalidates the knowledge that we have. Yeah. So it reminds us that there are two strands in every discipline. There’s the declarative knowledge, the quote content of facts concepts. But there are also the procedures or practices of the discipline which is the discipline way of thinking. And we want to honor the disciplines. We want to concurrently address both strands of coverage kind of implies you’re just in the declarative knowledge side of things. That’s what one thought two is. And we may get into this more detail. But the test worry. If we don’t cover it then it might be on the test and they won’t do well. Well first of all you implied this and we can go into more detail here. If the teacher just covers content superficially the kids aren’t going to understand it. It’s not going to last. If they don’t see it as relevant. They don’t even want to pay attention. So yeah, that’s not going to equip them for a state test. The second point on the state test, I’ll frame it as a question. What are the most likely missed items on state tests, whether it’s items involving reading or, say, mathematics? Most often, those items are not low-level Depth of Knowledge 1. They’re Depth of Knowledge 3. And you know this very well being an English person, kids are given a reading passage they’ve never seen before and they have to interpret it. Yeah. In mathematics they’re given a word problem they’ve never seen before. And even though the format may be multiple choice, people can fight format with cognitive demand. The the math problems that are most likely missed are multiple steps require mathematical reasoning, and the distractor items are because you didn’t think it through carefully. The catch get my therefore is the best test prep is not doing a lot of test prep worksheets or a low level coverage. It’s engaging students in higher order thinking, interpretation, inference, problem solving, reasoning, explaining your work, and confronting whether it’s new texts or new problems you’ve never seen before.
Catlin Tucker
I totally agree, and getting kids more comfortable. I think also in those spaces of productive mental struggle, right? I think so often in classrooms where the focus is on covering the content, there’s a lot of direct instruction. Students are in these very like passive consumptive roles. They’re not being challenged to think critically, to engage in discussion, to pull things apart, to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. And then you get them in front of something they don’t know on a test like this. And they just shut down their they don’t have any of that stamina to really think about. How might they figure this out? What have I learned before that I can transfer to this task right here to try to make sense of it, to try to solve it, to try to work through it. And that’s another piece of the way that learning and teaching is set up in so many classrooms that I worry about is we have so many students that as soon as they hit something they don’t know, they’re just like, I don’t know how to do that. And that’s really not going to fly in a world where they are going to have to be constantly learning.
Jay McTighe
Absolutely. And it’s just a reminder that in the mathematics standards, one of the practices, it refers to perseverance. Just that habit of not giving up or figuring out what to do when you don’t get an immediate answer.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah, totally.
Jay McTighe
So I’ll go ahead. Oh okay. So thinking about sort of three buckets of learning goals: disciplines, portrait of a graduate competencies, And then the AI skills which I want you to take the lead on. On the discipline side, The EBD framework is pretty clear. We’re suggesting that programmatically for subject areas, the subject area leaders and teachers identify a small number of what we’ve called long term transfer goals. Just declaring this is what we’re working toward. This is these are the games we want our kids to play when they graduate. So they’re long term. They’re stated as performance goals that involve transfer. And once we’re clear on those, they become our North Star. And we plan backward from from those to build our curriculum going forward. Underneath those are the understandings that kids are going to need to transfer. And we’re going to layer those from simpler to more sophisticated across the grades, just as you beautifully identify those skill sets building for AI competence. And then we have companion essential questions in there to engage, to help prioritize the curriculum through the questions and to engage student thinking and building their understanding. So that’s that’s my view on the discipline side. We’re not going to try to cover everything equally. We’re going to plan backward from transfer design understandings and building on foundational knowledge and skills.
Catlin Tucker
Right. Right. Yeah. I’ll be curious as I’m like, I don’t know whether the AI skills-before-tools work that I’ve done like exactly where it falls in because it almost makes me want to start talking about this idea of, like, working kids toward an assessment, like a performance task. But I think for me, so much of my work in that skills before tools, trying to identify what are those foundational skills that students need to use, I strategically, responsibly, and that skill development has to happen before they ever sit in front of a piece of technology or an AI tool. And so many of them, I think, could work beautifully as kind of woven into this larger conversation about what are we working toward and how might these skills also be something we want to keep in mind as we make progress toward that desired result? So when I break, when I broke it down and I was thinking, you know, I want to identify like purpose and questioning, why is purpose setting and questioning such an important skill pairing versus being really clear in communication that clarity and communication, piece evaluation and judgment, revision and improvement, and then the ethical awareness and responsibility. For me, I can see all of these these pieces having like really interesting roles in that pathway to the desired result, to support that deeper understanding, to support that work toward a transfer goal. And hopefully a lot of those skills also, at least the the portraits of graduate, the profiles I’ve seen, there’s so much beautiful like overlap there with the, you know, students who are developing these skills of evaluation, judgment, revision, improvement, etc. aligns with so much of what we try to cultivate in learners as we think about sending them out into college or career pathways post-school as well.
Jay McTighe
Yeah. No. Absolutely. In the in the upbeat frame of transfer understanding and acquisition type of goals, the portrait of a graduate, competencies are inherently transfer goals. We want to develop critical thinkers global citizens, but create creative individuals, cooperative workers and team members. And in your framework, that I love, in the guidebook that you prepared for, I inherently for me, the transfer goals are just what you said verbally a few minutes ago. We want to develop students who can use AI tools effectively, responsibly, and ethically. That’s our long term goal. Yeah, but then you plan backward, and you’re doing a very systematic building block of the skill sets that are underneath that broad, that broad category.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah. And to your point with the other, the discipline kind of, more discipline specific transfer goals, it’s like, I love I’ve always loved how you talk about that, like spiraling up. Right. Like we’re all kind of working toward these goals. But like over time, students are incrementally kind of making that progress in developing those understandings at different levels. And that’s how I see those kind of AI skills, those foundational skills kind of working as well. Like they’re going to look really different at like k three as students are working versus four six and seven nine and 1012.
Jay McTighe
One thing it’s been interesting for me to work on it, while I call it the more macro or programmatic level, is the idea of spiraling essential questions. So rather than having them by grade level or by course or not even necessarily by division level, high school, middle, elementary, but some that will spiral through with the recognition that you’re going to have to make kid friendly version for for primary grades. But just the idea of how do I know what to believe in what an AI gives me. It’s such a an overarching question. You can begin that with third or fourth graders all the way up to college students. The sophistication of how you answer that question and what do you think about will grow. But the question provides an intellectual throughline. Across the grade. So that’s been an interesting facet of of my work kind of programmatically.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah.
Jay McTighe
And I see that in your guidebook to kind of why divisions.
Catlin Tucker
It’s okay. Yeah. Hoping for that. Yeah. Because even like I, I think one of the central questions that I am really thinking about all the time with AI is that question around how do I know the thinking is my own, or how do I know I stayed in control of the thinking here and not something to your point where we really don’t want students offloading their thinking or using AI as a shortcut, but how do we really teach them to retain that ownership in their interactions with AI? So I could see these as being really powerful questions for students to be exploring throughout their entire educational journey. And to your point, the way in which a fourth or fifth grader is kind of tackling that question versus a 1012 grader who’s maybe citing and talking about the role of AI in a lot of detail in the process, could be wildly different.
Jay McTighe
Yeah. But you want those ideally you want those essential questions in their head when they’re not with you as a teacher or they’re not in school. Yeah. And they’re out in the world.
Catlin Tucker
Just ingrained.
Jay McTighe
Just the idea of ethical use that, you know, you should Google it rather than AI it for a simple question because there’s seven times to nine times more energy use if you have the same query to an AI tool, for instance.
Catlin Tucker
Right.
Jay McTighe
And that that’s an ethical consideration. Yeah. So, I want to play a kind of a move into stage two, but I want to come back to the use of AI by teachers as well as by students. That that’s a big, big category. But stage two, a backward design asks us to think about assessment evidence. And if we’re clear about long term transfer goals, whether they be within disciplines or for AI use or portrait of a graduate competencies. We, we want to be thinking about the assessment evidence appropriate for those goals. And my contention is as I know I believe is yours, that for many of the things we value the most, we need more performance based evidence rather than just kind of fact tests or skill checks. There’s a place for those, but it’s at the bottom of the of the ladder. But it seems to me that the confluence of disciplinary goals, portrait competencies like creative thinking in and the skill sets needed by students in an AI world come together through rich, authentic performance tests.
Catlin Tucker
Yes. Yes. I almost think it just to dovetail on one of the things you just said, though, that the the things that a lot of teachers are assessing the do you understand the information? Are you retaining the the facts? Do you have basic, ability to apply skills? To me, it’s like if we’re assessing that, that’s what I want. Formative assessment throughout the learning pathway to focus on that way, the actual assessment, the summative, the performance task at the end, it can really focus on the deep understanding and the transfer. And if we’ve been really diligent at that informal formative assessment along the pathway to support kids and understanding concepts and really getting proficiency around skills, then that we’re really setting them up for success in that that transfer at the end.
Jay McTighe
Yeah. No. Exactly right. It’s also interesting to think about the formative assessment unfolding, culminating in something that might be more at the end, more evaluative, is that potentially one can think about you’re collecting a body of evidence along the way. And you’re able to therefore trace growth or improvement which, which I’ve always argued ideally in the ideal world we would have three grades rather than one on a report card. We’d have a grade for achievement. How well you learn a given body of knowledge based on appropriate assessments like we have now. We would have a grade for progress. How much you’ve grown from one point in time to another. And, and a collection of formative assessment evidence and feedback and revision could be the marker for that. And the third would be to keep the three piece alliterative, process factors which would be typically work habits, because, you know, work habits are important in school and in life, but too often those are conflated with the achievement portion of a grade. Yeah. That ends up hurting the meaning of the grade. Yeah. So they need to be separate. That’s a little rough on grading, which I don’t want to go too deep into.
Catlin Tucker
I know, I’m sure there are people who are like, no J, not three grades. You can barely get one. But you’re right that when we jam all these things together in a single grade, so often that grade is it’s not truly representative of anything. Actually, it’s this weird mash up of, yeah, your time management and your study habits versus your, you know, scores on exams. So it’s it’s fascinating. I will say that in this, this conversation around step two, which is once you have real clarity about your desired result or your desired kind of performance, that you’re like working toward, what is assignment evidence is going to help us measure, like how close or how far did students get toward that desired result. Right. And I think one of my early areas of focus with AI was, how do we help educators leverage AI to improve their design work? And for me, bringing in a little bit of that universal design for learning, really utilizing AI so that if you have a performance task for students to take what they’ve learned and do something meaningful with it, transfer it, show that deep understanding. Can we acknowledge that maybe not all students are going to be successful demonstrating their learning in the exact same way? And so what’s been really exciting for my perspective is to really work with educators around construct specific options where instead of just like, you know, sometimes when you’re like, oh, let’s give students a choice around the project. They whip up two projects, but they’re actually not. You’re not assessing the same skills. Exactly. And so that’s been really fun to work with AI to say, hey, this is something we currently do. Here’s the desired result. Here’s the, you know, the transfer goals. We really want to see what’s another construct specific assessment option we could provide. So now there’s more flexible pathways. So hopefully we’re getting a much more accurate view of what students actually learned of what they can actually do.
Jay McTighe
Yeah I think that’s exactly right. I’ve been working with something called task frames. I’ll give you a quick example of a task frame. Students create a how to guide to teach someone how to do something that they know how to do. Okay. It’s generic. I have an example of a first grader teaching breakdancing and demonstrating, all the way up to a high school example where students creating a how to guide to how to create a an AI agent and called. Wow. Yeah. So so it’s generic. It’s tied broadly to expository writing or communication. But it’s open ended in the sense that you could give the students, they could pick different topics that they want to teach. Which builds in student choice and interest. But the what the what the criteria for judging what they do, whether they do a picture book or a written piece or an oral explanation is going to be the same. Yep. Right. Too often teachers think if I differentiate or give choice, I’ve got to have multiple rubrics. I know right? And so for me, if you think about backward design, the goals are static. And the criteria for evaluation is static. But in between you can give choice options different task frames or structures. If you’re careful and still get the evidence you need and judge it appropriately.
Catlin Tucker
Yeah, I don’t know how you’d feel about this, but I will often tell teachers I when I’m working with them and on this exact thing is, if you cannot assess this performance task with the exact same rubric, that is a red flag, that this is likely not construct specific, right, that they’re not in alignment.
Jay McTighe
I completely agree. And it’s counterintuitive, particularly when teachers give students some choice of product. They say, well, this group is doing a podcast. This group’s writing in this group’s doing a visual infographic. So I need three rubrics. And my response is don’t get caught up in the surface features. Focus on the essential understanding.
Catlin Tucker
Yes, yes I think it’s those product details of like is it esthetically pleasing. Did you, did you use filler words or whatever it is that they associate with that specific product that then starts to make the actual tools we use to assess feel like murky, like this isn’t going to work for all three. But when you say super grounded.
Jay McTighe
It’s like a generic criteria about craftsmanship. But don’t fixate on the surface features at the expense of the underlying. Content, understanding and process. So here are two kind of related tracks that I’d like to explore with you. Okay. The first is the use of AI by teachers for curriculum and assessment design. And the second is the use by students. And I’ll give you a couple of my thoughts. Although admittedly I’m not in the classroom now and I haven’t absorbed I haven’t I’m not as deep into this as you but I’ll give you my, my thinking. First of all, my essential question has been how do we enable and encourage educators and students to use these incredible AI tools without undercutting the development of their expertise? A related idea that I’ve always had is that understanding must be earned by the student or by the teacher. Right. So with that, this is this is my maybe crude conception of whether I’ll say it for teachers. But I think the same thing for students when I’m doing work, let’s say in curriculum design with teachers. I want them to understand what is a transfer goal. What is a conceptual understanding different from a fact? How do you decide what’s most important? How do you formulate rich, engaging, essential questions? And what are the qualities of those things? I want them to draft those before going to an AI tool.
Catlin Tucker
Yes. Well you.
Jay McTighe
Know for tools.
Catlin Tucker
Right. 100%. And actually there was just research that showed that when. Wow. I’m trying to think of it was like when a student went to AI first versus when they thought and did some pre-planning and then went to. I like the difference in the quality when actually they started the thinking and went to AI, the product was so much stronger. And I think the same way when I work with teachers and I get it, it’s it’s very cognitively intense, like energy sucking work to like go through the process of understanding these things. How do I backward design a unit? How do I think about assessment more flexibly? But I do totally agree. You have to go through that like mental exercise to understand what you’re working toward. How do you how do we as educators. Because if we just again, we’re doing exactly the thing we don’t want our students to do. If we just turn this whole process over to AI and we ask AI to spit out these things, but we don’t have a deep understanding of them, and we’re not getting in and thinking about evaluating. Is this actually aligned with the you know what I’m teaching is, is this accurate? Are there perspectives or things missing from this equation. And I think sometimes I’ll go through like I literally just facilitated a workshop maybe two months ago where I walked through backward designing a playlist with this group of teachers, and it was an all day we went through identifying desired results, the assessment we did, the learning pathway, and by the end they were all fried. But then I modeled with this, kind of a large prompt, how they could do that same thing with AI, and you could just see at the end they were all like, why didn’t we just start here? And I was like, no, we can’t start here. We have to start understanding the fundamentals of what we’re designing, how we’re designing, why we’re designing it that way for our specific subject area, context and group of learners before we start using AI.
Jay McTighe
Yeah. No, absolutely. And so for me, the kind of the upfront pieces are understanding the it like it’s just what you said. And relatedly, having a clear set of evaluative criteria. So in you BD we have what we call design standards. So what are the qualities of good essential questions or an understanding statement or a performance test. And it’s that it’s the twin elements of knowing what you’re trying to achieve. Understanding and understanding the elements of it in terms of success criteria is the under is the understanding that has to be earned such that. Just to your point, when I spits out a set of essential questions for a given topic, you will know which ones are really good and which ones are not and why. But understanding must be earned in that regard in that regard. For teachers who are experienced and understand these things, then I think moving to AI more quickly does make sense. But it also then leads to something that I love about your guidebook or your framework, which is highlighting the importance of reflection. So for me, almost a generic set of questions should be ever present, whether it’s teacher use or student use, which is what. Why did I use AI. How did it help me. What did what was valuable. How did it support my thinking. What did I reject from it. What would I learn through this process. What would I do differently. Those kinds of reflection questions I think become elevated. And it’s the kind of transfer metacognitive, if you will transfer that we want to cultivate in the users of these tools.
Catlin Tucker
100%. I actually was trying to make this feel a bit more palatable for a group I was working with, and I basically took that idea of, you know, the classic exam wrapper where before an exam, you have kids kind of reflecting on, you know, what do I see as my strengths coming into this exam or going into it? How did I prepare, study, etc.? What am I not feeling super confident about? And then after the exam they they do a reflection of like how to go, like where they struggle, blah blah blah. And so I created an AI reflection wrapper of like, okay, before kids use AI in your class, like why are they using it? What questions do they have or what feedback do they want? So it’s the idea is it’s not a very long it could be a discussion based with a partner. It could be reflection. They write and then they interact with the AI doing whatever it is, whether it’s like helping to organize something or get feedback or what have you. And then on the other side, there’s like this quick pause for another reflection, you know, what did you learn? What was helpful? What did you reject? Where did this like structure thinking? And again, it’s all about building that habit of the pause and the thoughtfulness, the reflection around I use that I hope teachers will start to embrace.
Jay McTighe
No, I love that. Yeah. And it’s a will for during after kind of model. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. So one of the things that I’m learning and trying to figure out is how to build an AI agent or, you know, a GPT or a gem’s kind of support, for understanding by design. And what I’m learning, I think, is input matters, right.
Catlin Tucker
So much.
Jay McTighe
Yeah. Yeah. So I have, for example, 40 articles, two books, design standards, sample Uber units that I’m all pushing into. Two, if not maybe three AI, tools, because that’s something else I’ve learned. I love what you said about discernment. You know, don’t just give up from to one. Give a prompt to 2 or 3 and then compare the results and you’ll learn from that. There are some but but getting the AI to really know what I want and get better at giving me higher quality things. And I don’t feel like I’m cheating by doing that because I’ve earned my understanding.
Catlin Tucker
Exactly. You know what I mean? Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And so ideally, teachers could have access to something like that, but if they really don’t, you know, if they don’t know the questions to ask and when they’re interacting with the AI and then after the AI has given them something, then I worry that, you know, even with the best resources and a customized kind of, you know, chat like an agent, that you’re still not going to get things that are going to necessarily be super high quality.
Jay McTighe
Because you’re at the understanding, I think it’s it’s that ever present tension of building and developing, understanding, but not but by working smarter as well and efficiently with these tools. All right. So here’s a more pointed question. What are your what’s your thinking currently about using AI to evaluate student work, be it writing, problem solving in math or other subjects, whether it’s for grading and or feedback purposes. But you know, if the teacher feeds 120 papers into the AI.
Catlin Tucker
I I this is one that I have some serious concerns about. I am so excited about the opportunity for students to have potentially unlimited feedback. We know how incredibly important feedback is for learners to especially feedback that’s happening. That’s formative, right? It’s while they’re working, it’s actionable. It’s timely. It’s all the things we know are so important. Grant Wiggins used to talk about all the time with me back. Right. And so I love that. However, I do think we need to build structures around that from a for that student experience, right. So that they’re not just taking suggested revisions and implementing them without doing that critical thinking, without the reflective metacognitive component. And I don’t want that to like, replace teacher feedback. I still want teachers pulling feedback loops into the classroom, looking at student work so that they’re collecting that really critical formative assessment data. Right? Like formative assessment isn’t just those checks for understanding. It’s looking at student work in progress. It’s seeing where they’re strong. It’s seeing where they’re struggling and noticing where they’re going to need more support from us. So for me the feedback piece is really exciting, but I don’t want it to replace entirely the teacher’s work. Looking at student and and again, this I mean, this all goes back to that tension too, of, you know, when I suggest teachers pull feedback loops into the classroom and look at student work in progress, the thing that they say is like, when do I have time for that? Right. Like I’m I’m covering all this content. I don’t have time to look at student work or let them get some of this work done in class. And so that’s its own tension. The assessment piece I struggle with. Right. If we’re grading something that students did, especially if we’re talking about authentic forms of assessment and performance tasks, I really don’t want teachers to be removed from that. Obviously, if students are answering basic, you know, doc, one level questions, then I can totally grade that. But what we’re talking about is different.
Jay McTighe
That’s right. Yeah. For me it’s it’s the efficiency question, especially for secondary teachers. And you live there. So you know, as an English teacher, if I have 120 kids a day as a high school teacher, let’s say I’m in mathematics and I know that I want to engage them with more authentic problems that require reasoning and require them to explain their work, show their work, do mathematical representations and communication. But I won’t spend my weekend reading 120 pages, right? Right. Yeah. So that’s to me, how can we use these tools? And let’s, let’s separate grading for the moment because like that, that raises the stakes. But just for feedback, in other words, feasibility is in the mix. And if teachers, I’ve had many teachers say to me I’m not going to do many performance tasks because it just takes me too long to look at everything that kids produce. Period. So I want to, I want to undercut that. But I completely get the idea. We don’t want to turn it all the way over to a machine. So my, my thinking is, is kind of crude in this regard. But I’m thinking about let’s take it just for formative assessment feedback. We use AI tool to get a lot of feedback. And let’s say a teacher has 120 kids or what you take for a given class. 30 the teacher would randomly sample 4 or 5, look closely at their work, compare it with the AI feedback, but not necessarily have to look at 30 or 120 in the same way, especially if they say, I’m not going to do that or I can’t do it. Yeah. So that’s that’s I’m trying to wrestle with that.
Catlin Tucker
The sustainability component of it. Yeah, I mean I do for me, I wish teachers, if they were assessing a student performance task, I wish they were doing that with the student. Right. If this is something that like we want to assess and put in the gradebook, I wish that more teachers had instructional structures. So, for example, just to kind of make this more concrete, let’s say we have wrap wrapped up a unit. Students have done a performance task to, you know, demonstrate what they’ve learned or their deep understandings, their ability to transfer what we’re about to start another unit of study. Wouldn’t it be great to leverage the technology that we have to allow students to kind of do like a choose your adventure kind of pathway exploration into the next topic that we’re going to be diving into, but in a way that lets them start to kind of lead that initial learning, that initial discovery, that initial meaning making, so that we can sit with students and pull them and evaluate those performance tasks and have actual authentic conversations about what they did and why. Like, for me, I just there’s so much and I work with districts that are like, you need to have X number of grades in the gradebook every week and everything so mandated, but I just like if this is worth doing. I wish we also had the instructional structures to position students in moments to lead their learning, so that we could be actually doing this work side by side with students, which is where I got to in the last 6 or 7 years of my teaching career. And it was some of the most powerful moments of my teaching career, was sitting next to students and talking about the work they had produced and what it reflected about their understandings and their abilities. Where I was just like, this is the magic right here, but how do we make that time? You know?
Jay McTighe
No, you’re absolutely right. And you’re brilliant. Work on station rotation as a structure to enable more of that, you know, is the structural mechanism to allow that to happen in other ways that teachers don’t know what to do? I know, and by the way, there’s a little, little, entomology here. The root word assess comes from Latin as a dairy, meaning to sit to with. Yeah, yeah yeah yeah yeah, yeah.
Catlin Tucker
Remember when I read that I was like, so we should be doing this with and for our students sitting right next to them.
Jay McTighe
That’s right. Yes, sure. So I have one more idea. The kind of ness under stage two. But it’s it’s even broader in a curricular sense. And it’s my idea called curriculum mapping 3.0. Okay. So here’s the idea, traditional, by the way, that I’ll give you the short history, in my view, curriculum mapping 1.0 was driven largely by my friend Heidi Hayes Jacobs book Mapping the Curriculum, written in like 1989. And this was before the standards movement hit. So her idea was, we need to find out, not what’s in the curriculum. Guides are in the textbook, what teachers are actually teaching. And her mechanism was for teachers to create what you call a diary, maps, just to identify the topics and skills you’re teaching on a calendar. The idea was then we could compare notes both horizontally and even vertically, and we might find if we look vertically at our diary maps. Guys, we have three dinosaur units in elementary school K one and three. But nobody knew that. Right? Or nobody’s teaching research paper in high school, even though it’s super in our curriculum. So that was the intent when and some of the the curriculum development software like Atlas Rubicon curriculum Map or Tech Pass came out during that era, basically saying you’re going to do diary mapping, don’t do it with post-it notes on chart paper. Do it electronically so you can compare. You can easily edit, the second iteration of curriculum mapping when when the standards hit. And that according to Heidi and I agree, move from individual teachers mapping out what they taught to curriculum team, subject area teams and grade level teams looking at the standards and as a group, mapping out what they were going to teach. She called that consensus mapping. I’m proposing a more radical view of generation 3.0 of mapping. What if we mapped out not just the content to be covered? But we literally mapped out the performances we wanted kids doing with that content. Hence imagine maps of performance tasks, simple or younger kids more sophisticated with older kids that embodied the knowledge, skills, understandings of that level. Yeah, in a way that was performance based such that our teaching was then if the tasks were right and were well conceived vertically, our teaching is more like coaching, where we’re coaching kids to be able to do these performances. We’re teaching them content and skills, but with the game in mind. Moreover, imagine you literally conform. If you don’t already have a digital portfolios of student accomplishments across the grades. That’s my idea. It would change the literally the game from a coverage oriented approach to teaching and learning to a performance based, competency based teaching where the evidence is not once a year state test scores that drive everything but a collection of more authentic evidence systematically collected. That’s my view of that.
Catlin Tucker
Right. Well, and so then the goal is that deep, deep learning to rate to.
Jay McTighe
Evidence through the ability to apply and explain.
Catlin Tucker
Exactly. And I love the idea of students having this kind of ongoing portfolio of their work, because I think one of the things that I encourage educators to consider is like, how are we also having students reflect on growth over time so that they start to buy into the idea that, like, school is valuable. I’m learning things. Look at how I’m growing. But I think for so many kids, they’re just, you know, they’re jumping through the hoops and the things you’re being asked to do, and they’re not necessarily appreciating that all of this work I’m doing in this class or for this subject, is really helping me develop as a learner and look at how my skills and my conceptual understandings have really changed over time.
Jay McTighe
Yeah, and literally having the great Wiggins love to say that students should graduate with a resumé of accomplishments, not just a record of classes taken in the GPA. And I’ve always loved that. But then the question is, what would be in their resume of accomplishments, their work on authentic tasks and projects? Yeah, yeah. And then there’s the motivational side of it, too. I mean, you as a high school teacher know this, and you have kids and I as I do. And you think about the minimum compliance mentality that is so often seem to be in secondary students. What’s the least I have to do to get the grades? Yeah, without having to do much work. Is the high achieving students have that? Except when are they most genuinely engaged? My experience is through extracurriculars. Yeah, and through more authentic projects and tasks.
Catlin Tucker
That tend to be more interest driven. Right?
Jay McTighe
Things they’re they actually will talk about at dinner. And I show Grandma and grandpa what they did 100%. And so how do we make more of those that yield the kind of motivational and intrinsic interest that we know? We see them and we see it in kids and extracurriculars, but often it’s absent in many subject areas. Yeah.
Catlin Tucker
Oh my gosh. I feel like we didn’t even get to the third step. You’re going to have to come back on because the learning pathway is one I want to unpack with you.
Jay McTighe
But we covered all the preparatory ground for that. But yeah, this is this is going on beyond the, podcast normal length.
Catlin Tucker
Well, I also want to respect your time. I want to thank you so much for joining me for this conversation before I let you go. And it can be very short. Anything right now that is working for you. I know we talked a little bit about your approach to travel, but for you, that’s like just helping you create maintain balance in your life with everything going on.
Jay McTighe
Meditation and exercise. Yeah. And they work together. The meditation is relaxing the mind, but it has it can come in at physical effect. Exercise energizes the body but has a calming effect on the mind and the two together. For me is the balance.
Catlin Tucker
I love that, I love that well, thank you so much Jay. It’s always an absolute pleasure to chat with you, and I would love to get you back on for that. Third.
Jay McTighe
Well, again, I admire your work and I’ve been recommending your guidebook to any and everyone I meet. It’s brilliant and I wish you great continued success promoting those wonderful ideas.
Catlin Tucker
Thank you so much. I love Jay’s approach to design work. I am such a design dork. I love instructional design. I love working with curriculum. I like thinking outside the box about how we design things for learners. So I always love his insights into how we design for deeper understanding, how we think about the way we assess students and what they’ve learned, not just the information and the facts that they’ve kind of absorbed in a unit or that they’re retaining from that unit. But really, are they able to take those things and do something meaningful with them and appreciate having the opportunity to also unpack some of our thinking around AI and the role of AI in this process? Now, the one thing we didn’t get to was step three and backward design, which is the learning pathway. So I definitely want to have Jay back on so we can dig into that one. I’m sure that will be a wonderful, very interesting conversation as well. So hopefully I’ll get him back very soon to have that chat. And if you have any questions, any comments, any feedback, I’d love to hear from you. You can reach out on social. I’m on X, Instagram, LinkedIn. You can always reach out directly through my website. Catlin tucker.com and send me a message or a question there. And I will include all of Jay’s information and a link to his fabulous website, where he has tons of resources on the topics that we discussed today. If you want to check it out, I will also include my skills before tools AI Implementation Guide, which we referenced in this conversation as well. So I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your week. And thank you for joining me.
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