Backwards Design
How can I determine whether or not a given idea is working?
To get clarity on this I should probably first determine what I mean by "working." This notion varies depending on context so here are a few examples of what this might look like in practice. The first is probably the most concrete. After I had been teaching at my university for a few years, I made some faculty friends who were advocating for a model of curriculum building called "Backwards Design." Every course had a syllabus which included course goals. For me, these were just part of the boilerplate of the syllabus, akin to office hours and contact information. I already knew what I was going to do day-to-day and with respect to assignments, so the course goals didn't really have much to do with my course design. Surely if I lectured clearly enough, they would learn whatever they were supposed to. My friends suggested I design my course by starting with my objectives. Once I began to articulate new goals, I could see that I needed to design different day-to-day activities, different assignments, and different assessments. I was no longer confident that my students would achieve any of the things I had deemed to be valuable simply by my being a knowledgable and engaging lecturer.
My courses would need to change fundamentally, but the first requirement was to have a working definition, that is some criteria, of success. Now I could realistically observe whether or not my efforts were working since I had a clear picture of what I was trying to achieve. This method proved to be more effective that what I had been doing before. I could go on and on about this, but it suffices to say that my frustrations with the students abated significantly after I adopted this framework. I didn't get it right the first semester(s) I implemented it, but I would practice and get better and after a few years I noticed that students I had worked with over multiple semesters in different course were just better prepared in later courses, i.e. they were learning more things better. In short, being intentional worked. Who knew?
So then what does this look like in my personal life, specifically with respect to my parenting? This is a little harder to answer since I don't know exactly what it will look like in my parenting. The funny thing is that I have already done something like this with my kids--several times. One of the reasons it has been harder to implement there is related to the other questions from yesterday's post. Specifically, why do I hang on to an old ineffective model? I'll touch on this soon, but for today I want to give another concrete example of successful implementation of this type of approach in my personal life.
When I was in graduate school I met a friend Jim who was living in the same city. He and became pretty good friends and had a lot of interesting discussions. He encouraged me to try some concrete things they he had read about and done himself. One of the topics that emerged several times was romantic relationships. To that point most of my relationships had been train wrecks. They almost all followed a familiar pattern of total infatuation, followed by a cooling off period, followed by an active desire to get away, concluding with a messy break up--often involving some sort of infidelity as I was moving on to my next mate. He suggested that I think about my ideals before getting into a relationship.
The easiest place to start was also the most superficial, so it was perfect for me at the time. What are the qualities I most desire in an ideal mate? I hadn't ever tried to articulate this before because really if the person met even the most minimal standards of acceptability, she only had to have one quality to be my ideal mate: be into me and show it. Once I began to list important qualities in my mate several things became immediately apparent. First, the things I listed first were really superficial, e.g. appearance, interests, tastes, etc. Second, several of the qualities I listed later contradicted qualities I had listed earlier. Also, the person had to have superpowers like mind-reading ability, infinite patience, sensitivity (but not too much). She had to be really into me but not codependent. When I was honest, it was clear that though I had been extremely fortunate to have had many wonderful women as partners, not one of them could possibly succeed in being a good match for me as long as I had this mess of ideals floating around my head.
This list was revealing, but Jim encouraged me to go further. He suggested thinking also about what an ideal relationship would look like. This list was not about me or the other person, per se, but focused on the relationship itself. For example, I want a relationship built on trust, mutual affection and admiration, compromise, etc. Do I want a monogamous relationship or an open one? Does my ideal involve any kind of traditional hierarchy or is it completely equal? I look at these honestly but without judgment. The final thing Jim suggested was to thing about myself in a two-fold way: (a) what are the minimal conditions I need to meet to be in an ideal relationship with an ideal mate, (b) what is my ideal for myself in such a relationship, i.e. who do I aspire to become?
I have applied this same methodology with pretty good success to other areas of my life, including my parenting and my career. In summary, the process has three parts for me to reflect on, moving from easiest and most superficial to most introspective and (perhaps) hard to swallow:
- What is my external ideal? Description of my ideal mate, ideal child, ideal job, etc.
- What is the ideal of my relation to the external?
- What is my ideal for myself?
- What are the minimal qualities I must possess to attract the external ideal?
- Who to I aspire to be with respect to this part of my life?
- How do I become this person?
There are two final points worth mentioning. First, exemplars are useful. I have found it difficult to generate ideals from whole cloth. It is much easier to start by looking around at others to see who has the sorts of things I want. An easy example is relationships. It's not too hard for me to look around and find couples that just don't seem to like each other much. I can use that experience as a sort of negative ideal. What are the things they do that I would not want in my relationship. Similarly, I can look at couples who have a sort of happiness that I would like too. It doesn't much matter that I don't have all of the details about their lives. They may not actually be as happy as they appear, but at least I can get a sense of general characteristics look good.
The final point is that I change my ideals over time. Some is natural evolution as my life changes, but the other changes arise from the iterative nature of the process. In the backwards design teaching model, I start with the goals and then build a course to achieve them. I have found that if the students are not reaching goals I've articulated sometimes it's because the goals themselves are flawed and need to be revised. In the same way, I may list qualities I desire in a mate, but then later find that when I think about my own ideal for myself, the original qualities I thought I wanted in my mate are not compatible with my ideals for the relationship or for myself in the relationship. I have generally found that when I write these things down I can reach a reasonable equilibrium after a couple of iterations. This has been consistent whether it's been relationships, parenting, career, or other things. Most recently, I applied this to what my ideal family cycling relationship entails. Maybe I'll write about that sometime.