One of the largest issues facing educators today is finding time in the curriculum to teach all of the content that is available to them, or considered to be necessary. The best a teacher can do is follow the curriculum standards set by their state or school and try to find the "big ideas" behind them. Once you've found these you can break down the standards into more digestible parts, which will start you off on the right foot for backward planning.
Once you have the ideas you want to hit you, or identify desired results, you then determine what is acceptable evidence that these students have accomplished what you've asked of them? How do you know that they "get" it? The final stage is planning learning experiences and instruction. So basically, what are you going to do to make sure that your students can do what you need them to in order to show that they understand the curriculum and are meeting standards.
Backward design has a few good qualities to it. One being that you are working from the big goal, not towards it, which makes you more focused on it. The second being that you can avoid the "twin sins", which are using activity-oriented instruction that lacks real evidence of learning, and the second sin is leaning on the textbook too much when really it's not the textbook that you're going to have to answer to in the end, and if you don't hit your content points, the textbook is not to blame. A teacher is also responsible for distinguishing between "knowing" and "identifying", and "applying", "analyzing" or "explaining". The first two could be evaluated through multiple-choice answers, but the second would need a deeper understanding that could be for example, written about in depth.
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