Backwards Design & Assessment — Outcomes First, Deliverables Over Quizzes

Master the Wiggins & McTighe Backwards Design discipline — start from "what should the learner be able to do?", work backward to "what evidence would prove it?", and only then to "what's the minimum content scaffolding?" — and build assessments that produce real capability evidence. By the end you've retrofitted one real artifact and internalized the contrarian metric: course-graduate-shipped-real-thing beats completion rate. Backwards Design is API-first development for teaching: specify the contract (what the learner can do), write the integration test (the assessment), then build the minimum implementation that passes (the instruction). Forward-designed teaching builds the database first and hopes the API emerges. And the assessment half is where your engineering instincts betray you, so watch them: a quiz is a unit test against mocks — fast, cheap, and passing it proves little about production behavior. A deliverable against acceptance criteria is an end-to-end test against staging. Engineers ship the mock-only suite because it's easy to write, then act surprised when production (the graduate's actual job) fails. You already know this argument; you make it in code review. Make it about your teaching.