Backward Planning

I had been reading some comments about backward planning on an excellent TPRS facebook page:

iFLTNTPRSCITeaching (you must request to join this group)

and wondered exactly what it meant. After doing a little research and deep thinking (!), I came to an understanding of the term. I first looked at my powerpoint about Kucing Pete (Pete the Cat, there is a link to this in ‘Getting Ready for the New Year’). I wrote down all the vocab that my students needed to know before they could read this book. I grouped the words into verbs, nouns, adjectives and others. Wah! Terlalu banyak! I realised this book would be better left until a little later in the year.

pete cat shoes breakdown

But now I know the words and phrases I need to be working on so that we can eventually read this book. Basically the vocabulary guides my planning. I will structure my planning so that by the end of this term (or next!) we will be able to read the book about Pete. Along the way there will be much circling of verbs, mini-stories, drawing, listening, acting etc. For now, I will work with a much simpler book ‘Asmara pergi ke sekolah’ which has many words students are already familiar with so we should be able to read this after a couple of weeks.

Asmara pergi ke Sekolah breakdown

Because it is the beginning of a new year, I will start with Bu Cathy’s wonderful suggestion of learning/revising ‘Nama saya __’ (My name is ___) and ‘Siapa namamu?’ (What is your name?’) The year 2 and 3 groups should not need much on this at all. We can then move on to pergi ke (go to). We could talk about where we ‘pergi ke’ on the liburan (holidays).

5 thoughts on “Backward Planning”

TPRS. Teachers definitely program this way ie backwards! We decide on the target structures that are both important for comprehension and are high frequency and then plan accordingly!!
I had trouble with your links (forbidden) so not sure what’s happening there. Are they links to google docs? I’m super keen to start investigating how to do that so that we TPRS Indonesian teachers can start collaborating online!
Another thing I’ve realised lately is that it is more important to focus on high frequency verbs than nouns which are often obvious through context and for jp students, its best to confine nouns to (my mind’s gone blank) words that are almost the same in both the TL & English!!
This term, I am looking forward to revisiting my stories from last year with my brand new receptions! I’m hoping I can refine and hone my stories and how I taught them so that I can put together a package for teachers starting out from scratch!
What do you think of my long rave? Haha

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buannesblog says:

January 29, 2016 at 11:17 am

Love your long rave! Thanks for letting me know about the docs, I will use flipsnack to convert the story to an ebook so that will be easy to share. The other 2 were just word docs. I actually wanted to use a simple table in the blog but couldn’t see how to do that and couldn’t paste from Word. Grrr! Will have a play tomorrow… cognates!!! I couldn’t remember either. Hmmm, let’s brainstorm some cognates…bamboo, orangutan, satay…we can get a story out of this for sure!

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1. bucathy says:
  
  January 29, 2016 at 7:55 pm
  
  Wouldn’t a list of cognates be a great collaborative google doc we could all contribute to! There are soooo many terrific cognates!!
  
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Backward planning is definitely the way to go Bu Anne! I think I’ve always done backward planning i.e. What do I want my students to know and be able to say/read/write/do at the end of a unit.
Great post, can’t wait to see more! 😉

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