NET Scheme News 2025 Spring issue 47

with the Backwards Planning Framework 15 NET Scheme News Issue 47 14 NET Scheme News Issue 47 Textbooks are useful and practice papers are necessary. At least, that is the general mantra for those of us teaching senior forms. Have you noticed, however, that students respond well to extra teaching materials that go beyond the content introduced in the textbook? A wider variety certainly helps students thrive in learning. Before Trying Backwards Planning The idea of Backwards Planning is nothing new – planning an activity to produce a calculated probable result. This is what teachers generally do, so I do not reject this idea as something alien. The Backwards Planning Framework that I learnt from the Pedagogy Hub expanded this idea into one whole unit spanning 4 weeks, where all the activities form a continuous process to result in one single output. Imagine a 4-week process writing unit, where students edited and improved their work once every week. Furthermore, there would be a clear editing purpose at each stage. Students would test run using the target language through activities before incorporating them into their edits. Instead of using the texts according to the order of the pages in the textbook, I used the ‘Choose-Adapt- Lose’ approach to look at all the texts from the unit and scrutinised them to see which ones were actually conducive to the final written product. Those texts would be rearranged in the order that matched each stage of the editing process. The rest would be discarded. Looking at the textbook through a new lens, I realised that many of the texts, by design, were already laced with an abundance of vocabulary and sentence structures that, even if students understood them, they might not actively try to use. The amount of useful vocabulary and sentence structures taken from the texts from one single unit could easily overwhelm the average student. Language learning requires repetition, and yet as students grow older, there are fewer opportunities to be able to offer the Benefits of the Experience This whole experience gave me some insights into how I could approach the teaching of Paper 1 differently. 1. Transparent Goals – not just for me,but my students too enjoyed a clearer understanding of what learning needed to take place from a specific text and what we wanted to reuse. 2. Better Time Management – Since texts that did not serve my purpose were discarded, I had less pressure to finish all the pages of a textbook simply because they were there. I could still assign those as homework or self-practice but that would not take up valuable lesson time. luxury of recycling the language they have learnt. I had to remind myself that while some of my students were more focused on ‘reading to learn’, some were more focused on ‘learning to read’. The structure of the Backwards Planning Framework makes sure that repetition is part of the design and the students who have more problems with vocabulary will benefit the most. One highlight of implementing this unit was a co- teaching session, where two of the Regional NET Coordinators, Craig Robertson and Hannah Standring, joined a lesson. Its focus was on recycling previously learnt vocabulary and using it to create a podcast. Then, students listened to each other’s podcasts while completing a self-made bingo form of the target vocabulary, thus using vocabulary again in a listening capacity. When Craig and Hannah offered their help, I jumped at the chance to request co-teaching support. I mean, how often can I get a team of extra teachers to speak to my students? 3. More Interactive Lessons – All parts of the unit became activity-based. 5 activities per week, spanning 4 weeks, making a total of 20 activities for the whole unit. There were more discussions and collaborations. Students of different language abilities and diverse opinions complemented each other. 4. Evidence of Learning – By highlighting changes in each editing stage and looking at them side-by-side, concrete examples of learning were apparent just by looking at the continuous growth of the highlighted parts. 5. Language Internalisation – Students had to use the target language and vocabulary multiple times. As such, students were able to better retain the language. I was overjoyed when I saw the same target language and vocabulary being used in other writing topics after the unit. This overall positive experience has made me believe that it is worth the time to utilise the Backwards Planning Framework in unit planning, even if it is just once or twice a year, to give our students a different experience. Kanyu Wong, NET Daughters of Mary Help of Christians Siu Ming Catholic Secondary School Pedagogy Resource Hub