Backwards design – a term that originally came from discussion with Anne Matava some years ago – is basically “frontloading vocabulary”. It’s the same thing. We pick structures from a reading we want to do with our kids and we do enough PQA around them earlier in the week in the form of stories so that, when the kids read the book, it is fast and easy for them. A twist on it from Anne Matava is to make sure that our students know all the other words in the texts we choose so that all they need to decode are the new structures.
This is a topic we will need to investigate this year, because that kind of backwards design (insuring that the students alrady know all the words in the Friday text – except the new structures that occur in the form of M/W stories and T/Th readings) is something that only Anne does, to my knowledge. Given the levels of success she has with her students, we need to investigate her kind of backwards design.