Aligning Outcomes, Assessment, and Activities

Designing a lesson plan is a lot like solving the maze on the kids' menus at restaurants. You could start at the beginning and end up with road blocks or dead ends. You may get to your goal, but you could end up with a big mess on your paper and not be able go find your way out. The other way to get through the maze is backwards, where you start at the goal, and make a direct path to the beginning of the puzzle. The latter method (though cheating in the game of mazes) allows us to make sure the path we are taking leads us to our goals. This is similar to the learning environment and the idea of building courses that Dr. Harapnuik (2015) described, where the alignment of "outcomes and activities with assessment is the cornerstone of course and program mapping and planning."

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Using Fink's (2003) worksheets, below is an overview of a unit plan for a staff to incorporate a virtual reality football simulator into their program. With the Big Hairy Audacious Goal in mind, learning goals were determined, and the Learning and Assessment activities were selected to align with the desired learning outcomes.