In Memento, director Christopher Nolan begins in media res to mimic his protagonist's rare condition of anterograde amnesia (the inability to retain short-term memory). The scenes work "backwards," each subsequent one showing what chronologically happened before. This is how I'm coming to reconcile Wiggins and McTighe's convoluted "backward design" pedagogy. We first need to understand the eventual results we want students to reach before assessment and lesson designing.
Yet I wonder if backward design is really as "groundbreaking" as Wiggins/McTighe make it out to be. In conferring with my group of peers, we strongly questioned it, and even considered the idea of it being the same institutional-centered tool masquerading as something more innovative. Furthermore, I question whether or not it isn't just a reiteration of other pedagogies. The bottom-up model that the field of rhetoric/composition has adapted from, of all places, the business discipline, bestows more power and voice at the bottom of the institutional hierarchy. Arguably, even the ancient Socratic method of teaching is a very close precursor to backward design. And as Jack has mentioned, it shares much with Dewey's ideas. I think it may be because I'm seeing many shared elements in established pedagogies that I don't quite see what the big deal is.
Nevertheless, since then, I've rather relaxed my resistance for it and am merely placing these different pedagogies (among others) on a spectrum of degrees. Backward design may be difficult because we intuitively want to think about means before ends, but the student-centered philosophy of this pedagogy is ultimately worth these moments of skepticism and hassle.
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