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How to Use Backward Chaining to Differentiate Instruction

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Listen to the interview with Melanie Meehan (transcript):

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If we want our students to learn as much as they can, ideally they should be presented with learning tasks that are right at their level, or slightly above, so they have to reach a little bit, but they can get there. Making this happen as a teacher—what we refer to as differentiating instruction—is really challenging, because within any group of students you’ll find a huge range of abilities, background knowledge, and interests. To do differentiation well, you need lots and lots of tools. A few we’ve offered here are playlists, self-paced learning, and Universal Design for Learning.

Today we have one more called backward chaining. It’s an approach that allows a student who struggles with a task to skip some of the early steps in order to experience the later ones. The strategy was shared with us by Melanie Meehan, a Connecticut-based elementary writing and social studies coordinator who has written three books about teaching writing and contributes to the phenomenal collaborative blog Two Writing Teachers.

Melanie Meehan

Although Meehan uses backward chaining to help students with writing, it’s a strategy that can be used in many, many subject areas, so even if you don’t teach writing, stick around, because you will likely find some ideas here for how you can use it in your own classroom.

What is Backward Chaining?

Backward chaining is a specific kind of scaffolding that has the student begin a task closer to the end, rather than starting it from the beginning. Where the starting point is depends on the student’s particular needs. “There’s no telling where the gum in the straw might be for somebody getting stuck doing something,” Meehan explains. So finding it will require assessment and experimentation.

For example, if you are teaching a child how to brush their teeth, and that child doesn’t quite have the fine motor skills to put the toothpaste on the brush, you’d do that step for them and have them start with the brushing itself. Eventually, as they build confidence with brushing, you’d have them move backward and add on the skill of toothpaste application.

While this strategy is frequently used in situations like the above—teaching life skills to young children or students with disabilities—it can be applied to any educational task where a student needs extra scaffolding or support.

“It’s another way to give kids access,” Meehan says.

The reasons a student may need a strategy like backward chaining can vary. It may be that their current skill or ability level would hold them up at an early stage of the task, or it might be that executive functioning is slowing them down. “So many of the kids that you might be envisioning at this point are kids who don’t always see things to completion,” Meehan explains. “To give kids a sense of completing a task is kind of a big deal.”

Examples of Backward Chaining

Tips for Using Backward Chaining in Your Classroom

Start with a task analysis. If you know you have an assignment coming up that some students typically struggle with, think through all the steps involved from start to finish. Doing this will give you options for different entry points for students.

Include the student in the process. Meehan recommends that teachers be transparent with students about the options available and let them choose where to start. For the research example above, she’ll tell them, “If you feel like you’re ready to have a text set that you can research yourself and take notes on yourself, I have those. If you feel like you need the notes, I’ll give you the notes so that you can get straight to writing. And if you’re like, no, I want to do the whole thing myself, I want to decide on my topic and find my resources and get myself set up, you can do that. It’s kind of like where in the process do you feel like you’re ready to start?”

Gradually move the starting point back. Backward chaining is not a permanent solution; the idea is that the student will eventually be able to move back to where they can do the whole task from the beginning. “Scaffolds by definition should be temporary and there should be a plan to take them away,” Meehan says. “So I am intentionally and purposefully doing work for kids, but with the idea that they are going to build their confidence, they are going to build their competence, they’re going to build their curiosity around the whole process, and they’re going to become more willing to go backward in the process to an earlier step.”


LEARN MORE

You can find more from Meehan on her website, melaniemeehan.com. She goes more in-depth about the backward chaining strategy and lots of others in her 2019 book, Every Child Can Write (Amazon | Bookshop.org).


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8 Comments

  1. DJuana Garrison says:

    Thank you for using cooking as an example. I teach culinary arts to high school students of all abilities and rarely do I get to see strategies laid out specifically for my needs.

  2. David Pye says:

    Lovely idea (and reminder) – as a physics teacher I naturally forward chain but as a method for getting students to be more confident in building multi-mark explanations of ‘how’ things occur I like this, especially for related points. I foresee an almost complete explanation followed by a less complete one and then a ‘free’ production of a third. I’ve done it with rates of reaction paragraphs in chemistry for years and still do, but somehow I’ve forgotten it in everything else.

    • Andrea Castellano says:

      This sounds like a great application of the strategy! Thanks for sharing, David.

  3. Rach says:

    I have a learner who SALT recommended Back chaining for.
    They would like to learn figure drawing.
    I understand the premises of back chaining. But can’t get my head around appling it in art/drawing skills
    Do you have any tips or recommendations for where to find the info in relation to art skills please.
    Thanks

  4. Hi,
    I think you could ABSOLUTELY use backward chaining to teach figure drawing. Instead of teaching the step by step procedure, draw the figure to the almost-point-of completion, and let the student finish it. Then draw it to the the slightly-less-finished point, and let the student finish it. As the student masters the final steps, leave more and more steps for them to complete. It’s a different but effective way for them to practice, but one where they keep feeling a sense of completion and mastery.

    I’d love to hear how it goes!
    Melanie

  5. Emily says:

    I teach 7th grade ELA and try to keep in mind what I want students to really focus on. For writing, I often provide students with a bank of textual evidence from whatever we have been studying so they aren’t spending gobs of time rereading. They can use this in their essay or go back to the text to find their own examples. In addition, I find word “idea” banks useful since often students just don’t have the vocabulary to build their reasoning.

    • Andrea Castellano says:

      Hi Emily,
      I’m not sure I’ve heard of “idea banks” before. Sounds intriuging! Can you elaborate on what they are and how they differ from vocabulary word banks?

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