Playbooks
Practitioner essays on course design, Backward Design, AI in higher education, and the discipline of getting Stage 1 right. Written for faculty, instructional designers, and program directors who want to do the work properly.
Each course looks fine alone; together a program over-teaches some outcomes and never assesses others. The curriculum map rolls program outcomes across every course — exposing the outcome each course assumes someone else covers and the redundancy nobody planned.
The take-home essay assumed the artifact proved the understanding, and AI severed that link. The instrument that survives is the oral defense — now runnable for the whole class, not just the honors section.
Multi-section courses grade inconsistently because a holistic rubric hides the standard inside adjectives. Convert it to an analytic grid your co-instructors apply the same way — in an afternoon.
A list of good assessments is not a coherent plan of assessment. Stage 3 is where you make a semester of graded work cover every outcome once, well, without redundancy or waste.
Every syllabus makes promises; the gradebook records what got measured. The alignment matrix checks the two against each other — exposing the outcome nothing tests and the exam mapped to nothing.
Stage 1 gives you outcomes. Stage 2 decides how you'll know students met them — and AI detonated the old shortcut of treating finished work as proof. The two kinds of evidence that survive.
Most faculty say they use Backward Design. Most syllabi reveal Stage 1 was skipped. AI didn't break our assessments — it revealed that Stage 1 was already broken.