Why This Matters

"I built the whole unit, and then I sat down to fill in the planner, and none of it fit."

If you've said some version of that sentence, you're not disorganised — you planned in the wrong order. You picked a topic, found some good activities, taught them, and only afterwards tried to reverse-engineer a statement of inquiry and a summative task to match. The planner document became a report on what you already did, not a design for what you were about to do. That's backwards, and it's the single most common reason MYP units feel bolted-together instead of coherent.

This article fixes the order. Everything else in this chapter — the statement of inquiry, the inquiry questions, the summative task, the finished unit plan — depends on getting this sequence right first.

Understand the Idea

Backward design is a planning approach popularised by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe in their book Understanding by Design. It is not an IB-authored framework — it's a general education planning model that MyIBHub, like many MYP schools and workshop leaders, finds useful for explaining the logic behind the MYP planning process. Treat what follows as MyIBHub's interpretation of how that model applies to MYP planning, not as official IB doctrine.

The core idea is simple to say and hard to practise: decide what you want students to understand and be able to demonstrate before you decide what they'll do in lessons. Most new teachers plan forward — topic first, then activities, then (reluctantly) a test, then, last of all, the paperwork that's supposed to justify all of it. Backward design flips that. You start with the end point — the evidence you want to see from students — and only then design the path that gets them there.

Why does the order matter so much? Because each decision in a unit constrains the ones that come after it. Your key concept (a broad, transferable idea like "change" that organises the discipline) and your global context (the lens — such as fairness, identity, or global interactions — through which students explore why the unit matters beyond the classroom) shape what the unit is about at a conceptual level. Your statement of inquiry — a single sentence that names the relationship between those concepts — is the unit's thesis. Your inquiry questions unpack that thesis into things you can actually ask a 13-year-old. Your summative task and criteria define the evidence you'll accept as proof of understanding. Only once all of that exists does it make sense to plan formative activities and daily learning experiences — because their job is to build toward that evidence, not toward a vague topic.

If you plan learning experiences first, you get engaging lessons in search of a justification. If you plan backward, every lesson has a reason for existing: it's building a skill or an idea the summative task will require.

🧭 Planning decision: Before you open your planner template, write one line at the top of a blank page: "The evidence I want by the end of this unit is ___." You will fill that in properly in Article 14, but naming it now changes how you plan everything between here and there.

See It in Practice

Picture two teachers, both planning a Grade 8 Individuals and Societies unit on industrialisation, both using the key concept change with related concepts causality and perspective, both working within a global context in the territory of "fairness and development" (schools word this differently — check your own school's current context language rather than assuming this exact phrase).

Teacher A plans forward. She loves the topic, so she starts collecting resources: a documentary clip on the Industrial Revolution, a source-analysis worksheet on child labour, a debate activity on factory conditions. Three weeks in, she realises she needs a summative task, so she writes a test with short-answer questions on causes and effects. Then she's told the planner needs a statement of inquiry, so she writes one on the spot: "Industrialisation changed how people lived and worked." It's true. It's also a summary of the topic, not a statement she ever refers back to, and it has almost no relationship to the debate activity or the test she already built. The planning log, if she were honest about the order, would read: topic → activities → test → SOI → concepts, retrofitted.

Teacher B plans backward. She starts with concepts and context, then asks: what's the relationship between "change" and "perspective" worth investigating here? She drafts a statement of inquiry about how changes in production systems can force groups to renegotiate whose account of progress gets believed (we'll build this properly in Article 12). Only then does she design a summative task — an evidence-based argument document written from a specific historical perspective — because that task is the clearest way to generate evidence of the SOI. Only after the task exists does she plan the formative sequence and daily lessons, each one chosen because it builds a skill the task will demand: reading a primary source for perspective, distinguishing cause from consequence, structuring an argument. Her planning log reads: concepts/context → SOI → questions → task/criteria → formative sequence → lessons.

Same topic. Same year group. Radically different coherence. A colleague picking up Teacher B's plan could teach it and understand why each lesson is there. A colleague picking up Teacher A's plan would have to guess.

🧠 Teacher insight: The tell-tale sign of forward planning isn't a bad unit — Teacher A's lessons might genuinely be engaging. The tell is that you can't explain, in one sentence, why a specific activity is in the unit and not some other equally engaging activity. Backward design gives you that sentence every time: "This is here because the task requires it."

The same logic holds outside the humanities. A Mathematics teacher planning a Grade 8 unit on linear relationships using the key concept relationships doesn't start by picking fun graphing activities. She starts by asking what she wants students to be able to argue or model by the end (the evidence), drafts a statement of inquiry about how patterns of change can be represented and predicted, designs a task where students model a real, messy data set, and only then sequences the skill-building lessons — reading gradients, interpreting intercepts, comparing representations — that the task will require. Backward design isn't a humanities habit. It's a planning discipline that applies wherever there's a concept worth understanding and a task worth completing.

Apply It

Teacher Activity: The seven-decision card sort.

Before reading the answer below, try this from memory. Take a blank sheet (or seven sticky notes) and write these seven planning decisions, one per note, in random order:

  • Design the summative task and select criteria
  • Draft the statement of inquiry
  • Plan the formative assessment sequence
  • Select the key concept and related concepts
  • Select the global context
  • Plan learning experiences and ATL (Approaches to Learning — the transferable skill categories the MYP asks you to build deliberately, covered fully in Chapter 05)
  • Draft the inquiry questions

Now physically arrange them in the order you think a backward-design planner should make these decisions. Don't peek ahead.

Compare your order against this one: concepts and context → statement of inquiry → inquiry questions → summative task and criteria → formative sequence → learning experiences and ATL. If your card sort matched, good — you already have the instinct; the rest of this chapter will sharpen it. If it didn't match, look specifically at where you put the summative task. Most first attempts put it too late, after the lesson planning, which is exactly the forward-design habit this article is trying to break.

Artefact to produce now: Open your own in-progress unit (or start a fresh one) and write the topic, key concept, related concepts, and global context in one place — even in draft form. Don't write a statement of inquiry yet. That's Article 12's job. Right now you're only committing to the starting point of the correct sequence.

Avoid This

"I'll write the SOI last, once I know what I'm teaching." This is the single most common inversion, and it produces exactly Teacher A's problem — a statement that describes the topic instead of driving it. Fix: draft the SOI before you plan a single lesson, even roughly. You'll revise it (Article 12 shows you how), but it needs to exist first.

"My planner has all seven fields, so it must be backward-designed." Filling in fields in order isn't the same as making decisions in order. A planner filled in after the fact still has the SOI field — it's just retrofitted. Fix: check your planning log, not just your finished planner. Can you show, honestly, that the SOI existed before the activities?

"The activities are the fun part, so I plan those first to stay motivated." Understandable, but it inverts the whole model. Fix: allow yourself to collect resources early (nothing wrong with bookmarking that documentary clip) — just don't commit them to the unit until you know what evidence they're meant to build toward.

Check Yourself

Without looking back at the article, write the seven planning decisions in order from memory. Then check: does your summative task appear before your formative sequence? Does your statement of inquiry appear before your inquiry questions? If both are true, you have the sequence.

Continue Learning

→ Next: Article 12 takes the concepts and context you just named and turns them into the unit's thesis — the statement of inquiry.

📎 Download: MYP Planning Checklist (order of operations) — a one-page sequencing tool for your own planner.
📌 Official source: For the current official planning model and terminology, check the latest MYP: From Principles into Practice guide via your IB programme resource centre — this article reflects MyIBHub's teaching interpretation, not a quotation from it.