Planning Backwards

I wisely started with a map,
and made the story fit.
—J.R.R. Tolkien

There is an old joke in the Jewish tradition that goes something like this:  A celebrated rabbi on his deathbed has his students lined up by seniority to pay their respects.  The rabbi signals to his most senior disciple and whispers to him, “life is like a river.”  This piece of alleged wisdom is dutifully transmitted down the line until the most junior among them at the end has the naïveté to ask what that means.  This query is then passed back up the line to the dying rabbi, who upon hearing it replies, “All right, so it’s not like a river.”

Insert polite chuckle.  Because I never really laugh at this joke.  But the educator in me does always smile in self-recognition because not only have I been the rabbi, but also the senior disciple, the naïve junior, and the entire line in between.  When I started in this profession, I copied handouts on a mimeograph machine, submitted my grades on physical paper, and used the dedicated landline in the teacher’s lounge for personal phone calls.  The future internet was still under construction, and email was an exotic feature only employed by those in academia and other research fields.  What personal digital technologies there were involved cathode-ray monitors and CPU units the size of footstools, and I would teach more than a decade before one of these devices—singular!—was actually available for use in my classroom. 

My, have things changed!

Today—to state the obvious—nearly 100% of humanity walks around with the entire internet in their palms 24/7, and our legal system is confronting the need to determine if certain forms of the digital realm have enough agency to be held criminally liable.  In fact, so ubiquitous has computing technology become to almost every facet of daily life that we have had to invent terminology to reference those of us born prior to its eruption (digital immigrants) and those born afterward (digital natives).

I bring all this up—and use the term “eruption” deliberately—because as I was enjoying an adult beverage with a friend of mine recently, I had one of those insights that frequently trigger my next round of writing, namely the eerie parallels between when laptop computers erupted upon the educational landscape and the current explosion of AI in that same landscape.  In both instances, the change came rapidly, even abruptly; there was little forethought given, with the positivity of the change assumed; and the unintended consequences for the brain produced significant disruptions to the learning process.  In other words, those of us in education found ourselves in reactive rather than proactive mode.

Which admittedly fits with our national character.  We have a long history in America of chasing the horse after it has left the proverbial barn (including our entry into nearly every war we have ever participated in), and our libertarian tendencies have made even clearly rational and obvious regulatory policies happen only after enormous numbers of people have died or been injured (think seat-belt laws and bike helmets).  Granted, some things we have no choice but to react to rather than to anticipate (the scientific field of chemistry was not advanced enough at the time to grasp the impact of the industrial revolution on the world’s climate).  However, we Americans have a bad habit of taking such laisse-faire to extremes, and our employment of technology in the classroom has been no exception.

Yet what if we resisted our cultural tendencies and actually started deliberately planning what we wanted to see happen with the latest technological revolution? What if we asked the “should” question even if our anticipated answer was already a default “yes?” There is in education a concept known as “backward planning,” and its essence is that only if we start with the educational target fully fleshed out and predetermined can we figure out all the intermediate steps that will lead a student successfully from novice to expert.  By analogy, if my goal was to ascend Mt. Kilimanjaro, I should first ask what will I need to navigate the final alpine zone to reach the summit. Oxygen tanks? A certain number of days of acclimation? Then to reach those alpine altitudes, what will I need to navigate the temperate region of the mountain? Sleeping bags? Rain gear? Hence, as I descend backwards down the mountain in my mind, I plan for all that I will need to start my ascent at the bottom and achieve my goal.  If I simply traveled to the base of Kilimanjaro and began hiking, it is highly unlikely that I would ever see its peak.

Too often in education, though, it is this latter approach that frequently dominates much of the teaching that occurs in schools, and nowhere is this truer than when it comes to the employment of technology in the classroom.  I remember well the introduction of one-to-one laptop programs where each student now had their own personal device, and the question asked was not “what are our educational targets?” but rather, “how can we use these computers in as many ways as possible to justify their expense?” Some of us rebelled and kept planning backwards anyway, employing the new tool only in ways that helped us reach our educational goals.  But not everyone did, and the learning suffered accordingly.

Of course, now the new tech-in-town is AI, and again, the response has been “what do we do with this?” rather than “here’s what we seek to achieve; how can this aid us in doing that?” Granted, most of us in schools would state that education’s target is empathetic critical thinkers who can communicate and collaborate effectively, and AI would appear to actively inhibit anyone developing any of these traits.  But my point is that if you don’t take the right approach to asking the questions in the first place, we’ll never know.  Perhaps—in the same way that laptops made libraries of knowledge accessible anywhere 24/7 (an advantage to any learning environment or educational goal)—there may be a role for AI in achieving education’s purpose.  But we won’t know one way or the other without examining its use through the lens of backward planning.

A theme some colleagues and I intended to explore this summer; so I’ll keep you posted.

Coda

As a sidebar, I think it worthy to note that right now, the latest reactionary approach to technology in schools is an openly antagonistic one.  The mounting evidence available about the negative impact of all manner of screens to the learning process has produced a nearly universal cry to ban cellphones, smart watches, tablets…the list of digital “outlaws” grows daily. 

But as sympathetic as any of my regular readers knows that I want to be to this trend, the current process is no less reactive than the original introduction of all those screens into classrooms in the first place, and there are already potential problematic consequences.  Many of our children with certain disabilities actually need laptops, etc. in order to learn at all, let alone successfully. Hence, our current rush to throw out all this technological bathwater threatens to take some people’s literal babies with it. 

Yet, that leaves me pondering the fact that both the barndoor-horse and the baby-bathwater allegories are classical, uniquely American idioms about our reactive cultural tendencies.  So apparently—to paraphrase the Apostle Paul—we can see rather clearly in the mirror after all; we are just either unable or unwilling to fix what we see. 

Maybe we should map out a plan for that. Or we can keep doing this, broadcast the morning I had scheduled this essay for posting: Teacher Poll on AI in Schools.

References

Bechard, D.E. (Feb., 2026) AI Coding a Dyslexia Tutor.  Scientific American. P. 22.

Mehta, J. (June 4, 2026) Screens Are Leaving Schools Fast, Though Some Students With Disabilities Rely on Them.  NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2026/06/04/nx-s1-5812850/screens-schools-students-with-disabilities.