Start With the End: What Do We Actually Want Students to Think and Do?

If we want education to develop better thinkers, perhaps the first question we should ask is not:

“What should we teach?”

It is:

“What should students be able to think and do after they have learned it?”

This sounds like a small difference.

It isn't. For many years, educational planning has naturally started with content. Here is the syllabus. Here are the topics. Here are the chapters. Here are the concepts students need to cover. 

Then we decide how to teach them and, eventually, how to test whether students remember them.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. Students need knowledge. They need foundations. They need concepts, vocabulary, procedures and subject-specific understanding before they can do anything meaningful with them.

But if we want to develop higher-order thinking and creative thinking, content coverage cannot be the final destination.

We need to start thinking about the destination first.

What should the learner actually be able to do?

Consider a simple computer science example.

A learning outcome might say:

Students will understand the concept of deadlock.

That gives us some useful information. But what does understand actually mean?

  • Can the student explain the concept?
  • Can they identify a deadlock situation?
  • Can they analyse why it occurred?
  • Can they determine whether a resource-allocation state is safe?
  • Can they compare two possible solutions?
  • Can they explain the consequences of choosing one over another?
  • Can they design a different approach?

These are very different levels of thinking.

The content may be the same.

The intended learning outcome can be very different.

This is where frameworks such as Bloom's Taxonomy become useful.

Bloom's Taxonomy gives us a useful starting point

The revised version of Bloom's Taxonomy describes cognitive processes progressing through:

Remember → Understand → Apply → Analyse → Evaluate → Create

It is tempting to interpret this as a simple ladder where the first three levels are somehow inferior and the last three are automatically better.

I don't think that is helpful.

A student cannot analyse something they know nothing about.

They cannot evaluate alternatives without understanding the problem.

And they cannot create a meaningful solution without some knowledge and experience to work with.

The levels are therefore not a reason to abandon foundational learning.

They are a reminder that learning can involve different kinds of thinking.

The more important question for a course designer is:

Where in this learning experience will students actually get opportunities to move beyond remembering and understanding?

A difficult question is not necessarily a higher-order question

This is something I have become increasingly conscious of in my own teaching.

We sometimes assume that giving students a difficult question automatically means we are assessing higher-order thinking.

It doesn't.

A student can spend twenty minutes solving a complicated problem using a procedure they have memorised.

The question may be difficult but the thinking may still be largely procedural.

Similarly, a multiple-choice question can sometimes require sophisticated analysis, while a long-answer question may require little more than recall.

So the issue is not simply:

How difficult is the question?

It is:

What kind of thinking does the task require?

That distinction matters enormously when we design learning.

Start with the thinking, then work backwards

Suppose we want students to be able to evaluate alternative solutions.

That immediately changes how we might design the learning experience.

Students need:

  • enough foundational knowledge to understand the problem;
  • examples that allow comparison;
  • situations where more than one approach is possible;
  • opportunities to identify advantages and limitations;
  • questions that require justification;
  • feedback that helps them reconsider their reasoning.

And eventually, assessment should give them an opportunity to demonstrate that ability.

In other words, the learning experience has to support the intended thinking.

We cannot simply write “Students will evaluate solutions” in the learning outcomes and then spend the entire course asking students to memorise definitions.

The pieces have to connect.


And this is where creativity enters the picture

Creative thinking does not suddenly appear as a separate subject at the end of the course.

It can grow from the progression that comes before it.

A learner first needs to understand something.

Then use it.

Then examine it.

Then question assumptions.

Then consider alternatives.

Then explore possibilities.

Then perhaps create something of their own.

This is why I see the progression more like:

Knowledge → Application → Analysis → Evaluation → Exploration → Creative thinking

Rather than:

Knowledge OR Creativity

The two are not opposites.

In fact:

Creativity is not the opposite of knowledge. It is what we can do with knowledge once we understand it deeply enough.

That does not mean every lesson needs to end with an innovative product. 

  • Sometimes the creative act may simply be finding another way to approach a problem. 
  • Sometimes it may be asking a question nobody else has considered. 
  • Sometimes it may be testing an alternative and discovering that the original approach was actually better.

That is still valuable thinking.

So what changes when we design backwards from the desired thinking?

Quite a lot.

The learning outcomes become more precise.

The content is selected not only for coverage, but for what learners need to do with it.

The learning activities create opportunities to apply, analyse, evaluate and explore.

The questions move beyond “What is...?” towards “Why?”, “What would happen if...?” and “What are the alternatives?”

The assessment looks for evidence of reasoning rather than only the final answer.

And the teacher's role gradually changes from primarily delivering information to creating situations in which learners have to use what they know. The teacher becomes a facilitator. 

This doesn't mean that lectures disappear. It doesn't mean that textbooks become irrelevant. It doesn't mean that examinations are automatically bad.

It means that we begin asking a more fundamental question about every part of the course:

Does this actually help produce the kind of thinking described in the learning outcome?

A small design test

Perhaps there is a simple test we can apply when designing a course.

Take any learning outcome and ask:

What should the student know?

Then:

What should the student be able to do with that knowledge?

Then:

What kind of thinking does that require?

And finally:

Where in the course will the student actually practise that thinking?

If we cannot answer the last question, perhaps the problem isn't the student.

Perhaps the learning design needs another look.

The starting point

I don't think the answer to better education is to remove foundational knowledge and replace everything with projects, creativity or open-ended activities.

That would simply create another imbalance.

Students need something solid to think with.

But once that foundation exists, we should deliberately create opportunities for learners to use knowledge rather than merely reproduce it.

That is where curriculum design becomes important. Perhaps that is the real value of starting with the end.

Before deciding what chapter comes first, what activity we will use, what technology we will introduce or what examination we will set, we can ask one deceptively simple question:

When this course is over, what do I actually want my students to be capable of thinking and doing that they could not do before?

Once we have a clearer answer to that question, the rest of the learning design has somewhere to go.

The next question is then unavoidable:

What knowledge do students need before we can reasonably ask them to think beyond it?

What this looks like in a real classroom

Take a familiar Computer Science topic: network routing.

A conventional learning outcome might be:

Students will explain how routing algorithms determine paths through a network.

That is a perfectly reasonable starting point.

Students need to understand routers, routing tables, paths, metrics and the basic logic behind routing algorithms.

But what happens if we design the learning experience around what we ultimately want students to think and do?


We might begin with:

Remember and Understand

  • Students learn the basic concepts and can explain how routing works.

Then Apply

  • They are given a network topology and asked to determine the appropriate path between two nodes.

Then Analyse

Now we change the situation.

  • What happens if one of the links fails?
  • Which routes are affected?
  • Can the network still deliver the packet?
  • What changes in the routing table?

Then Evaluate

Suppose there are two possible routes. One is shorter. The other has greater available bandwidth.

  • Which would you choose?
  • What information would you need before making that decision?

Now students have to move beyond applying a known procedure. They have to compare alternatives and justify a decision.

And then comes the more interesting question:

What if we designed the network differently from the beginning?

  • Could we introduce redundancy?
  • Could we distribute traffic differently?
  • Could we reduce the effect of a single link failure?
  • Could a different routing strategy be more appropriate for this particular network?

At this point, the students are no longer simply demonstrating that they understand routing.

They are using their knowledge to analyse an unfamiliar situation, explore alternatives and reason about consequences.

And importantly, there may not be one predetermined answer to every question.

A student might propose an alternative network design that initially looks promising.

Another student might identify a limitation.

The class might test the idea and discover that the existing design actually performs better under the given conditions. There could even be contradictory opinions and constructive arguments among groups of students. That is absolutely fine. This is not chaos, neither a failure of copy-book classroom management. It creates a dynamic and responsive classroom environment that nurtures creative thinking. It is an important part of the desired learning outcome.

The student has generated a possibility, examined it, considered evidence and revised their judgement.

The progression has become:

Understand → Apply → Analyse → Evaluate → Explore → Create → Reconsider

Notice what has not changed very much.

  • The subject is still network routing.
  • The fundamental knowledge is still essential.

What has changed is what we ask students to do with that knowledge.

And that is precisely why I think starting with the intended thinking matters.

If the learning outcome is simply:

“Students can explain routing algorithms,”

then a very different learning experience is sufficient.

But if the intended outcome is: “Students can analyse network problems, evaluate alternative solutions and justify design decisions,”, the course needs to provide opportunities for students to actually practise those abilities.

The content has not disappeared. The thinking has expanded. 


What do you think? 👇

I'd be interested to hear from teachers, educators, lecturers, academic leaders and other education professionals who have experience with these issues. If you have a different perspective, a classroom experience, or an approach that has worked for you, please feel free to share it in the comments.

Thoughtful disagreement is welcome too. The aim is to learn from one another and keep the conversation going. Thank you!

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