You don't design the whole course, then test it. You build one small piece, put it in front of a learner, watch where it breaks, and adjust — outcomes held still, everything else in motion (Allen & Sites, 2012).
SAM replaces one long build with short, repeated cycles. Allen and Sites (2012) split it into three phases; the outcomes are fixed before any loop starts and never move — that fixed target is Understanding by Design's job (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005).
Gather what's already known about the learners and the problem, then run a Savvy Start — a fast kickoff where the team sketches rough ideas and reacts out loud. The goal isn't a finished plan; it's momentum and a shared picture.
Short loops — design, prototype, review — repeated. Each loop is small enough to throw away. A weak idea dies cheap here instead of surviving into a full build.
The build ships rough and early — Alpha, then Beta, then Gold — and gets tightened on real feedback each round, not polished once at the very end.
A rough version in front of a real learner tells you more than a perfect plan on paper. You design to learn, not to approve.
Review isn't something you hope for at the end — it's a step inside every loop. Reviewers react to something concrete each cycle instead of signing off on a document once.
When the unit is small, being wrong is cheap. You find the flaw early and correct it before it's welded into the course.
Decoding the Code is a self-paced structured-literacy PD minicourse for Grades 6–12 content-area teachers. It's built from discrete, testable pieces, which is exactly what SAM wants to prototype.
"UbD fixes the outcome. SAM iterates everything else."
I'm pairing the two on purpose. Understanding by Design sets the six course learning outcomes and locks them — that's the target. SAM is the engine that builds and rebuilds the path to that target on live feedback. Both models guard against the same failure: scope-drift-by-prototype, where each new build quietly adds a goal instead of testing the ones you have.
Why not ADDIE alone? ADDIE does include formative evaluation, so reading it as a one-way line that saves all judgement for the end misstates the model. The difference is where the feedback sits. In ADDIE, formative checks are steps carried out inside the phases; in SAM, the prototype-review-revise loop is the process itself. For a course whose components have to be built, tested, and revised on real learner and reviewer input, I want continuous feedback and rapid prototyping to be the structure rather than a checkpoint within it.
The learners make the case. Marcus needs foundation work, Rosa a framework, David an intervention plan. Each component has to be tested against a real breakdown, not a generic one — prototype-and-review work, which is SAM's home ground.
Allen, M. W., & Sites, R. (2012). Leaving ADDIE for SAM: An agile model for developing the best learning experiences. ASTD Press.
CAST. (2018). Universal design for learning guidelines version 2.2. https://udlguidelines.cast.org
Moats, L. C. (2020). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers (3rd ed.). Paul H. Brookes Publishing.
Piskurich, G. M. (2015). Rapid instructional design: Learning ID fast and right (3rd ed.). Wiley.
Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). ASCD.