Throw out those Lesson Plans!

Paradigm shifts are scary: they mean that everything you were doing before was misinformed or counter-productive. All those hours gone to waste. And what do teachers hate more than anything else? Having our precious time wasted. Oh, yeah, and being wrong. We hate that, too.

It all comes from a good place, though. We want to do our best. We want the kids to learn and grow. It’s important! We’re important! And it takes a ton of time to plan meaningful and motivating lessons for our students. We give up our lunch breaks, mornings, evenings, and weekends planning out activities, aligning said activities to standards and content goals, assessing the activities in order to give our students feedback and inform our next round of planning, etc.

We’ve worked so hard to create the plans we’ve used in our classrooms everyday. And now we have to throw it all away?

Well, yeah.

And here’s why: Lesson “plans” are not the place to start. A plan is just a list; a series of exercises in chronological order that keep students busy and fill class time with content-centered activity. Having a plan is important, but should always come second - or even third - to design.

“But design and planning are the same thing! I design my lesson plans!!” one may argue.

Well, no.

Design is the big picture: the architectural concepts and sketches behind the final blueprints and construction.

Unlike planning and logistics, Design lives in a conceptual space. The world in which Design lives does not have any rules - gravity and the laws of planetary motion do not exist in Design World. So what does? Creativity, abstract thought, invention, flashes of brilliance, that feeling of elation you get when you finally remember the name of that actor from that movie with Barbra Streisand that made you cry.

Anyone who has ever had a brilliant “Aha!” moment has started here, in Design World. Once design is in place, once the idea has formed, then the planning and logistics can begin.

So what can implementing design do for me as a teacher?

A good design can:

• Solve a common problem, usually in simple and innovative ways.
• Inspire new ideas or perspectives.
• Communicate an overarching message or theme.
• Elicit a specific emotion or reaction from an audience.

Implementing design into our teaching not only makes our content more engaging for our students, but it inspires them to incorporate the skill of design into their own lives. Take a look at your curriculum. Do you see an authentic problem that you want your students to solve? Do you want to communicate an overarching concept or theme to your students? Do you want your students to walk away with a specific feeling about a topic? Start there. Allow yourself to break the rules of Tradition and hang out in Design World for a bit.

Eureka! You’ve got it? Now you can start planning!