Plan with the end in mind

This is a picture of a page in my teaching journal. Scrawled in the corner of the page it says "What I teach or plan with __ in mind I do as a better teacher."  A snapshot of a small epiphany with big consequences.  I am a better teacher when I plan and teach with students in mind.  That seems obvious. What teacher doesn't plan and teach with students in mind, right? Unfortunately, obvious at it is, it hasn't always been the case.



For instance, there have been times I planned around activities I like to do. I didn't exactly realize I was doing it at the time.  Sometimes teachers get attached to a particular activity. It's something fun. It might even be something that students really enjoy doing as well. And there certainly is a great deal that can be said about the value of fun in teaching.  Fun attached to meaningful learning activities is a powerful thing. But if fun isn't attached to meaningful learning, it ends up being the end itself, and that has considerably less value in terms of student achievement.  I like board games.  I have sometimes assigned a project at the end of a novel that required students to make a game based on the novel. And they would make some fun stuff. Fishing in the Mississippi River after Huck Finn. Monopoly like versions of the Joad's journey in The Grapes of Wrath.  I recall a board shaped like a tree in homage to the tree in A Separate Peace. All fun.  All active and student-centered to some degree.  But ultimately, I discovered that no matter how much care and diligence students put into constructing these games, ultimately they often dealt with trivia rather than the essential questions and deeper understandings about the novel that I hoped students would walk away with.

I probably got a at least one good teacher evaluation out of these projects.  And most students would get good grades on them.  But what was I assessing?  More importantly, what were they learning?

Planning and teaching with students in mind means thinking about the end first.  What is it that students should know?  How will there get there?  Maybe it isn't by moving pieces around a game board.  Or maybe a more well designed game project would do it.

I have moved away from planning around activities that I enjoy, figuring out a way to fit them into my curriculum. That's like  planning a trip around a road you like to drive on, even if it doesn't go where you want to go.  Instead, start with the end in mind and figure out the roads to get there, then figure out where to pack the fun.