One of the activities for my students is to create a brochure using Microsoft Publisher. I’ll be honest: it’s not my favorite. Partly, I think, because it couldn’t be any more mundane. Sure, there are plenty of principles within this project that could be carried over to other areas of skill, but generally speaking it’s not exactly exciting to tell students that we are going to be creating a brochure. In fact, most of my students are unfamiliar with the concept or purpose of a brochure prior to my explanation of the project. The project isn’t sexy like video production or as creatively challenging as website creation and it’s fairly easy to throw something together without much effort.
So the question needs to be asked: Why am I doing it?
How often do we look at the things that we do and objectively question its validity? Do we just follow the curriculum handed us without question (in my district’s case, content-area teachers are told to unquestioningly follow C-Scope lesson plans/activities) or do we take the challenge of instructional design seriously? This is my fourth year teaching and so far, this is the first semester that I haven’t completely started from scratch. Each semester for three years, I completely overhauled and revamped what I was teaching, the projects we worked on, and the order of lessons. Some lessons and activities have stuck and others have not. For example, we do a travel project where students have to research where they want to go, how they’ll get funding, etc and this project lasted for three semesters. This time around, however, I’m killing it and rewriting it to include more cross-curricular areas.
I think this comes down to a simple, straightforward principle. Are we willing to kill things, even if they “work,” in pursuit of something better? Far too often, we are not. We persist in the same activities, the same routines, the same assignments… it’s easier. It’s less work. Why reinvent the wheel? The engineers of tanks asked the same question and developed the track, proving far more maneuverable and reliable than the wheel.
What are we missing out on because we are determined to do what’s easier? Why not do what’s effective?
