Backwards Planning: My (1st) Big Idea

I was, much to my pleasure, included in project planning from the moment I arrived at High Tech High, during the days before school started. It was exciting and mentally invigorating to help create the overarching scaffolding or map with which students would challenge themselves and learn. From the get-go, my CT was adamant that anything we’d be asking the students to do, we had to try to do ourselves, in part as a prototype, but also to teach ourselves where the challenges might be, for all our students. I built the team’s prototype for the first semester project, and it went well, but the makeup of it changed as the semester went on, which is something I am still getting used to: the joy of Just In Time changes. (I am still working on not thinking of myself as a planning failure every time a lesson doesn’t turn out the way it was laid out on paper.)

Of all the prototyping I have done this past school year, this one was actually the hardest. It wasn’t difficult to do, per se, but the ideas I had in my head were far more intricate and involved. I was unable to make the Annotation Poster look as much like an infographic or a map as I wanted to. I think this is because it would have been too difficult to do so, even for an adult. I had to keep myself to a less complex style: no lines connecting phrases to explanatory notes, no artistic arrangement of note “bubbles”, and far fewer notes than I’d imagined… I was able to create something, though, even though it was late. The poster I created pointed out to me the changes I’d want when it came time to for students to undertake the same project: I’d want to have them provide the research they did to fill the poster, perhaps on an annotation notecatcher; I’d want to have a more locked down rubric for what would need to be included in the poster; perhaps it would be nice to have a QR code that would bring up an audio version of the poem for people at Exhibition… Going through the prototyping process brings up new ideas that may not have surfaced otherwise.

I love coming up with projects and lessons from scratch, but I fear that I overthink, and rabbit hole, and otherwise make the process longer than it needs to be, which eats into the finite amount of time I have to do these things. It is hard for me to focus, and even harder to un-focus, and this is a challenge I am working on. How do teachers not let excitement lead them into a joyous, extended frenzy of planning and building?

Above right is the poster I made as a prototype.

And here is the Project Handout. The front of the handout is something I am reasonably proud of, despite it probably not meeting accessibility standards.

Finally, here’s the Backwards Project Planner that was part of the assignment.