Planning vs. Execution

I love planning: collecting books from the library for the research project, setting an agenda for a road trip, making a list of what I want to accomplish for the year. The actual execution? Eh, I’m getting there.

Here, in a nutshell, is what I dig about planning as a teacher and what I’m trying to get better at…

I love thinking about how to tweak reading assignments, big projects, and total outcomes. Some examples:

• Scaling back my ENGL 203 writing assignments to one big paper with a paper proposal due the second week of class. In theory? Great. More time for students to work on their project and a better chance for them to focus their research.
• Assigning students to groups at the beginning of the semester (with some normal rotations) so that anytime I had group work to do, these students already had people to work with.
• Moving past memorized names/dates as an outcome and going for more interpretive application projects so that my quizzes/exams became open book

Ah, but the execution.

• For particularly packed syllabi schedules, something inevitably comes up and sends my house of cards toppling. I have to excise this, add that, and generally rework something that seemed airtight in the planning stages.
• There’s the daily grind of classes. I never quite get to all the group work I want to, and try as I might my daily lesson plans are never as effective a month in advance as they are when they are responsive to the last class we had. That means that stuff isn’t the best use of my time. It’s fun to sit and think about all the details I could incorporate into my class, but the best use of my time is figuring out the kind of work that’s most meaningful for my students on a given work on a given day.
• Project creation is much more enjoyable than project assessment, especially if I haven’t taken the time to shepherd students through the process. In-Conference grading made this different as did some other tweaks to my assessment process, but the realities of 70+ research papers can cower the biggest ambitions.

Seth Godin urges project managers and freelancers to “thrash early,” meaning that it’s ideal to do the hard work of figuring out where projects should be NOW, ASAP, and then adjust my goals accordingly. It’s fun to tweak wording on a syllabus or think about what books it would be nice to read, but that’s not the hard of teaching. The hard work is helping students write a story for the semester and remain aware of the value of what they’re doing even when the doldrums of February roll around.

To quote Elvis, it’s time for a little less talk, and a lot more action!