Don't be Afraid to Experiment (or Fail)

The strategy of backwards planning has been a crucial contribution to contemporary teaching. It helps teachers think about curriculum as a coherent and interconnected web in which what we do in the beginning of a unit should tie into the later pieces (and assessments). It makes us more thoughtful and purposeful in how each lesson can lead us toward our key understandings and skills.

Backwards planning, though, sometimes seems to unintentionally raise the stakes in the sense that it makes every decision appear to be so important. Certainly, it is not the only factor raising the stakes in education today; we have the larger political climate to deal with as well. But teachers have limited time (both to plan and to be with our students) and limited capacity to juggle everything we want to achieve with our students. The more rigid we get in our structures to meet our objectives, oftentimes the less willing we become to experiment and to create. When we see every piece and every lesson as crucial moments to step up that ladder, we often become reluctant to try something new, to mess around, or to possibly mess up.

I try to balance my belief in the value of backwards planning with a healthy willingness to try something new and to fail. That willingness to experiment is, of course, what led me to develop my role-playing strategies. I recently had this conversation and this experience with my wonderful student teacher from Teacher's College, named Daniel. He had put together a nice fishbowl discussion on strategies and violence in the Iranian Revolution. We did it period 1 but it was a very highly structured conversation with a lot of ping-pong discussion and teacher-led questions. When we debriefed, I suggested that we loosen the format, put more power into the students' to lead their own discussion, and just give them a few suggested guiding questions. He wasn't sure. He didn't know if the students could do it. I didn't know either. But I really pushed for us to try. After all, the worst thing that could happen is we could have a bad discussion and one poor lesson. However, we'd also learn something from it.

We did try the looser, student-centered approach and it was, as he described, "beautiful." The important point, though, was not that the second version led to a better outcome. It was that we both saw two things clearly: 1) putting more power into students' hands in this case led to a more authentic, fun, and thoughtful discussion; 2) just because we did the lesson one way at the start of the day doesn't mean we needed to do it that way at the end of the day. We could experiment and learn along with our students.