Distracted Intentions

Ask parents what they want for their children and you'll get a chorus of answers that sound eerily similar - happy, confident, productive, respectful, helpful, empathetic, just, accountable, kind... this list is hardly controversial.

The What is easy.

It's How we are going to achieve these lofty goals that causes controversy and divisiveness.

Teachers and parents are good people. Sure there is a handful of baddies, but they are certainly in the minority. For the most part, adults are good souls with the best of intentions.

Despite these good intentions, we are sometimes woefully misinformed and susceptible to distractions.

Peter Bergman warns us to not get distracted by our plans:

Every once in a while there happens to be a trail that travels in the same direction we're traveling so we follow it. It makes for easy walking.


But a dangerous thing happens when we follow a trail: we stop paying attention to the environment. Since the trail is so easy to follow, we allow our minds to wander and neglect to observe where we are.


Then we forge ahead, moving with speed and purpose, right to the point where we look up and realize, like I did that day, that the environment around us is no longer recognizable. Our focus blinded us.


This is not just a hiking thing.

When schools cut recess for academics - our focus blurs.

When teachers give up on the weakest students to help the bubble kids - our focus dissipates.

When parents bribe students to learn - our focus crumbles.

When whole teaching staffs are fired - our focus rots.

There's a lot wrong with education deform - no wonder people like Sir Ken Robinson talk less about the need for evolution and more about revolution.

No plan might be a good plan

Is there a place for a good plan?

Sure, but let's not kid ourselves - planning is guessing.

At best, plans can be used to guide us as we maneuver our way through life. Problems arise when we re-label plans from guides to dictates. When the tail wages the dog, we lose our way.

We tell kids we can't discuss this because we are suppose to be learning about that.

Instead of asking kids what kind of project they want to do, we tell them what project they have to do.

Peter Bergman explains Why Not Having a Plan Can Be the Best Plan of All:

Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates were computer science students without any real plan. They started Facebook because it was fun, used their talents, and was a novel way for Harvard students and alumni to stay in touch. Zuckerberg never anticipated it would host over 400 million members. And he had no clear idea where the money would come from. But he kept at it until, in 2007, Facebook let outside developers create applications for it, and game developers started buying ads on Facebook to keep attracting players. Hardly Zuckerberg's strategy in 2004.



And when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, started writing code in 1996 they had no clear plan or idea how they would make money either. But that didn't stop them from starting. It wasn't until 2002 and 2003 that AdWords and AdSense became the company's money-making platform.

Lesson planning has taken on a life of itself - often these content-bloated, overly prescriptive lesson plans are by-products of a curriculum that demands kids know an infinite amount of material in time for yesterday.

Just as Mark Twain coined the phrase "I never let schooling get in the way of my education", it is just as true that good teachers don't let lesson planning or curriculum get in the way of learning.