When It Doesn't Go Well

Looking back on what I have written so far it would be easy to think that everything just works. However that is most certainly not true. Every great educational book that I have read talks about creative and innovative lessons that fall flat and I have had my fair share. So this is a small sub category that I am going to start called WIDGW, or When It Doesn’t Go Well. Here I am going to talk about the things that I am going to use again, but before I do I need to rework it a bit.

I am starting with what was one of my favorite new things this year that I totally miscalculated: A Scooby Doo Addition and Subtraction unit. It was my second unit here at my new school and I just didn’t feel like I was myself yet. Looking back at it now, my family and I were living with our in-laws, I had just launched a gamified science class, I was adjusting to a new school, state, and life. I probably should have taken everything lesson by lesson, but I dream big.

I looked at what was too come and I wanted to make something more out of what was a pretty straight forward set of lessons. I made a haunted house where the kids could see our progress from one lesson to the next. Then I created a deck of what I called ‘Zoinks’ cards. Each card was themed after a classic Scooby Doo monster from the old cartoon. During lessons we would pull cards and the cards would each have a fun effect. One might ask them to write every odd number in their sums and differences in green color pencil, another forced them to rewrite their answers in expanded form. I set up my lessons in a pretty simple way so that the game element would be the piece that made it fun.

The haunted mansion I drew for the unit.

For the first few lessons, it worked. The kids were enjoying the challenges. Some of them would act so dramatic when it was time to pull a card. They wanted to do it though. They all also wanted to be the ones who moved our marker to the next area of the haunted house. So, what went wrong? In a word: timing.

Do to some things that we did at the beginning of the year that are positive to do, we were about a week and half behind on our pacing guide. During this unit, I found out that a lot of teachers in our district combine concepts in this unit to make up some of that time. Additionally, because of the way I had designed some of the cards it was making students take longer to complete certain tasks, which in turn would cause us to draw out lessons into multiple days. This would mean that we wrapped up lessons early the next day before starting the next day. In that rushed feeling, I would forget to have someone advance the Scooby Gang to the next room. Between combining lessons and throwing in preparation for the final assessment my well laid plan totally feel apart around me.

An example of one of the cards.

In the end, the students did well with the material and we were where we needed to be in terms of content and pacing. However, Scooby and the gang did not make it through the mansion. Also, despite the excitement that it generated, we only got about two thirds of the way through our Zoinks cards. A few of the kids asked why we stopped with the different pieces and I told them that I was sorry that it didn’t work out.

If I am being honest, the hardest part about innovation in the classroom is usually balancing time and pacing. This is especially true in math, where pacing guides loom like the forbidding legendary ghost of a pirate captain which is actually just a millionaire who is trying to scare off well meaning teachers with aspersions to make things awesome.

It is possible to do exciting and engaging lessons, it just takes work, planning and time. Scooby and the gang will rise again next year if I am teaching math. They will be more equipped to get through a renovated haunted house. The villains will be lurking in the shadows to complicate matters. Kids will probably be pretty excited excited again. For right now though, this all finds itself in an article subtitled: When It Doesn’t Go Well.