The Best Question for Helping You Simplify Lessons, Curricula, Policies, or Procedures

The question is pretty… well [looks up synonym for simple] basic:

What would this look like if it had to be simple?

• If this lesson I'm planning had to be simple — as few moving parts as possible, as few things that could go wrong as possible, as few needless confusion points as possible — what would that look like?
• If this unit had to be simple, what would that look like?
• If our start of class procedure had to be simple, what would that look like?

You get the idea.

It's not complicated.

And that's the point.

The key is, when you ask yourself the question, try to really imagine that you have to strip it down to its most basic parts. You can't, in this scenario, attend to five different teaching gurus or nine lines on the teacher eval rubric.

All you can do, for this one precious moment, is boil the [lesson/unit/procedure] down into its basic parts.

Once you do, go two questions further:

• What's the worst thing that could happen if I actually did it this way?

• What's the best thing that could happen?

I can't think of any time in my career where the first wasn't outweighed by the last.

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SIMPLIFY is the sixth discipline of time management life stewardship that we'll discuss in the Life Stewardship for Educators seminar. It'll be live, focused conversations amongst educators like us trying to make practical applications of ideas like the one you found in this post.

And guess what? Registration is NOW OPEN until October 3. Learn more here.