kzbteach

When I write, I’m messy. Not in the sense that I have crumbs all over my keyboard and coffee stain crop circles on the mountains of papers surrounding my desk. Maybe if you ask my wife it would be a different story, but that’s beside the point. 

I am messy because I write everything that comes to mind. Sometimes, I take to paper and create this Cthulhu-looking thing with so many tentacles it would have trouble walking. I start with a central idea–maybe an objective, a thesis, a major plot point–and the legs start growing. Offshoots upon offshoots later, I have chaos and a ton of potential.

Some ideas I combine. Others I hack off completely. The process, though, is where the gold is. The extra legs are the point. They give you material to dissect later. Eat your hearts out, anatomy teachers. 

On these legs, I often find my can-do statements, my hooks, my assessments, maybe even a project idea. 

I had a professor in college that gave me some great advice about essay writing that I think can be applied to the lesson/unit creation process. He said that writing an essay is like making a sculpture. At first, you throw all the clay at it. All the ideas, all the nonsense, all the facts, all the wisps of concepts that could work but that are not fully there yet. Everything. It’s going to get messy. It’s going to be a lot. A blob of ideas and information will sit in front of you. 

After, you need to sculpt. You take your knife or spatula or whatever sculptors use and you dig and remove and shape. You shave away all the stuff that doesn’t fit and start to see something recognizable start to emerge. It’s still ugly, maybe it doesn’t even look human, but at least it’s getting there. This is where parts of the lesson begin to define themselves—ideas to combine, can-do statements to build, themes to shape into lessons.

Refine. Rework. Design. Beautify. Chip away until it’s something sleek and beautiful with student-friendly learning objectives, assessments (both formative and summative), benchmarks, activities, and lessons. 

And from the heaps of clay, the vastness of ideas and thoughts (some throwaways, some pure genius), you have built something that you value and that students will appreciate.There is something about a lesson built by a teacher’s own voice and authenticity that makes it outstanding. Teaching is personal. We are the ones that give it personality and intrigue. We are pedagogical artists. 

A colleague once told me that when she teaches others’ lessons she feels boring and the students feel it as well. I think being the creator and implementor, knowing where to lean in and where to back off, where to emphasize and where to let the students make conclusions is profound and impactful and unique. 

Objectives can be solid and uniform and unchanging. Lessons should be our own.

– Zach, May 2026