Like reading a page out of my history as a teacher...

Ok, I was just rereading some of Ch. 1, and caught something I didn't really think about the first time through. On page 15, the authors start to discuss the benefits of ID to P-12 teachers.

On page 16, they write, "Implementing these approaches (project-based, cross-curricular, cooperative, authentic, etc.) obviously requires well-designed expeditions and projects. Where do they come from? For the most part, that responsibility falls on the individual teachers."

Wow! So that all of a sudden puts my "flop" of a first year teaching much more in perspective for me. I went out with the grandiose idea that if I taught the "right" way, I'd never have discipline problems, my students would love learning in my classroom, they'd carry me on their shoulders through the halls chanting my name, yada yada yada. Well, reality hit pretty quick that I didn't have a lick of resources to use to make "that kind" of teaching happen.

It was very frustrating to me to know what I was trying to make happen, but it just wasn't working right, but now I see a bigger picture. What I realized just now after reading page 16 is that the problem wasn't that I didn't have a solid understanding of the instructional strategies. I see that understanding the instructional strategy is only one piece in the larger puzzle in being able to design quality instruction. I was not prepared to fulfill the quote above: that the "responsibility" fell on me to create what really should have been professionally designed and developed already, and I as a new teacher should just have been implementing.