End of Year Report

Writer J. Michael Straczynski, borrowing from Robert Heinlein, discusses the following metaphor:

“If you are trapped high in a burning building, you are eventually left with one of two options. You can stay where you are and perish in the fire, or you can jump and buy yourself a few more seconds to figure out what to do next.  The former spells certain doom; the latter provides at least the possibility of hope.”

I feel like I’ve spent a lot of time this year jumping out of burning buildings.

In retrospect, the decision to implement Canvas more fully as a content delivery and assessment system, while simultaneously moving full time to a new electronic textbook, was probably too ambitious.  Despite preparations I made over the summer, I feel like I spent the entire year trying to catch up. Everything took longer than expected to implement—the fact that we didn’t have the promised access to the e-book for the first month or six weeks of school certainly didn’t help—and pacing suffered.  There was a fair amount of material that I simply ran out of time to cover.  SAGE Summative results will probably reveal this in detail.

If I had it to do over again, I would probably move forward with Canvas first, using the textbook we’ve used in previous years.  However, having made it this far, I feel I’m in a good position to implement both the e-textbook and Canvas more effectively next year.  The groundwork has been laid; the infrastructure is, for the most part, now in place. I can spend my planning time next year revising instead of inventing.