Ep 1: WSBAT (Will Students Be Able To?)

WSBAT

Five years and one month ago, at my first job, I saw a lesson plan for the first time. A two-page 'word document' that was supposed to guide a teacher on how to carry out a teaching session. I remember thinking - wow! this is so magical, so beautiful, so elegant. 

Lesson plans were a revelation for me, especially taking into account where I come from. I taught a class of 40 students for the first time when I was 17, at a private school in my hometown of Poonch, J&K. Poonch is smaller than a typical locality in a metro city. There, teachers came to class and winged it, from their notes or the textbook - they had no exhaustive plans. The lessons had an outline, but there was no lesson plan. These plans I saw, however, were detailed and had things like - teacher actions, student actions, expected responses, exercises, strategies, etc. It blew my mind. 

All lesson plans started with one thing and one thing only, an acronym, SWBAT. I did not understand SWBAT at all and therefore, it added to the enigma of the plan. I went to "S" and asked, what it meant. S was leading the education team at our company at that time -- he was supposed to be the Ed co-founder in our Ed-tech company. S helped me a lot, and took the veil off the word for me. He explained that it stood for - Students Will Be Able To. He then described how SWBAT was supposed to be followed by a measurable action that the student is able to perform in the classroom. 

"SWBAT dance at the end of the class." Or, more realistically - 

"SWBAT explain Photosynthesis at the end of the class."

It was a standard to write a 'Learning Objective' of the lesson, he said. And, that it had to be observable and measurable. And like other great teachers, he went on to explain more, and more and more. He started uttering words I had never heard before - Piaget, Bloom, Taxonomy, Dewey, Scaffolding, Pedagogy. I think I started to feel like an idiot around the second minute of the conversation. I knew that Piaget was a noun, but whether it was a person, a place, a thing, or a concept, I had no idea. Was Pedagogy a female scientist? Does taxonomy have to do something with taxes? How are taxes relevant to a lesson plan? I was mesmerized by all the complexity. I adored what I could not understand. I think humans tend to do that - deify what they can't understand. 

I think humans tend to do that - deify what they can't understand. 

Then, one day S left. While he was there, he got the lesson plans made by freelancers, and my job was to find videos for the lesson plans that had already been made. One of those days, we realized that the lesson plans that were already made were not compatible with the company's vision and so, we ditched them all. Now, we had to recreate them, and since S had no interest in creating the plans himself -- he had made hundreds in his time and now he felt that the job was monotonous -- he started training other people to make the plans. I was one of them. I started making my first plan, and S did all the scaffolding -- Ed-speak for hand-holding -- and in 3 days, the plan was made. S checked it, I still remember the frustration on his face as he was doing it, and ended up reluctantly rewriting 80 percent of it. This went on for 2 more weeks and around 10 more plans. Then, one day S left. We were left with no Ed-founder in the Ed-tech company. 

Without S, I thought WSBAT - Will Students Be Able To?