We called the event Omnivores’ Forum. After middle schoolers read the young adult version of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan’s exploration of where food comes from and how our choices shape the food system, my team of teachers and I brought in 24 experts—farmers, cheesemakers, beekeepers, chocolatiers, chefs, cookbook authors, anti-hunger advocates, flavor scientists—to give workshops. We paired a teacher with each presenter, and every workshop included a demonstration, hands-on activity, discussion, and reflection exercise. We created mixed-grade groups of students and ensured each saw presenters with diverse perspectives. We wrote prompts to help students link the book to the workshops and consider their own food choices.
My principal was so pleased when this event came together. He highlighted it in the school newsletter, where he and the event poster were pictured. It truly was a great event—my team had worked so hard to conceptualize, organize, and actualize it because we believed in the values behind it. We believed in building a sense of belonging through a shared critical reading experience, in hands-on learning, in involving community partners, and in learning to make ethical decisions. The problem was that the event was a one-off. Instead of us teaching those values every day, a poster, left up on the wall outside the principal’s office, was its only remaining trace.
My school’s focus on initiatives like Omnivores’ Forum is hardly unique. I’ve worked with one institution after another where there was a gap between the school’s stated values and its everyday practices. Instead of embedding those values into its most basic daily practices—teaching and learning—the schools added programs to compensate for their absence. Compensatory programs make up for a lack of something important at school instead of making that “something important” an inherent aspect of the school experience.
What Does “Compensating” Look Like?
I remember once, in preparing to lead a workshop for a large school, visiting the “Who We Are” section of their website. The menu that popped up had so many items that it went off the page: sustainability, wellness, equity, global citizenship, and many more. This was a well-resourced school filled with smart, passionate educators. Yet after clicking each link, all I knew about the school was that they had all those programs. I didn’t know who they were at their core, what a student’s day-to-day experience was like, or what mattered most to the community.
One-time events like Omnivores’ Forum are compensatory: They add something the school says is important—in this case, experiential learning and community engagement—to make up for the fact that students rarely experience school in these ways. Many other types of programs can also be compensatory, such as:
- Recurring special events. These might be yearly, like a “Students Teaching Students” day, or more frequent, like monthly “open sessions” where students discuss personal challenges.
- Carve-outs. These are activities set aside within class time, like emotional check-ins, that appear in the schedule but aren’t integrated into learning. Asking students to notice emotions while reading about a historical event or solving a set of math problems is embedding SEL. Asking students to spend the first six minutes of class naming emotions compensates for the rest of the day when they have to bury those emotions.
- Contingency resources. These include things like “wellness kits” that contain coping strategy cards, stress balls, lavender oil, and candy.
Sure, such programs can have benefits. But at their core, they compensate for something the school deems important but hasn’t built into students’ daily experience—whether that’s intellectual challenge, social belonging, personal wellness, or something else. In contrast, when a school commits to its values, we see those values reflected in its everyday practices: communication systems, schedules, homework and attendance policies, and above all, instructional design.
At school, students spend most of their time in learning spaces, doing learning activities, pursuing learning goals, developing a sense of self in the process of learning, and building a sense of community by learning together. To bring the school’s values to life, there is no practice with more leverage than instructional design, because that’s how we structure our students’ daily interactions with learning content and each other as learners. We can proclaim our values through our special programs, but we enact our values every day through instructional design.
Hidden Costs of Compensatory Programs
Planning, implementing, maintaining, and refining even small-scale programs demands time, energy, attention, and money—all of which are in limited supply. The more of these resources we devote to compensatory programs, the less we have to design instruction, even if that’s what will have a greater impact on our students.
Students also see these programs as separate and apart from the main business of school—their classes—and therefore as less important. For example, if students only have opportunities to talk about their identities during “community conversations,” they get the message that their identities have nothing to do with their classes and are less valued than their academic achievements. The programs can then come across as performative. To be clear: I’m not saying all these programs exist for the sake of optics, but some do, and that can easily be students’ perception.
Meanwhile, teachers can feel unseen and unappreciated if their instructional practices already embed the values the program is supposed to serve. Imagine a teacher who structures her entire geometry curriculum around local social justice projects, such as calculating the area of green space within a particular neighborhood. She brings in community activists, scholars, and officials to share their perspectives on relevant issues, explain how they use geometry in their work, and critique students’ projects. Now imagine how this teacher might feel when another event at the school, that happens only once, is held up as a paragon of creativity and civic engagement, when that’s exactly the kind of experience she creates for students in her class every day. The problem is the very fact that it is compensatory—created to make up for something that should already be happening (or already is happening in the case of the geometry teacher) every day in classrooms.
Instructional design is the highest leverage practice schools have to align students’ experiences with the community’s values.
Leveraging Instructional Design
Let’s return to the values our Omnivores’ Forum espoused: interpersonal connection, local partnership, and ethical decision making. In hindsight, each of those values would be better served through instructional design. If we want students to connect with one another, we can design discussions and assignments such that they contribute meaningfully to each other’s learning, create something together that no one person could have created alone, and express appreciation for the role their classmates play in their growth. If we want students to partner with local professionals, we can physically or virtually bring them into our classrooms as guest presenters, visit their spaces, ask them to serve as mentors during projects that approximate or support their work, or invite them to give feedback on student performances. If we value ethical decision making, we can design prompts, projects, and simulations that help students apply ethical principles to issues they’re studying and to their own lives.
Instructional design means shaping the ways students interact with the content and each other so they achieve learning goals and embody qualities that the school community deems important. Instructional design is the highest leverage practice schools have to align students’ experiences with the community’s values.
The idea that schools need to focus on instruction isn’t exactly earth shattering. So the question becomes, why do schools devote so much energy to programs that compensate for the absence of a valued quality and so little energy to designing instruction so that quality emerges in students’ daily experiences? I’m not exempting myself. I spent many hours working on Omnivores’ Forum—and many more on other initiatives that have nothing to do with classroom learning and don’t impact students’ daily experiences. But the real issue isn’t individual effort or intent. School leaders who want to focus less on compensatory programs and more on instructional design will likely encounter the following pressures.
1. The Demand for Visible Solutions
The hot topic in education might be literacy, sustainability, equity, empathy, wellness, or artificial intelligence. It doesn’t matter what the conversation is about, but as soon as there is a conversation, school leaders face pressure to respond. Programs like Omnivores’ Forum or wellness kits give principals and superintendents something to point to, take photos of, and describe in their newsletters. Instructional design doesn’t create things we can point to because it doesn’t create things. You can point to an empathy poster, but you can’t point to the empathy that emerges from how a discussion is structured in science class. In the era of “pics or it didn’t happen,” instructional design doesn’t give us a photo to post for families to like on social media. Moving from compensatory to systemic solutions would mean retraining our community to expect students to experience meaning and vitality, even if the photos don’t look as cool.
2. Resistance to Change
OK, yes. Some teachers are rigid and don’t want to change anything they do. But most of us want to talk about the way we teach because our work matters to us. Yet, we don’t get many opportunities to discuss how we design instruction. We get mandates, which bypass reflection entirely. We get evaluations, which cast what we do as “good enough” or “not good enough” instead of noticing what actually happens in our classrooms. And we get vague celebrations—but telling us our hard work is appreciated isn’t the same as asking us about our practices, much less giving us time to ask each other about our practices and to explore new practices together. There will always be a few teachers who fear change. But most of us are curious, committed professionals who share a set of values and want to learn how to teach in ways that cultivate those values in our students.
3. Scarcity of Time
Instructional design is work, and there isn’t time for one more thing. But if we treated instructional design as the thing, we could reclaim the time we spend chasing everything else. At my school, we had three meetings a week: a full faculty meeting where we sat and were talked at, a grade-level team meeting for “student review,” and a grade-level team meeting for “non-student review.” Seriously. That’s what it was called, and we used it mostly to talk about compensatory programs. What if we reclaimed that time to discuss articles about instructional practices? Or simulate those practices so we could experience them as if we were students? What if we visited each other’s classrooms and then used our meeting time to debrief what we noticed? Or pose teaching problems that we could address as a group?
When we had meetings on our schedules, we attended them. We participated. If one of those meetings was for collaborative professional learning, that’s what we all would’ve done every week. Instead of building wellness kits, we could’ve learned how to teach in ways that evoke wellness; instead of putting up posters about empathy, we could’ve learned to design instruction in ways that foster empathy among students.
You can point to an empathy poster, but you can’t point to the empathy that emerges from how a discussion is structured in science class.
Living Our Values
If schools are willing to redirect their resources to building the necessary infrastructure for teachers to discuss and refine their instructional practices in accordance with a particular set of values, then we won’t need compensatory programs.
It was easy to get sucked into projects like Omnivores’ Forum precisely because the underlying values aligned with my own. I got to build something that felt meaningful and see an outcome in a matter of months. But true values are lived every day. Through instructional design, teachers create the conditions for students to enact the values that define a school’s identity. And leaders can create the conditions for teachers to design instruction. It might not make a good poster, but it does make a lasting legacy.
Reflect & Discuss
Where in your own classroom or school do you see values lived out in daily instruction?
What message might students be getting from current programs—do they feel integral to learning or separate from it?
What’s one small design change you could make to better align your teaching with the school community’s values?
