Notes

So this isn't just a thing for me--at least the others in my PD group agrees, and I was talking to someone in a teacher ed program on Long Island and she agreed too, so I believe this is just a prevalent thing across EdEd as a whole.
We spend a lot of time in all of our classes talking about the importance of text selection and classroom design, and about how to be antiracist and antibigoted and aware of the context around us. We really get into the importance of growing beyond the traditionalist flaws in our education system. I think the quickest way to say it is that we are actively taught how to optimize our classrooms and our content.

That's where the issue comes in. I have no experience, in class or out, in terms of writing lesson plans, assignments, choosing one reading over another, balancing workload... all the sorts of stuff that is the most basic part of planning and running a classroom. We aren't given a class on that. Instead, our classes assume that we know the basics and need to learn how to improve them, which leads to lots of us being thrown into the deep end when it comes time to do assignments and projects built around improving the lesson plans we have never done. We are told how to optimize and improve content, but not how to make the content in the first place. It's much like how a woodcarver will very much appreciate a high quality handsaw but it is still very difficult to start making a table without being given an axe.

To be fair, your templates have been fantastic, and you have given a lot of guidance on this topic, but the best stepstool in the world isn't a ladder. My group discussed possibly asking someone in the SOE if they could put together a workshop on the basics of lesson and content design. What do you think of that?