Taking a Shower with the Forces of Nature

I really just planned to take a shower. Showers are pretty boring, so I let my mind focus on something we had done the day before in our Instructional Design class. We were exploring ways to get at the Big Idea we wanted to teach. I knew I had to design a unit on geology, with an emphasis on landforms. Frankly, the topic seems deadly dull to me. Maybe it would help to think about what the Big Idea could be. I considered such ideas as: The earth has a variety of landforms that people must adapt to. Or: Forces of nature create a variety of landforms. Not bad, but my enthusiasm meter had not budged. Then it occurred to me: Would finding the “right” Big Idea get me more excited about the topic? I thought about how profound the concept of Big Idea really is. Wiggins and McTighe, in Understanding by Design, tell us that the Big Idea is the broad overreaching concept that can help students transfer specific understanding about one set of information to other related sets of information. Hmmm. Could it also be the thing that would make a topic so enticing that a person couldn’t wait to learn it—or teach it? By now I was clean, but I was really getting involved in this concept of a Big Idea, so I showered on. Could I come up with a Big Idea about landforms that would make me excited about designing and teaching the subject—and maybe make the kids excited about learning it? Maybe it’s a bit over the top, but here’s what I came up with: The earth is composed of nonliving material, and yet, because of natural forces within and around it, changes and growth occur that make it seem almost alive. Now that’s a Big Idea I’m eager to teach!