Designing comprehension: eight years of making hard ideas reachable.

He had the textbook and still could not trace the blood through it. A change of context did what better words could not.

He had the textbook, the labelled chambers, the arrows. None of it had moved from the page into his head. So I stopped explaining. I pressed down on a vein in my own arm, cleared it, and let him watch the valve refuse to let the blood run backward. His face shifted, though my words had been no better than the textbook’s.

That heart-diagram moment was the smallest version of eight years of the same work. The subject moved around. I taught literary analysis to fifteen-year-olds and the politics of Animal Farm to a transitional English class, then IELTS and SAT preparation to students in Canada, the United States, Taiwan, and China. The rooms varied as much as the subjects: Vancouver public and independent classrooms, an IB World School, and BC offshore schools in Shanghai and Beijing. The content changed every time. The move did not.

Once teaching became a design problem, the question shifted from how to explain an idea to how to make it reachable.

The material I was handed was usually abstract, or distant, or both. A short story from 1948. A totalitarian state told through farm animals. An organ you cannot watch working. The students were fifteen, or reading in their second language, or sitting an exam that would decide which university would take them. The syllabus was written as if they already had the scaffolding to reach the idea. Most of them did not.

So I stopped asking how to explain something and started asking how to change the context so the idea landed.

Watch where a student stalls, rebuild the material that night, test the change the next day.

For most of the eight years I designed and taught solo, answerable to no one for the day-to-day calls. In schools I worked alongside a coordinating teacher and a school advisor, inside a department and a timetable I did not control. The teaching worked because it was tailored, so the tailoring stayed with me.

• Observed where comprehension broke down, lesson by lesson and student by student.
• Interviewed students about where the reading and the writing broke down.
• Curated and built unit plans, lesson sequences, handouts, assessments, and slide decks.
• Tested with formative checks, weekly anonymous feedback, and the next day’s class.
• Handed off my resource library and a set of staff workshops to colleagues.

Formative checks, exam results, and a weekly anonymous survey pointed one way: students held on to the formats that did not look like school.

My certifying practicum had one inquiry behind it: what is the relationship between how I engage a class, the media I use, and how students respond, both in the room and in their assessments? I gathered the data the classroom allowed. Formative checks during a lesson. Summative results after it. A weekly anonymous survey that told me what had worked.

Each format was a variant I could read a response to: gamified review, circle discussion, slide decks, handouts, quizzes. The finding came back consistent. Students engaged more, and stayed engaged. After that, every class opened the same way. Students rated their day on a row of mood icons as they came in, so I started each lesson knowing the real state of the room.

I redrew a nineteen-lesson unit: two actors, timed steps, and a check line under every lesson.

My English 10 unit ran nineteen lessons over four weeks. Reading it back now, it is a service blueprint in a teacher’s vocabulary. A header strip of metadata: subject, grade, theme, schedule, length. Two columns set side by side, what a student would be able to do, and how I would know they could, the action beside its evidence. A lane for the learners who needed the material adapted. A lane for the materials and technology each lesson depended on.

And underneath every lesson, a timed sequence split between two actors: what I did, and what the student did, minute by minute, with a line for the check that told me whether the lesson had landed. Frontstage and backstage, durations, a measurement line.

A protagonist became a head-to-head matchup; a story arc became a line you can trace.

A protagonist is an abstract idea. So I taught it through a short film the class already loved, had students rank the characters from least to most likely to be the lead, and let them argue before I named the term. Round or flat, static or dynamic: I framed it as a head-to-head matchup, because the grammar of a video game was already theirs. Point of view became three plain cards. Conflict became person against person, person against self, person against the world.

I drew the Freytag pyramid as a single line that climbs to a star and drops, because a shape you can trace holds in the mind in a way a list you have to memorize does not. The content stayed the BC curriculum. The form belonged to the students. I tuned the examples to whoever was in the room, to what a class would recognize from their own lives, because an example only works if the person reaching for it has somewhere to stand.

I designed where the curriculum, the exam board, the school, and the guardian all pulled, and taught understanding over a memorized template.

Every lesson I built answered to more people than the student in front of me. A provincial curriculum set the competencies. An exam board set the bar that decided which university would take a student. A school set the timetable, and a guardian was waiting to hear how it went. I designed at the point where all of them met, and the hardest calls came when two of them wanted different things.

Writing instruction is almost always formulaic. The thesis and its three reasons, the five-paragraph shape. The fast path is to drill the template until a student can reproduce it under exam pressure. I took the slower one. I taught the structure, then taught why it works, where it fails, and how the move underneath it (make a claim, support it, answer the objection) carries into a cover letter, a budget request, a difficult conversation.

For test preparation that was a real risk. The exam rewards the template, and the template alone can pass it. I made a bet that students who understood why the structure works would outperform students who had only memorized it. On the IELTS and the SAT, they did. A template gets a student through Friday. The understanding stays for years.

Students hit the exam bands they needed.

The students reached the outcomes that mattered to them. Exam-preparation students hit the IELTS bands they needed, from the 7 that opens a post-secondary application up to a 9. Others completed the IB programme and went on to the universities they were aiming for. Along the way most of them got better at thinking critically and at naming what they felt, which was never on the syllabus but mattered more than anything that was.

The practice did not leave when I did. I shared my resource library and digital materials with the department, and I ran workshops for staff on how AI works and where it could give teachers their time back. UBC’s Faculty of Education named me its recipient of the BEd Outstanding Practicum Award for 2023 to 2024. May Ng, my faculty advisor at UBC, assessed the practicum and recorded the same result I had been tracking week to week: it was the unconventional formats students engaged with and remembered.