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.

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 was the smallest version of eight years of the same work: literary analysis to fifteen-year-olds, the politics of Animal Farm, IELTS and SAT preparation, in Vancouver classrooms, an IB World School, and BC offshore schools in China. The content changed every time. The move did not.

Once teaching became a design problem, the question shifted from explaining an idea to making it reachable.

The material I was handed was abstract, or distant, or both. The students were fifteen, or reading in a second language, or sitting an exam that decided which university would take them. The syllabus assumed a scaffolding most of them did not have.

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; in schools, alongside a coordinating teacher and inside a timetable I did not control.

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

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? Each format was a variant I could read a response to: gamified review, circle discussion, slide decks, quizzes. The answer came back consistent. Every class then opened the same way: students rated their day on a row of mood icons at the door, so no lesson began on an assumption about 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. Two columns set what a student would be able to do beside how I would know they could. A lane held the learners who needed the material adapted. And under every lesson ran a timed sequence split between what I did and what the student did. 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: rank the characters from least to most likely to be the lead, argue about it, and only then get the term. Round or flat, static or dynamic became a head-to-head matchup, because the grammar of a video game was already theirs.

The content stayed the BC curriculum. The form belonged to the students, and I retuned the examples to whoever was in the room, because an example only works if the person reaching for it has somewhere to stand.

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

The hardest calls came when two of them wanted different things: an exam board that rewards a template against a student who will need the understanding a year later.

Writing instruction is almost always formulaic, and the fast path is to drill the template. I took the slower one: teach the structure, then 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 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.

IELTS bands from the 7 that opens a university application up to a 9, and a resource library the department kept.

Others finished the IB programme and went to the universities they were aiming for.

The practice did not leave when I did. I handed my resource library to the department and ran staff workshops on AI. May Ng, my faculty advisor at UBC, assessed the practicum and recorded the result I had been tracking week to week: it was the unconventional formats students engaged with and remembered.