It’s the start of a new school year and many of the country’s greatest educators have been readying plans to kickstart new projects, goals, procedures, instructional strategies, and countless other fresh ideas in their classrooms. Many of us spend the summer months exploring our craft and searching for the something that might work just a bit better this year. For those with these innovative mindsets, the ideas might be overwhelming. Even when a school year wraps up with a sense of achievement and satisfaction, lifelong learners feel the urge to continue experimenting with their pedagogy.

As social media has changed the game of lesson planning in recent years, our feeds are flooded with captivating ideas, often accompanied by impressive photos, anecdotes, and resources published with attention-grabbing graphics and fonts. How can educators sift through the options to choose the best ideas and implement them with integrity?

We are all aware of the marketing platform that is social media, but the marketing of learning experiences that bombards teachers each time they log on is unprecedented. To determine which of these ideas are worth our precious class time, it’s important to remember to keep our overarching goals in focus.

Before curating a list of ways to change your lessons this year, articulate the change you want to see. In broad terms, we want to positively affect the quality of learning in our classrooms. More specifically, many use the avenue of increasing student interest and engagement in their lesson topics in order to affect learning. While I will never undermine the importance of engaged learners, I have come to realize that this pursuit can sometimes derail my overall intentions in the classroom.

At times, my most creative ideas end up being an “event” rather than an authentic element of learning. A simple Google search for lesson ideas related to a particular topic will turn up countless results that might not be quality, standards-aligned practices. I encountered this most frequently when I tried to plan projects in the past. I would look for activities to wrap up a teaching unit, and often it turned out to be what students remember most about the topic. Unfortunately, if I am honest, too often those culminating projects didn’t showcase my learning objectives. Instead, they tended to either assess memory, compliance, or nothing at all. But they were cool, man!

I have absolutely been guilty of using technology just for technology’s sake. I’ve been “sold” on new apps or other tech tools that I looked for ways to use in my instruction just because they were cool. I’ve spent hours designing lessons in fancy presentation format that really didn’t expose my students to anything different. It was only through some really serious reflection that I admitted to myself that I was falling for the marketing and losing sight of the change I actually wanted to happen in my classroom.

In many cases, teachers have tech at their fingertips before they have a clear vision for why and how it should be used. Undeniably, connectivity can offer a HUGE boost to student engagement, but it’s important to keep coming back to our purpose. We need kids to be engaged in the right things, after all. It’s a theme that you’ll hear us discuss often: the greatest resources in the world won’t affect student learning unless they are used effectively. The goals or objectives need to come first every time. I still have to remind myself of this repeatedly. It’s so easy to lose sight and it’s not easy to admit it.

A simple way to keep our sights set on our true intentions is to write it down, look at it often, and speak it aloud to others. I use a sort of vision board for myself, and that is what I look at as I am thinking about unit planning. When I read a tweet or pin an new idea, the act of looking at my intentions helps me to mentally assess whether it is going to help me or distract me from doing what I’ve set out to do...