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A Project Manager Is You
Notes on an ignored skill set in education
I had to pursue a second Master’s Degree before I ever took a class about the design and presentation of information. I was fortunate to have been gifted some Tufte earlier in my trajectory, so I wasn’t totally at a loss in this space. But I was still surprised by the fact that at no point prior to that class had I ever been explicitly taught principles of design regarding such central parts of my work as a teacher. Things like constructing slide decks and creating classroom materials may be often rote, but in education they are oft-repeated.
Of course, it’s actually not very surprising. None of this is a knock against anyone who was part of my educator training, it was just not on the plate. I still find it a bit odd that I never got a moment of anything like training with tools that I would come to use quite regularly for most of my life. Very few days go by where I’m not designing things to convey information. I suspect that’s the case for most teachers. And I suspect that most teachers still don’t get any real instruction in how to do that type of work most effectively if they don’t seek it out.
In education, this situation is not limited to documents and slides.
