Self-Discipline, Self-Direction & Delayed Gratification

As I reflect upon the content shared in Chapter 9: “Planning for Learning,” from the book Understanding by Design, the idea that most presses me is the authors' call for the following: genuine application to meaningful, real-world problems, hands-on opportunities to “do” the subject, and soliciting and offering helpful feedback along the way. I agree, that is how I want to design my units. But sometimes the most challenging aspect of a executing a unit is  student engagement (getting students to want to complete the tasks presented to them)--probing them toward getting lost in the subject so much that they forget that it is work—that is how I feel when I am engaged (the time passes without me knowing). And as the authors point out, this requires students to be self-disciplined, self-directed, and able to endure the challenge of delayed satisfaction.

High aims, right? Am I even able to practice these on a consistent basis? Hmm…not always! But I believe the greatest challenge to these three ideals, when considered components to engagement in the classroom, is that we teachers forget that self-discipline, self-direction and the ability to wait for gratification must be taught. I know I am guilty of simply expecting student to know what these three desired character qualities look like in practice. But when you really look at these words and examine the world in which we live, they are quite counter-cultural to the teenage experience. Does that mean we should just accept that, no? In my home and in my classroom I don’t desire to train my children to just blend in—joining the status quo. Absolutely not. I want so much for them than that. I want them to be highly-motivated, kind-hearted, agents for change in a world that so desperately needs people of such quality.  But I must step back and realize that they just might not know what that looks like. That I might have to, in the midst of focusing on content, focus too on the instruction of character qualities that will enable my students to become engaged through the way they act and think.

• If this is true, how does this type of training show up in my unit design?
• If these character qualities are not a part of the standards I am expected to teach, how do I justify spending time on them?
• Is it even worth creating units with genuine application to meaningful, real-world problems, hands-on opportunities to “do” the subject; and timely and consistent gathering and offering of feedback if I do not realize that at the root of my instruction is a call to instruct students on how to be self-disciplined, self-directed, and able to work long hours before being reward? 
  

Wow, and doesn’t that sound like a daunting task? I think going back to just teaching English like its just another school subject sounds like a huge time saver. But if you read about my work as an Under Cover Agent, you will know I am not about saving time and I like a good alias. So I will press forward in my work, using the boring subject of English to transform students’ character qualities, not just their understanding of the literary world.And I will try my best to do tgenuine application to meaningful, real-world problems, hands-on opportunities to “do” the subject, and soliciting and offering helpful feedback along the way