#rawthought: What’s the Big Idea? A Thematic, Inter-disciplinary Approach

“It takes a big idea to attract the attention of consumers and get them to buy your product. Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night” — David Ogilvy

I’ve been thinking a lot about learning lately, and how best to make what we choose to teach in schools poignant: meaningful, relevant, and memorable. Reflecting on the quote above, I think educators can learn a lot from the marketing sector.

from Disney’s 1959 “Sleeping Beauty” — the etymology of “poignant” comes from “to prick”

Part of me has always been influenced by my mother — a life-long educator who worked mostly with primary school children, ages 3–8. She would choose a unit of interest to the students — like “dinosaurs” or “rainforests” — and everything they studied would be related to that theme. She’d work in all the standards so that the numeracy and language skills, social skills and scientific thinking were all seamlessly…