Yesterday, on Anchor I shared the idea that there is value is sharing the messes and mistakes that we make. In that little podcast I mentioned that one of my most popular blog posts from seven years ago was one about how my Cold War lesson plan flopped and what I did to correct it. The original post can be found here. I’ve also copied part of it below the Anchor recording embedded below.

When I realized that my plan wasn’t going as I hoped, I jumped on Twitter and asked,
“Doing an intro to Cold War w/ my class, can you help? Which event(s) of the Cold War were most significant/ memorable in your lifetime?”

My hope was that the responses would lead my students investigate some of the events mentioned in the responses, it did. But, I also got some unexpected responses of “read them the Butter Battle Book.” I didn’t have the book available, but I did have YouTube available. Sure enough I found a video of the Butter Battle Book on YouTube. So we stopped the KWL activity and watched the video. It turned out to be a great introduction to Cold War concepts.