How to Use Moonshot Thinking in School

By Alyssa Gallagher, Guest Author

More and more educators are talking about the importance of student voice and passion in learning. While the desire to improve learning experiences for all students is admirable, it will only translate to actionable changes through the work of teachers. But how do you incorporate your passion into the classroom?

Discovering and Sharing Your Passion

At a recent week long professional development workshop I led, 30 teachers shared how they would define their passions and creatively incorporate them into their practice. The hidden talents and passions of the group ranged from horseback riding to Mexican folk art. These teachers risked being vulnerable to share something personal with professional colleagues, and that trust helped us create strong bonds quickly. It showed me how a classroom, school staff or administrative team might be transformed by taking the time to share, acknowledge and nurture the personal passions of their teachers. Here are a few easy ways to begin exploring and using your passion in your teaching:

• Identify it. What is something you are genuinely interested in outside of school?
• Brainstorm incorporation strategies. How can you share this passion at work?
• Create a sharing culture. Do you know the personal passion or native genius of every member on your team? If not, it’s time to discover something new about your colleagues. Just ask them.
• Share the personal passions of your team with your site principal. It just might help her to get to you know better and encourage her to think about how to share her own personal passion.

Working With Student Passion

Incorporating what your students love into your lesson plans is an important step to help them get the most out of every day in the classroom. Begin by instructing students to create and share Ignite presentations about their passions. By sharing their areas of interest, each student will feel engaged in their learning experience. To facilitate this:

• Model what you’d like to see. Create an Ignite style presentation of your own to share with your students. Not only will this model what you want, but it will help students learn something about you in the process
• Create guidelines. Make a template and expectations for the students to follow. For example, Ignite presentations are typically no more than five minutes, with 20 slides or less. Setting specific parameters will help students feel less overwhelmed by their projects.
• Assign it as homework. Having an opportunity to work on their projects at home will give students time to think about how to tackle it.
• Schedule student presentations. Consider starting or ending each class period with a student presentation during the first month of school. This offers your class a great way to get to know each other right off the bat, and gives students a chance to think about how they may want to present themselves to their peers.

Moonshot Thinking

Defining personal passion is a great place to start, but it must be combined with hard work, investigation and determination. For inspiration, check out the video What is Moonshot Thinking? by X. This video beautifully illustrates the power of moonshot thinking, which builds by building on passion with persistence and lofty goals, but recognizes that so much more is needed. When people embrace moonshot thinking, they’re choosing to be bothered by problems that aren’t easily solved and committing to finding solutions to them.

How to Embrace Moonshot Thinking

Once your students have identified and shared their personal areas of passion, take it to the next level with these suggestions:

• Brainstorm problems. After showing What is Moonshot Thinking? to your class, start a class discussion about problems that bother your students. Have volunteers call them out, and make a class list on the whiteboard or a piece of chart paper.
• Connect problems with passions. Once you’ve identified world problems, help each student connect a passion of theirs to a problem that needs solving. For example, if a student loves to garden, you may show how their green thumb could lead to solving the problem of world hunger, or creating food in areas plagued by drought.
• Present to the class. After your students have time to consider different potential solutions to their problems, encourage them to share their ideas with the class. Hearing the ideas that their peers have come up with can inspire each person, making it a valuable learning experience for everyone.

Creating passion in the classroom is critical to helping students think way outside of the box, sharpening their problem-solving skills. By encouraging them to use the strategy of moonshot thinking, you’ll ignite their love of learning and set them up for a future of success.

For more teaching resources, check out education.com.

Alyssa Gallagher is the Director of Global Leadership Development for The Wiseman Group and a co-founder of the weekly #DTK!2chat. She enjoys coaching leaders on the innovative mindsets and disciplines. With the goal of improving learning experiences for students, she is constantly exploring “What if…?” with school leaders and works to support radical change in education.