Checklists have never been big in my life. That is until I read Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. The book tells the story of how the humblest of tools, the checklist, has made profoundly positive inroads into medicine, financial services and airline safety. Gawande argues for more extensive use of checklists, but he is very clear that they are not panaceas, just helpful tools. He calls them “cognitive nets” and argues that while they are great at dealing with simple problems, they can also be a prerequisite for dealing with complex ones as well.

I recommend you read the book to see how he makes that argument. Don’t accept it uncritically. Don’t be like the usual crop of ed reformist morons anxious to foist “checklist reform” onto all classrooms. I am sure you won’t, but I really don’t want the idea ‘ruined’.

Happily, checklists remain where they should–in the hands of teachers and learners as a way to provide feedback on practice. Which is to say that for now the teacher and learner are still in charge of checklists, thank you very much [fingers crossed].

I saw the infographic below on twitter and followed up by doing a screencapture and some modification using Diigo’s simple but effective annotation tools. Thanks to Reid Wilson for the generous Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license where I can share and modify his work. I hope the graphic is self-explanatory. I plan to use it as a checklist this semester. I plan to use it as a writing prompt after classes every day. I plan to add more ‘little heads’and checkboxes as I blaze a trail through the semester.

I am also planning on using this as one of my projects on my ‘Smallest Federated Wiki’ in the fond hope that others might join in. I will post more on this later, but I am twitchy with adrenal juice over the prospects.