Making the Case for the One-Pager

Better use of time with predictable, clear meeting materials

The Brief Case 📚→💼→📈→📊

Here’s a little secret. We didn’t choose the title of our last book. We wanted to call it Selling is Teaching; our publisher didn’t; we lost.

Regardless, the unfinished tagline __________ is Teaching has been an animating focus for our work ever since. Selling is teaching. Marketing is teaching. Negotiation is teaching. Coaching is teaching. Our research, experience, and wide ranging interviews with insightful people have surfaced the ways that high quality teaching practice improves most any group activity.

High quality teaching brings an intensive focus to the __________’s effect on someone trying to learn something. It causes an individual to take responsibility for what happens inside another person’s head — and often, as a result, what actions they take next.

Think about some of the most basic practices involved in running a school: course sign-ups, discipline, providing insurance options for faculty and staff, etc. Many of them, we would argue, would be improved if we thought of them as opportunities to stimulate learning, i.e., as opportunities to practice the craft of teaching.

Consider the example of mid-semester or quarterly comments — the ones teachers write about student progress. From one angle, their purpose is to share information with parents. From another, comments are (hopefully) also for the students, who can gain valuable, formative insight from them. And then there is the teaching angle: comments are also learning opportunities for their authors.

Think, here, of what teachers learn by writing comments. When they interrupt what they are doing to write comments — as so many teachers are called to do each mid- or quarter- semester — they have to deeply focus on one…student…at…a…time. They have to look back through that student’s body of work. They have to bring their own history as a teacher to the forefront. If an assignment can be judged based on what it asks its assignee to know, rehearse, recall, and do, then comment writing is actually a profoundly good assignment.