How to Create a Fun Lesson

I have an almost perfect memory for the lessons I learned from. I can tell you exactly which class period I first understood compound interest, the specific moment I grasped how to read a financial statement, and the exact session where I first felt confident pitching an idea in front of strangers. Each of those memories has a few things in common. None of them involve sitting still and listening to a lecture.

I also have an almost perfect lack of memory for everything else I supposedly learned in school. I sat through hundreds of hours of instruction in subjects I now couldn't summarize if you asked. The difference between the lessons I remember and the lessons I don't is what I think about when I'm helping teachers design their own.

What Makes a Lesson Memorable

The lessons I remember have four ingredients in common.

The first is I had to do something. Not watch something, not listen to something, not take notes on something. Do something. Solve a problem. Build something. Present an idea. Defend a position. The act of doing — even when the doing was small or imperfect — created a kind of memory that passive consumption never produces.

The second is there was real risk of failure. The lessons that stuck were the ones where I could have gotten it wrong, looked foolish, or missed the point. The risk wasn't catastrophic — it was just real enough to make me actually pay attention. Lessons where the right answer was guaranteed by the structure tend not to stick. Lessons where I had to figure something out, and might not, do.

The third is someone reacted to my work. A teacher's nod. A peer's question. A judge's vote. The moment my work was acknowledged — positively or critically — by another human, the learning crystallized. This is part of why I've designed so much of Products: The Card Game around the table-based pitch format. Every invention gets a live reaction. The reactions are what makes the experience stick.

The fourth is I left wanting to do it again. Memorable lessons usually end with a feeling of incompleteness — there was more to do, more to try, more to figure out. Lessons that wrap up neatly often vanish from memory because there's no open loop pulling me back to them. Lessons that end mid-loop pull me forward.

How to Build These Ingredients into Your Own Lessons

If you teach and you want to build more memorable lessons, the practical question is how to actually engineer those four ingredients into your class time.

The doing is the easiest part to engineer. Replace at least one segment of your lesson with an activity where students have to produce something — a written response, a quick sketch, a mock pitch, a worked solution. The activity doesn't need to be elaborate. The point is to shift students from receivers to creators for at least part of the period. This is the principle behind experiential learning and learning by doing, which I've written about more deeply elsewhere.

The risk of failure is harder to engineer because it requires giving up some control. The lesson can't be set up so that the right answer is obvious. Students need to have a real chance of getting it wrong. This is uncomfortable for many teachers, especially newer ones, because it makes the classroom feel less predictable. But the discomfort is the price of memorable learning. Without real risk, the brain doesn't form the kinds of memories that last.

The reaction is engineered through structure. Build in moments where student work is shared with peers, evaluated by an outside party, or responded to publicly. A simple "share your answer with the person next to you and have them tell you what they noticed" is a reaction. A formal pitch competition is a reaction. The form doesn't matter as much as the fact that someone is responding. My piece on how to host a pitch competition goes into more detail on the most structured version of this.

The "want to do it again" feeling is the trickiest one to engineer. It usually comes from leaving a lesson in mid-loop — an unfinished discussion, an unresolved invention, a competition that ends with a "see you next week for round two." Lessons that wrap up too cleanly satisfy a kind of teacherly impulse but don't pull students forward. The teachers I most respect are willing to leave loops open intentionally. My piece on how to create an active lesson covers more of the structural choices that support this approach.

If you build all four ingredients into a single lesson, you'll have built one your students will remember years from now. I know this because that's how the lessons I still remember from school were built. The teachers who made them probably didn't think of it in those terms. They just understood, intuitively, that students remember what they did, not what they were told.