As we all know, “good instruction” is something that can happen in any classroom, and it doesn’t matter if you’re teaching differential equations or physical education—it’s all about the planning. Mainly because this allows administrators (who would have no idea what a differential equation is) to ask for your unit plan, lesson plan, and any other various documentation that you spend hundreds of hours painstakingly creating only to have dumped into your file after they check whether or not it looks enough like the template they gave you to follow as a guideline for planning, but also because all subjects are pretty much the same thing from their perspective, and they’re desperately looking for a one-size-fits-all solution for any discipline, no matter how complicated it might be.

Well, today is your lucky day—the World Teacher Federation (or WTF) has developed a model for delivering high-quality instruction to all administrators who struggle (though they’ll never actually admit it) to understand what you’re teaching, because your first priority is to make it very clear to whoever might happen to stumble through your door to know exactly what you’re doing at any given moment, even if it’s barely all you can do to explain the basic concepts to your students, many of whom have more familiarity with the topic than the administrator who is evaluating you. Your evaluator (who might have taught a completely different subject at a completely different grade level, at a school whose demographic is nothing like the one you’re teaching at) is still expected to judge your professional expertise because they underwent a rigorous, online, for-profit degree program: IDGAF.

Since it’s an acronym, it’s clearly a more legitimate method than actually using things like complete sentences to communicate, because it provides a completely watered-down approach to instruction at all levels, rendering the content practically meaningless in an aesthetically pleasing way that makes it look scientific and official. Here’s the breakdown:

• I: Information—Gather information about what you’re teaching. Maybe it’s a list of vocabulary terms, or propositions, or rules, or equations. It doesn’t really matter, as long as it looks like information.
• D: Data—Arrange this information into something that looks really important, by making it into a list or a spreadsheet, and then include a bunch of standards in parentheses and italics so it’s clear that you’re not just making this all up. You’re not, but they won’t check.
• G: Graph—Make a graph. It could be a bar-chart, line-graph, or if you’re really trying to suck up, a pivot-table. This is so you can explain that you made a graph, which is part of good instruction.
• A: Assessment—Develop a way to assess mastery of this information. It could be anything from a multiple-choice test to a presentation; it really doesn’t matter as long as they see that you have some sort of percentage and letter-grade equivalency.
• F: Frequency—Include plans for re-teaching and progress-monitoring, even though the district timelines for benchmark exams mean there’s no time to do that.

Of course, with such a simple, straightforward process, you might be wondering how this strategy could be introduced in a five-hour Professional Development meeting that teachers are contractually obligated to attend unless they’re willing to burn a sick-day for it, or at some districts, be docked pay as missing a PD is more detrimental to student learning than missing a day of instruction with your students.

In short, IDGAF represents a shifting of the paradigm as a new, research-based strategy that will work for any subject. It serves as the type of canned-solution that administration has been searching for, but have yet to find… until now.