A time-honored family tradition is making chocolate chip cookies; not the premade dough you slap in a pan (although that works in a pinch), but the joy of baking from scratch.
There’s something almost reassuring about the process. Pull out the flour. Measure the sugar. Crack the eggs. Add the vanilla. Mix in the baking soda. Finally, it’s time for the ingredient everyone has been waiting for: chocolate chips. Yum!
There’s a recipe for a reason. Imagine that halfway through making the cookies, someone decides the recipe could use some improvement.
“What if we add ketchup?” Technically, we can, though the result may not be what we want.
Or what if our family decides vanilla extract is boring and peppermint extract sounds more interesting. We could make that substitution too. The result might even taste good.
But then we’re no longer making the chocolate chip cookies the recipe was designed for. We’re making something else.
That is the challenge with high-quality instructional materials, or HQIM. High-quality instructional materials are not simply collections of lessons. They represent carefully designed instructional systems.