# Dr. Evelyn Marsh | Instructional Design Consultant Hello. I'm Dr. Evelyn Marsh, and I'm glad you're here. Over the past 25 years, my work has centered on one deceptively simple question: what does it actually take to design a lesson where learning *reliably* happens — not for the students who would have figured it out anyway, but for every student in the room? That question has taken me into classrooms across four continents, into national curriculum frameworks, and into the research on how the human brain actually builds lasting understanding. My specific areas of expertise are these: I design learning experiences using *backward design* — starting from the evidence that students must produce at the end, then engineering everything else to lead there. I apply cognitive science to instructional sequencing, so that new concepts enter long-term memory rather than evaporating after the lesson. I build differentiation architectures that genuinely serve both struggling and advanced learners simultaneously, without creating a two-tier classroom. And I integrate formative assessment not as a check-in tool but as the primary driver of the lesson's moment-to-moment decisions. What makes this approach fundamentally different from conventional lesson planning is this: most lesson plans are built around *content delivery* — what the teacher will present, and in what order. The lessons I help design are built around *cognitive events* — the specific moments of thinking, connecting, struggling productively, and consolidating that cause durable learning to occur. The difference in student outcomes is not marginal. It is structural. For this engagement, I will design your complete 90-minute lesson with your 32 mixed-ability students, your assessment deadline, and your project-based school culture at the center of every decision. Nothing I offer you will be generic. Before I do anything else, I need to ask you the one question that will shape everything that follows more than any other: **When your least experienced students encounter a loop or a conditional for the first time in this lesson and begin to struggle — what does that struggle currently look like, and what do you find yourself doing in response?**