Flirting rather than lecturing

Chip Heath and Dan Heath's book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die was never written to be sold strictly as a teacher preparation text-book, but it should be. The Heath brothers borrow a term from Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point, sticky, and inside their 300+ pages they provide six characteristics most sticky ideas share: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotional and stories.

The Heath brothers explain how gaining someone's attention is tricky enough, but keeping their attention maybe infinitely harder. If you're a teacher, you don't need to be told this. In fact, you could write a book on this topic.

Here is an excerpt that I found helpful when thinking of my next lessons:

Knowledge gaps create interest. But to prove that the knowledge gaps exist, it may be necessary to highlight some knowledge first. "Here's what you know. Now here's what you're missing." Alternatively, you can set context so people care what comes next. It's no accident that mystery novels and crossword puzzle writers give us clues. When we feel that we're close to the solution of a puzzle, curiosity takes over and propels us to the finish.

Treasure maps, as shown in the movies, are vague. They show a few key landmarks and a big X where the treasure is. Usually the adventurer knows just enough to find the first landmark, which becomes the first step in a long journey touward the treasure. If treasure maps were produced on MapQuest.com, with door-to-door directions, it would kill the adventure-movie genre. There is value in sequencing information - not dumping a stack of information on someone at once but dropping a clue, then another clue, then another. This method of communication resembles flirting more than lecturing.

Unexpected ideas, by opening a knowledge gap, tease and flirt. They mark a big red X on something that needs to be discovered but don't necessarily tell you how to get there. And, as we'll see, a red X of spectacular size can end up driving the actions of thousands of people for many years.

The best kind of learning occurs when you construct your own understanding - hence why most people who know anything about learning subscribe to the constructivist model. This model doesn't leave the learner to fend for themselves through the jungles of learning, rather the teacher does in fact play an important role. But rather than bieng the bulldozer who removes every obstacle in the jungle, the teacher is the compass, wineskin, or machete - in other words, the teacher plays a supporting role, but resists the urge to swoop in and rescue. To do so would sabotage the whole adventure.

We all know of children who are likely to buck the system and subvert the learning process, but you may find it ironic that the children are not the only one's causing teachers grief.

Because teachers are being asked to teach such monstrously large curriculums by the very system they work in, it is tempting to cover everything - travelling at break-neck speeds just to get to the end of the curriculum guide.

But there's a problem.

We call it a curriculum guide, but it's not a guide anymore, is it?

It's now become a rule book.

And it's threatening.

Howard Gardner wasn't joking when he said:

"The greatest enemy of understanding is 'coverage.'"

Despite the external, and threatening, pressures to do otherwise, teachers need to find a way to insulate our students from this madness. If not for our own sanity, then for the student's learning. That is why some of the very best teachers spend every day subverting or ignoring curriculum.

The next time your planning a lesson, remember that role as a teacher is less about lecturing the curriculum but flirting with it - presenting it in such a way that you care less about what your students know and more about what questions you want them to ask.

That is real engagement.

That is real learning.

Losing our way

Teachers encourage their students to prioritize and avoid distractions all the time. We employ all kinds of classroom management tactics to encourage a focused learning environment. However, perhaps more today than ever before, students are driven to distraction - and what's sadly ironic is that the adult's may be to blame.

In order to refocus ourselves, we need to understand what it means to properly prioritize.

In their book Made to Stick, Chip Heath and Dan Heath explain how defining and maintaining the essense of an idea can be so important:

It's hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. If we're to succeed, the first step is this: Be simple. Not simple in terms of "dumbing down" or "sound bites." You don't have to speak in monosyllables to be simple. What we mean by "simple" is finding the core of the idea.

"Finding the core" means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence. To get to the core, we've got to weed out superfluous and tangential elements. But that's the easy part. The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important but just aren't the most important idea. The Army's Commander's Intent forces its officers to highlight the most important goal of an operation. The value of the Intent comes from its singularity. you can't have five North Stars, you can't have five "most important goals," and you can't have five Commander's Intents. Finding the core is analogous to writing the Commander's Intent - it's about discarding a lot of great insights in order to let the most important insight shine. The French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery once offered a definition of engineering elegance: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." A designer of simple ideas should aspire to the same goal: knowing how much can be wrung out of an idea before it begins to lose its essence. 

Because most teachers have curriculums that are bloated with content, it can be a real challenge to maintain our focus. With the advent of today's high-stakes, standardized testing accountability, teachers may be more apt to become distracted than ever before. As if printing students' test scores in the local paper wasn't distracting enough, now policy-makers want to tie teachers' salaries to their students' test scores with merit pay. We've gone from targetting teacher's pride to targetting their wallets. All of these distractions make it hard for teachers to focus on our primary objective: learning. And if the teachers are having trouble maintaining focus, you can only imagine how distracted the kids are.

In the military, the Commander's Intent intentionally remains vaguely focused on the primary objective. This way the original plan may go up in smoke, but you still execute its intent. In the classroom this translates into: If there's only one teacher left to teach, they better be doing something to help student's to learn.

Unfortunately, top management might know what their priorites are but be completely inept at sharing and achieving them.What's worse is that there is very good reason to believe things are worse than that- for too long education reform has been driven by politicians who are incompetent at even identifying the primary goal of education.

As you prepare for your next lesson, think not about what you can add to your classroom, but how you can peal away the distractors and make it obvious to every single student in your class that, in the end, students are in school to learn.