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.

Teacher's Intent

Every year I get a couple student teachers from the local college. They are third or fourth year university students who are learning to become teachers (Bachelor of Education typicall takes four years of university in Alberta - sometimes five). And every year I have to convince them that everything they have been told about lesson planning was maybe a little bit of a lie.

Let me explain by using an excerpt from the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath.

Every move an Army soldier makes is preceded by a staggering amount of planning, which can be traced to an original order from the president of the United States. The president order the Joint Chiefs of Staff to accomplish an objective, and the Joint Chiefs set the parameters of the operation. Then the orders and plans begin to cascade downward - from generals to colonels to captains.

The plans are quite thorough, specifying the "scheme of maneuver" and the "concept of fires" - what each unit will do , which equipment it will use, how it will replace munitions, and so on. The orders snowball until they accumulate enough specificity to guide the actions of individual foot soldiers at particular moments of time.

The Army invests enormous energy in its planning, and its processes have been refined over many years. The system is a marvel of communication. There's just one drawback: The plans often turn out to be useless.

"The trite expression we always use is No plan survives contact with the enemy," says Colonel tom Kolditz, the head of behavioral sciences division at West Point. "You may start off trying to fight your plan, but the enemy gets a vote. Unpredictable things happen - the weather changes, a key asset is destroyed, the enemy responds in a way you don't expect. Many armies fail because they put all their emphasis into creating a plan that becomes useless ten minutes into battle."

The Army's challenge is akin to writing instructions for a friend to play chess on your behalf. You know a lot about the rules of the game, an you may know a lot about your friend and the opponent. But if you try to write move-by-move instrucitons you'll fail. You can't possibly foresee more than a few moves. The first time the opponent makes a surprise move, your friend will have to throw out your carefully designed plans and rely on her instincts.

Colonel Kolditz says, "Over time we've come to understand more and more about what makes people successful in complex organizations." he believes that plans are useful, in the sense that they are proof that planning has taken place. The planning process forces people to think through the right issues. But as for the plans themselves, Kolditz says, "They just don't work on the battlefield." So, in teh 1980s the Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander's Intent (CI).

CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plan's goal, the desired end-state of an operation. At high levels of the Army, the CI may be relatively abstract: "Break teh will of the enemy in the Southeast region."

...The CI never specifies so much detail that it risks being rendered obsolete by unpredictable events. "You can lose the ability to execute the original plan, but you never lose the responsibility of executing the intent," says Kolditz.

No plan survives the enemy. Even those who have no connection to the military must find a lot of truth in that statement. For teachers, no lesson plan or curriculum survives contact with students.

Lesson planning is stressed a lot in our teacher education programs in Alberta, but it shouldn't be that important. A teacher who plans their entire lesson from start to finish without bringing the students in on the planning is no less foolish than the bride who plans her entire wedding, honeymoon and life without finding a husband to share it with.

The same can be said of inflexible and top-down prescribed curriculums. Good teachers know that no curriculum survives first contact with the students. That is why curriculum should be focused less on a 'bunch o' facts' and more on teaching the cognitive, thinking and collaborative skills that children will need.

If we are going to continue to seriously pursue national, state or provincial standards then we need to seriously look at keeping those standards as vague as possible.

Alfie Kohn summarizes this standards movement nicely in Beware of the Standards, Not Just the Tests:

Considerable research has demonstrated the importance of making sure students are actively involved in designing their own learning, invited to play a role in formulating questions, creating projects, and so on. But the more comprehensive and detailed a list of standards, the more students (and even teachers) are excluded from this process, the more alienated they tend to become, and the more teaching becomes a race to cover a huge amount of material. Thus, meeting these kinds of standards may actually have the effect of dumbing down classrooms. As Howard Gardner and his colleagues wisely observed, "The greatest enemy of understanding is 'coverage.'"

Just as standards and curriculum should be kept vague, so should lesson planning. The vagueness is necessary so to allow teachers and students to personalize their learning to suit their own personal needs.
Susan Ohanian's book One Size Fits Few and Peter Sack's book Standardized Minds are fascinating reads on why standardization is doing more harm than good.

Made to Stick shows how important it is to keep planning to a simple primary objective, but they also show how training your personal properly and then trusting them to understand the objective is at the heart of good planning.

Like the Commander's Intent that the Army created, we might be better off creating a Teacher's Intent that keeps the primary objective of school focused on one very focused, primary objective - that all children would have the desire to go on learning. An interesting model of this Teacher's Intent might be found in UNESCO's Four Pillars of Education.

But none of this works if teachers are distrusted. If we continue to try and 'teacher-proof' education with more top-down prescribed standards and standardization, we will never be able to properly provide our children with the education they deserve.