Friday, November 9, 2007

Made to Stick










I recently finished reading Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Fail by Chip and Dan Heath. It is an interesting study on how to best present information so people will remember it for the long term. As a teacher I thought the book might offer some interesting ideas about how to turn my turning into actual student understanding. Remember, just because you’ve said it or shown it, there is no guarantee that the student owns that information. The whole idea of the book is that there are some “best practice” ways to present information in order to make it stick (persevere).

The brothers have crafted an effective acronym SUCCESs to illustrate their ideas.

Simple:
Find the core of the message. Get rid of the fluff….what is the core/most important concept. From a teaching perspective I see that as your objective. I have a long unit to teach and what is the one thing I want kids to take away from the unit. What do I want them to know 2, 5, 10 years from now.

Unexpected:
To make the idea stick or stick out you need to catch them off guard. A story is related about an airline stewardess who dances thru the safety routine because she knows the passengers have seen it many times…but she wants them to see it this time. For a teacher it might mean creating an uncomfortable feeling for the student…roleplaying something and the students don’t know it is being roleplayed. Years ago Betsy G. and Pam D. had a lesson about “taxation with representation” that started with the new rules being enforced in the class. Needless to say they had the student’s attention and caught them off guard setting up the whole representational government lesson.

Concrete:
Don’t teach in abstraction! The content we teach in the schools is well know by us and we forget what it is like to not have this knowledge…so we often speak and teach as if everyone has this same knowledge base. We need to push this “Curse of Knowledge” aside and recall what it was like no to know what we are trying to teach the students. As teachers we need to relearn it with the students. The more concrete we can make the content the better chance students will be able to grasp it and extend it.

Credible:
As a teacher I would like to think I am credible to my kids….but are we really or are do they hear enough of us that we lose our credibility? To help boost the credibility of the information we are trying to teach the students need to hear other voices share the same ideas. That is why primary source materials are so important. That is why student work (even from previous years) can be a powerful learning aid. Teach with multiple examples to make it more “credible”. Nonexamples are sometimes just as powerful. The book shares the story of one of the most successful anti-smoking commercials in which a women dying of lung cancer shares why we shouldn’t smoke. Data/numbers are add to the credibility but we need to make the data accessible. The book How Much is Million is an excellent example of making data accessible. The book helps students understand just how big one million is by using examples such as, “if you were count from 1 to one million it would take 23 days.” An example like that makes the data ACCESSIBLE. 23 days of counting….that must be a big number.

Emotional:
Ideas that pull on the heart strings can be sticky. Making a math concept sticky might be tough….but the social studies curriculum is full of examples that are full of emotion. In order to appeal to the emotion we need to learn from Mother Theresa’s example in which she used individuals to help spread her message of the third world’s plight rather than speaking in terms of the huge numbers of people involved. We see this technique used rather effectively all the time on the news. We read and hear stories of large numbers of civilian Iraqis being killed in the war. However, when the story focuses on one person who was killed in the same bombing and how this person was going to market to buy food for their family the story sticks with us because we can relate…we shop and have a family…yet our lives aren’t threatened during these every day activities.

Stories:
Our brains are wired for stories. For many generations history was oral….it was how we learned about our past. We are naturally drawn to a good story. History presented as facts and events are dry….but history told as a story, when done the right way can really pull students in. I can learn the facts about Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic Ocean and how people didn’t believe it could be done and how many miles it was and how many hours it would take. But when I read Flight by Robert Burgleigh I can really begin to feel what it might have been like to fly almost blind because my extra gas tank was so large that it blocked out my front window of the plane. I can get a sense of how lonely it was to fly in the dark all alone, just hoping I was going the right way. The same thing happens in our own professional conversations (rather in the meeting room or the lunchroom) we learn from each other’s stories. We hear and commiserate with a teacher that had a rough day. We listen and gleam ideas of what works with different students. We learn thru each other’s stories.

They don’t have another S :)

I have really just scratched the surface of this book. You know what makes ideas sticky now…but to really understand you need to read the book and reflect on the ideas/case studies shared by the authors.




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