Sunday, February 20, 2011

Structure of Lessons

I've finished reading this book called Made to Stick, which talks about how to make your important messages memorable to people. The book mentions a variety of strategies, but the single all-encompassing strategy they offer is to tell stories, because stories have various qualities that make them naturally "sticky."

For example, near the end of the book they cite a study done on some Stanford students. A small group of students took turns each giving an impromptu speech arguing for or against some topic on crime. The students were asked afterwards to rate each other's performance, and the charismatic speakers naturally scored the highest. As a red herring, the professor then played a short clip of Monty Python to get the students' minds off of the speeches. After 10 minutes, he turned off the video and asked the students to write down everything they could remember about the speeches they had heard. Shockingly, these presumably sharp Stanfordites remembered few details from any of the speeches -- charismatic or otherwise. They remembered almost no statistics or supporting ideas. The only parts of the speeches that were memorable to them were the few personal stories that were given to illustrate an idea.

Obviously, the lesson here is two-folds:
1. Stories are sticky, because they illustrate an idea with cohesive details and emotional impact.
2. A message that seems immediately effective does not necessarily have the lasting impact that you think it will have.

That got me thinking about the format of effective lessons. In my classes, I rarely tell stories. I could only remember one recent example where I had started the class hooking kids with a question, "What makes metal boats float, when we all know that a piece of metal would sink when we throw it into water?" I didn't reveal the answer until the end of class, after we had worked for a full class on measuring and calculating densities of objects. After all the hard learning had been done, we came back to solve this mystery of the floating metal boat, and I further tied in the story of the Titanic and why it sunk. The lesson was formatted like a mystery that unfolded piecewise, and hooked kids to be curious at every step. That curiosity was not satisfied until the end of class. At the time, I thought that the lesson went well. Now looking back through the lens of this book, I have a better framework for analyzing this lesson. It was essentially formatted like a story.

It got me thinking about my other lessons. Are they crappy because they don't follow this format? (I thought so immediately, but Geoff convinced me that I can't be so narrow-minded.) I think it would be helpful to come up with some general lesson formats that have been successful in the past, so that in the future when I plan lessons, I can follow a blueprint structure that has worked well for me in the past. (That was another theme in this book: Creativity thrives, ironically, when you follow a general structure that has proven to be successful in the past.) It would also give me a better framework for analyzing my own lessons in the future.

Are you aware of any great teaching resources that de-focus on content and focus instead on the format of a lesson? What are some lesson formats that have worked particularly well for you in the past?

9 comments:

  1. I guess the format that works best for me are ones where students have the flexibility to designed the method to get to the end and ones that are more about seeking information and building things that are products and useful to society.

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  2. Hi Leslie,

    Do you have sample lessons that you can point me at?

    Cheers,
    Mimi

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  3. Hey Mimi,

    I’ve read “Made to Stick” and think there’s some good ideas there. If you want to see teachers who use their approach, you probably want to investigate the website that one of the authors created to sell videos of teachers who use the “Made to Stick” approach:

    In 1997, Dan Heath co-founded and served as Editor in Chief of a startup publishing company called Thinkwell, which created from scratch an innovative new line of college textbooks.
    http://www.madetostick.com/theauthors/

    http://www.thinkwell.com/

    You can see a ton of clips from the online lessons for free if you search for “mindbites math” on youtube:

    http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mindbites+math&aq=3

    The math lessons are taught by a college professor who used to be a professional comedian; he uses humor and funny little stories and visuals to make the concepts stick.

    So having provided all of the above resources to help in answering your query, permit me to chime in with my own two cents. I really don’t think you need to change AT ALL. Like I said a few weeks ago, you run your class like an afterschool math club and many of us are extremely jealous of how you pull it off so well. Your students create their own stories when you launch your cannon and have them use inclinometers and the math they’ve learned. View the recommendations from the “Made to Stick” book as one more tool to add to your teaching and use it when it makes sense, but please don’t drop the amazing stuff that you’ve been doing and sharing.

    That would just be sad.

    Paul Hawking
    Blog:
    The Challenge of Teaching Math
    Latest post:
    Posts I really like from (Math Be Brave)
    http://challenge-of-teaching-math.blogspot.com/2011/02/posts-i-really-like-from-math-be-brave.html

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  4. @Paul Thanks for the encouragement and for the awesome links! I guess the thing I really liked about the book was not that it would somehow revolutionize my teaching (because it seems silly to expect that any one book would), but that it gave me a more sophisticated way of analyzing the structure of a lesson. It was one way to look at / structure lessons. I am sure there are lots of other effective ways. I'm just trying to wrap my mind around thinking about lesson structure rather than content.

    By the way, I looked up TenMarks, and the concept is awesome but the website is slllllloooow! Do you have the same problem with your kids?? I registered all of my classes and added my students to the database, but every time I've logged in to try to view the problems myself, I've logged out after some minutes of ANGUISH. What gives??

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  5. @Mimi: I set up my classes in Tenmarks and then on the first day of class for homework, I had the students bring home and return a note asking the parents if they would like their child to have access. For those that did, I sent the parent a login id and pw via the email on file with the school or by phone. Since then, I haven't signed on to Tenmarks: I get the weekly status report via email over the weekend and on Monday I award a candy bar and some homework points to the most active student(s) on Tenmarks.

    Obviously I could do more analyzing with the data tools on Tenmarks, but for me this is self-driven extra practice that the students choose to do.

    I also put the responsibility of checking each student's progress on the parents. I purposely issue the login and pw to the parent so that they can either login to see how their child is doing or have their child pull up their report to see if they've done any practice recently.

    I just logged on to Tenmarks a few minutes ago and I was able to pull up a week's summary report without any problem. I then pulled up one of the student's individual reports and was able to see which modules they worked and how many problems they got right out of total for each module. I didn't see any button or pull-down to see what questions the student answered, but maybe I'm just not looking hard enough.

    I also just now signed back in with one of my unissued student accounts and did 5 problems of the quadratic equations module. I didn't watch any videos, but after purposely answering one of the problems wrong, I clicked on "View Solution" and instantly got a pop-up that gave a detailed explanation of why each answer choice was correct or incorrect.

    I didn't find it slow at all and new problems appeared as soon as I clicked the button for a new one.

    I would suggest that you drop Tenmarks an email and ask them for help: you are a teacher and are basically helping them to promote their product to over a hundred parents so they should be very interested in helping you, especially if you mention that you may decide not to continue the experiment if they can't help you with this.

    Per their website, you can contact them at "info (at) tenmarks (dot) com".

    SERIOUSLY, I don't work for them--just trying to help you out here :-)

    Paul Hawking
    Blog:
    The Challenge of Teaching Math
    Latest post:
    How I manage my TA relationships
    http://challenge-of-teaching-math.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-i-manage-my-ta-relationships.html

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  6. Have you seen the pdf "Teaching That Sticks"? Summarizes the book-- for a teacher audience (written by same authors). It's available for free on their website if you sign up, but if you don't want to do that let me know and I can email it to you :)

    I love the idea of lesson-as-story and I've been thinking a lot about storytelling both in individual lessons and also as narrative arcs as a unit unfolds. Over the past few years, I've played with 5E (and its variations-- 7E, Karplus, etc) and its storytelling virtues, and the latest incarnation involves some type of hook or "reason to wonder" and activation of relevant prior knowledge, a mathematically meaningful instructional task, some type of debrief conversation, and then additional practice. We're contemplating teaching our novice teachers to lesson plan using this format, although with novices there's always the chance that they'll stick to it too rigidly. Let me know if you'd like to see a template!

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  7. @grace I would love to see an EXAMPLE of this format implemented in an exemplary lesson. Got any you can toss my way?

    I haven't seen the PDF for "Teaching that sticks", so if you want to send it my way as well that would be great! :) Thanks!

    @Paul I guess my computers are just too slow. Travesty. Not sure why it causes so many problems on my computers (both at work and at home!). Anyway, thanks for the detailed breakdown.

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  8. @Mimi. No problem--sorry you're having trouble with it. I just finished watching for the SECOND time an exemplary math lesson that grabs students' attention with a story and a murder mystery. A very "sticky" lesson and I'm not sure why I didn't think to share it sooner:

    http://www.teachers.tv/videos/teaching-pythagoras

    Paul Hawking
    Blog:
    The Challenge of Teaching Math
    Latest post:
    Dear Parents Letter
    http://challenge-of-teaching-math.blogspot.com/2011/02/dear-parents-letter.html

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  9. Bree (@btwnthenumbers) from http://betweenthenumbers.wordpress.com/ has touched on this a few times. She writes short stories and I think this gives her a perspective different from most math teachers.

    There are multiple layers to the story problem that I've been trying to resolve. The "math story" (or science in my case) students see throughout their career. The yearly and unit story. And the lesson plan story. What elements are more important for each layer? So perhaps there is no true climax/resolution on the career story, but it is incredibly important on the lesson level. I could argue that the fact that we can't agree on the hook for the whole math career is source of our fractured narrative in the first place.

    ugh... like Grace's posts, you've left me with a ton of questions. But that's good.

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