Making Ideas Stick
Imagine this scenario:
You spend the larger part of your one-hour lecture slowly and painstakingly explaining partial differentiation (or some other important but abstract concept you have to teach), and your students seem to get it.
Come the following week, only the 2 nerds in the front row seem to recall anything. The concept was as sticky as Teflon for everyone else.
Familiar? I’m sure most teachers have experienced this, and many of them have cracked their heads trying to concoct with stories or analogies or illustrations just to make a concept more sticky – I’ve spent countless hours doing it myself.
Well, looks like help is on the way, with the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
As of now, this book isn’t out yet, but you can (and should) read the introduction, which is really compelling.
The introduction talks about the 6 principles of sticky ideas (which I won’t elaborate on):
Simplicity
Unexpectedness
Concreteness
Credibility
Emotions
Stories
It helps that the 6 principles spell out ‘SUCCES’ – corny, but helpful – and these principals are a good gauge on how sticky the concept will be.
I like the part on the Curse of Knowledge as well:
This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.
Teachers are definitely “cursed” cursed by their knowledge!
I’m looking forward to reading the rest of this book.
The Power of the Marginal
From “the Power of the Marginal” by Paul Graham:
When I was in college the rule seemed to be that you should study whatever you were most interested in. But in retrospect you’re probably better off studying something moderately interesting with someone who’s good at it than something very interesting with someone who isn’t. You often hear people say that you shouldn’t major in business in college, but this is actually an instance of a more general rule: don’t learn things from teachers who are bad at them.
I can’t help but notice how this is quite similar to my recent *ahem* post “Choose the Teacher, Not the Subject“,
The typical advice for students would be to pick the subject which they are most interested in [….] The advice I gave to my students was to pick the subject with the best teacher, regardless of whether the subject seems interesting or not.
Not surprisingly, I have been criticized for my view, so I was rather pleased when I approached the end of Graham’s essay:
This leads to my final suggestion: a technique for determining when you’re on the right track. You’re on the right track when people complain that you’re unqualified, or that you’ve done something inappropriate. […] And if they’re driven to such empty forms of complaint, that means you’ve probably done something good.
[…] Pointing out that someone is unqualified is as desperate as resorting to racial slurs. It’s just a legitimate sounding way of saying: we don’t like your type around here.
Top-Down Support for Ground-Up Initiative?
Just a few weeks ago, I was speaking to someone who used to teach Literature in a secondary school. She was relating about how she engaged her students using drama techniques in her Literature lessons.
Then one day her principal, who was observing her lesson, told her not to waste time doing all that drama stuff, right in front of her students.
That school lost a great Literature teacher soon after.
Then last week, I was chatting with a primary school teacher. As typical of many teachers I’ve talked to, he was griping about the amount of work, the administrative work he had to do, the politics he had to contend with in the school, the difficult people he had to work under – people who were more concerned with everything else other than students’ learning.
One of the classes he had to take was PE (Physical Education). And for his primary 2 class, he had to teach them how to dribble a basketball.
He described to me with much excitement and detail the intricacies of teaching 8-year-old kids how to dribble a ball – the preliminary steps he took to first help them overcome their fear of the ball, then how he helped them understand the mechanics of a bouncing ball, before slowly letting them walk then run while dribbling the ball.
To be honest, his experience of teaching kids how to bounce the ball wasn’t too fascinating to me, but what impressed me was how passionate he was about the whole thing – teaching 8-year-olds how to dribble a ball – which made me a little ashamed of my own lack of interest.
Then he related to me how his PE HOD (Head of Department) threatened to rate him poorly for his class, only because he didn’t adhere to the prescribed methodology for teaching kids how to dribble balls. Prescribed by the PE HOD himself of course.
Our friend was naturally quite incensed, and made it clear to the HOD that he would still stick to his own method of teaching. It certainly helped that his students were dribbling balls better than the HOD’s own students, so he got by, but not without becoming a little less popular with a superior.
Now what really bothers me about these two stories is that they aren’t isolated incidents. I hear such stories from passionate teachers all the time. Primary school teachers, secondary school teachers, Junior College teachers, even polytechnic lecturers. I hear this all the time.
The only consolation, perhaps, is that there have been policy changes within the Ministry of Education to address this.
In a speech on 28 September this year, Education Minister Mr Tharman said,
The quality improvements are not coming in top-down, but from initiatives taken by teachers on the ground – whether it’s a change in the school curriculum, or a new way of teaching the existing curriculum, or a new way of organising students for learning.
He then went on to cite some examples of this “top-down support for ground-up initiative” already taking place in schools.
I mentioned this to the primary school teacher, but he roundly dismissed it. He obviously wasn’t seeing any top-down support for any ground-up initiatives in his school. He was getting jaded, fast.
I have no doubt myself that this “top-down support for ground-up initiative” is the way to go – the best teachers are the ones who need the most space and flexibility to do their thing.
I only hope that these teachers on the ground will get to see this in their own situations soon, before we lose more great teachers.
Choose the Teacher, Not the Subject
Some of my students were asking my opinion on what subjects they should choose to enrol in the next semester. You see, the institution where I work requires students to do a certain number of “interdisciplinary” subjects, subjects which are not related to their course of study. This means a Mechanical Engineering student can also enrol for subjects like Social Psychology, Financial Management, or Basic French, and a Business student can do subjects like Photography, Drama & Poetry, or Literature Appreciation.
The typical advice for students would be to pick the subject which they are most interested in, or at least the one that sounds most interesting, or the least boring one (if none of them seem remotely interesting). If all else fails, pick the one that seems easiest to get a passing grade. For instance, Photography would probably be easier than Social Psychology.
The advice I gave to my students was to pick the subject with the best teacher, regardless of whether the subject seems interesting or not. (Of course, I then had to help them identify the best teachers in the list.)
With a great teacher, any dull subject can be transformed into a meaningful and engaging one, inspiring the student into deep and profound learning. All the student has to do is to step into the classroom with an open mind.
Those who disagree with me on this point probably have never been inspired by a great teacher before. Which, unfortunately, is not too uncommon, because great teachers are a precious few.
And if the student is already interested in a certain subject, but the teacher isn’t a good one, I would still advise that student to choose the subject with the best teacher instead.
Besides not being engaging and inspiring, a poor teacher can even kill whatever interest the student has in that subject, so the student will actually be worse off at the end of the semester.
We don’t have anything on the History of Carpet Weaving in Turkey, but if we do and a great teacher is teaching it, I’d make sure all my students sign up for it. I might even request to join in some of the lessons!
Too Much Homework
I was reading a blog post by Trisha (a teacher in Singapore) entitled “Why I Hate Teaching“.
She doesn’t really hate teaching – her post is a rant against the system under which she teaches, where she has to do everything else in addition to her teaching.
Like photocopying handouts and worksheets, collecting school fees from students – totally absurd!
Anyway, one of her complaints was that teachers have a perpetual backlog of student work to grade:
8) I hate having to keep a red pen in every one of my handbags, because I am constantly having to mark something. I hate bringing scripts with me everywhere I go. I hate it that my marking is never finished, even on the last day of the school year, because there just isn’t enough time for teachers to mark their students’ work, and because we have to do so many other non-teaching-related work.
A bulk of this grading work is a result of giving students (too much) homework.
I was never a fan of homework when I was in school. Well, most normal and mentally-sound students probably feel the same. But unlike most of my classmates, I didn’t do most of my homework. In fact, I used to get into a lot of trouble with my teachers because of that. (But that’s another story.)
But I did alright for my examinations, at least most of the time.
Not because I’m some kind of genius (I’m not), but perhaps the recent TIME article “The Myth About Homework” can shed some light:
[H]omework does not measurably improve academic achievement for kids in grade school. […]
Too much homework brings diminishing returns.
I wish I knew all this when I was a student, so I could have a more sophisticated reason (excuse?) rather than “I forgot” or “I didn’t have time” or more recently “the computer virus ate my homework”.
And perhaps if more teachers know this, they would have better reasons to give less homework and thus lighten their already-hefty loads.
No Handouts
I was teaching some adult learners to use a certain software this morning, and not surprisingly, one of them asked if I had handouts.
"You won't need any handouts for my lesson," I told them half-jokingly, but actually meaning it.When I teach, I strive to make my lesson so brain-friendly that students remember what I teach without even realizing it, because it's been made so obvious and natural, like when you first learnt the name of the Pitcher plant.
Of course, that doesn't mean that I never give handouts. I give handouts when there is information that is difficult to simplify given the constraints, or when some information may be quite intuitive, but may be forgotten because it won't be used often or anytime soon, or there's simply some difficult-to-remember information. And also, it gives students a sense of security – the I-can-rest-easy-if-anything-goes-wrong-cos-I-have-the-handouts feeling.
Back to this morning's lesson.
After I announced that handouts were unnecessary, some of the students took out their own notepads, ready to preserve my pearls of wisdom (as if). And every now and then throughout the lesson, I would quip "hey there's really no need to take this down – this is easy stuff!"
At the end of the lesson, I walked around the class, trying to take a peek at what they had written.
I was glad that they didn't write much, and that they were comfortably using the software without referring to their notes.
Metaphors for Students
I was in a training session for new teachers, and the trainees were asked to come up with metaphors for students.
The metaphors that a teacher chooses can give insight into their teaching and learning philosophy and approach, and how they deal with students.
"Students are sponges," offered one of the trainees.
"Anyone has any comments on this metaphor?" asked the facilitator.
I spoke up: "I don't like it because it implies that students are sitting there passively absorbing knowledge from the teacher."
"Who chose this metaphor?" asked the facilitator. "Do you have anything to say?"
"I chose 'sponge' because students tend to absorb everything we say or do, even the wrong things, which makes it quite scary sometimes. Also, sometimes you have to squeeze out the old stuff that's already there before you give them the new stuff."
I thought he had a point.
Anyway, someone else chose 'monkey'.
"Why 'monkey'?" asked the facilitator.
Someone else quipped, "because they are less evolved."
The guy beside me almost spat out his coffee.
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