I’m going to steal something directly from one of my friends here. His name is Rohit Bhargava and is somewhat of a marketing/social media guru, who has written a book on his profession and is hired to speak with company executives about making their company have a personality. His ideas, along with research and readings about how the body and mind learn made me start this blog. I was shocked to see how similar certain elements of marketing/selling are similar to teaching. He mentions 4 items that can keep a company paralyzed and they are the same ones that paralyze educators:
1) Success – “What we’re doing is already working”
No class has ever all scored a 100% on everything for the duration of a semester. There is always room for greater success
2) Uncertainty – “We don’t know what will happen”
Creating new activities that are based on old frameworks still means that we have a predictable outcome but the “dressing” might be different. If you change the text on a PowerPoint from one year to the next, you are changing information but you know how the students will react.
3) Tradition – “We have always done it this way”
This is possibly the most dangerous for education. Technology and science are revealing new things about learning and new learning techniques but forgoing them for what you used in the past makes you a non-adaptive and non-reflective teacher.
4) Precedent – “No one else is doing it that way”
This is possibly the most paralyzing of these four. If you don’t risk getting ahead, you will never be in the lead. If you are in the lead and don’t take risks, others will pass you.
All new lesson plans (and some old) should go through this checklist. Everything does not need to be the most innovative and a plan that is the opposite of these four items might not always be effective either since some lessons endure because they work. This past week I had my students get into groups and write down 50 facts from two American History chapters and create one lie. They were going to exchange their 51 slips of paper with another group to see how fast the other group can find the facts and detect the lie. If I go through the list above I uncover the following:
1) Success – This is my first time teaching US History so I am not quite sure what success will be for me in this course
2) Uncertainty – I had no clue what would happen and found out most of it blew up in my face because people copied numbers wrong or some other small game changing mistake was made.
3) Tradition – It was a game for points on an exam which is a traditional manner of playing games in the classroom setting
4) Precedent - I have never heard of this game and after asking a few people no one definitely heard of it either
I’m happy with my lesson, even though it blew up a bit, because I saw students interested and trying to fix the problem. I’m going to add a fifth element for education:
5) Confusion – “It is really complicated and there are too many things involved”
If the task is done properly, even if there is a period of understanding, because of the need to familiarize others with the material, they will get to interact and know the material better.
We all became a little confused with which one was a lie, but we discussed the lies and the facts they wrote. Quite a few in class won’t forget that the president following
