Thinking Citizen Blog — What Seven Words Matter Most? In What Order? Are You Sure?
Thinking Citizen Blog — Friday is Education and Education Policy Day
Today’s Topic: What Seven Words Matter Most? In What Order? Are You Sure?
Here are my seven: do, example, focus, pictures, music, numbers, and metaphors. You learn by doing. You teach by example. The key to both is focus. A picture is worth a thousand words. If you want to remember anything, put it to music. Everything is applied math. Metaphors are bridges to understanding. Seven tips from a guy who started teaching in 1977. Today, a few more notes. Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
THE DO THING, THE EXAMPLE THING, THE FOCUS THING
1. Do it. Get up there with a piece of chalk and walk the class through how you solved that math problem. Get out on the court and show everybody how you hit a tennis ball with enough top spin that after landing in the court it hits the fence before hitting the ground a second time.
2. Example, example, example. We are a mimetic species. We are copy cats. Show the students how it’s done. If you can’t, should you be teaching this course?
3. Focus, focus, focus. What matters most? Without mastery of the most basic step of any process, no mastery of subsequent steps. Without mastery, no joy. Daily testing and instantaneous feedback is key to achieving mastery of any step. Every course I ever taught since 1977 involved short daily quizzes (1–3 minutes), a short paper (3 paragraphs), and a class hour divided into equal segments for each student to express their views orally.
THE PICTURE THING, THE MUSIC THING, THE NUMBERS THING
1. If a picture is worth a thousand words, some are worth ten thousand, others a million. No course on any subject should ever be taught without the teacher passing on to his students the image that the instructor believes best captures the essence of what is most worth remembering from the course. For me, that picture for decades was the three by three matrix, to me the perfect metaphor for critical thinking — breaking down a problem into its three component parts, and those in turn into three.
2. The Music Thing: if you want a student to remember something, put it to music. When I was a fellow at Harvard Law School, the only students or professors who could remember the Preamble to the Constitution were those who learned it on “School House Rock.”
3. The numbers thing. All of life is applied math. If you haven’t found the math, you haven’t dug deep enough. The right number is worth a thousand pictures. To me the most magic numbers are one, three, and seven. They provide mental discipline: what’s your point (one), what three things matter most (three), add two (think of them as illustrations of the three main points, call them Exhibit A and Exhibit B), and finally, add two more in the category of how could I be wrong?
THE METAPHOR THING
1. Metaphors are bridges to understanding.
2. Customize the metaphors for your students. A baseball metaphor can be powerful but does not work for non-baseball-fans.
3. Every department chair should have a closet full of most powerful metaphors for each new instructor to make use of.
NB: Award a prize to students or faculty who come up with a new metaphor for anything worth understanding. Thoughts?
Liberal Arts Academy | Time to Re-Imagine Education
A LINK TO THE LAST THREE YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED BY THEME:
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest thing you learned in the last week related to education or education policy. Or the coolest thought however half-baked you had. Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to education or education policy that the rest of us may have missed. Or just some random education-related fact that blew you away.
This is your chance to make some one’s day. Or to cement in your own mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something that is dear to your heart.
