December | 2011 | TILT

Archive | December, 2011

Creating “Sticky” Teaching

by David Langley

Observation and likely fact:

many students quickly forget large amounts of content and often have difficulty transferring ideas from the classroom to novel contexts. How can we create “sticky” teaching messages that will be memorable, understandable, and useful to students?

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (2008), provide six principles that can help teachers create those messages. The principles are:

Simple: focus on a core idea in compact form.

Unexpected: gain and keep student attention

Concrete: use real-life examples and language that evokes images

Credible: provide believable evidence for your assertions

Emotional: help students care and be emotionally invested in the content

Stories: use narratives of real occurrences to inspire students

As you see, the bold letters are capitalized for a reason…

The feedback I have received in numerous workshops this year convinces me that optimizing these principles is a sound approach to improve presentation skills. Most importantly, the principles are inextricably tied to deeper student learning—perhaps the best reason we should use them in the first place!

During the Spring 2012 Semester, the Techniques in Learning and Teaching blog will expand upon each principle in future posts. This deceptively simple framework is teacher-friendly and easily adaptable to any discipline. And it is easy to remember, too!

To review Dan and Chip Health’s short overview of “Teaching that Sticks” see either the Center’s slideshare site or the Heath’s web site.

Editor’s Suggested Additional Resources

“Teaching that Sticks! A New Look at Teaching Impact” – slides and notes from the Center’s interactive seminar are available for viewing our Slideshare account.

“Learning that Sticks!” – because whether it’s a duct tape or velcro analogy that holds this together, both the learning and the teaching will need to be sticky for the thing to work

All Things Learning blog – posting on How to Make Learning Stick
Sticky Learning blog – overall source for designful ideas on learning that sticks

Image from Katie Is a Teacher blog at http://katieisateacher.com/2011/12/06/the-case-of-several-unrelated-items/.

Tags: learning, sticky teaching, success, teaching

← Older Entries

Newer Entries →

Featured Posts

Enhance Cognitive Capacity to Maximize Learning

Four Key Strategies Cognitive load refers to the amount of mental effort expended in your brain’s working memory. Learners only have so much working memory available. With attention to cognitive capacity and cognitive load, we support learners in managing the Too Much Information monster. When learning new material, what may be a simple concept for […]
Incorporating Canvas Tools: Helping Students Keep Up

As the University of Minnesota transitions from Moodle to Canvas, CEI will be highlighting some of the ways that instructors can leverage Canvas to meet learning and teaching goals. This is the first of four planned posts for this academic year. As instructors, we want students to come to class prepared, complete assignments on time […]
Online Learning Spaces – (Re)Imagining Discussions

3 Research Resources: (Re)Imagining Discussion in Online Learning Spaces How might we evaluate, measure and grade, online discussion forums? Teachers commonly opt for participation measures such as a counting the number of times and ways people participate, or the weighting of the quality of response content, or build a rubric to guide their review as […]
Developing a Learning Culture and Learning-Centered Climate

3 Resources Cultures of Learning 1. What is a culture of learning? The short answer, posted by an Edutopia blogger, is this: a culture of learning is a collection of thinking habits, beliefs about self, and collaborative workflows that result in sustained critical learning. 2. Rethinking our default definitions of learning is a crucial first step for thinking […]
The Write Situation: Assignment Clarity and Timing

With this post, we’re continuing our (re)introduction of the Teaching with Writing project’s monthly writing tips. See the Teaching with Writing pages on the Center for Writing website for teaching resources, including sample assignments and syllabi. Establish the Situation for Your Assignment “At the heart of every assignment is the rhetorical situation — someone […]