Just Stick It!

At the risk of becoming a product huckster, I have to tell you that Gorilla Tape is the real deal.  It's a bit like duct tape on steroids and shouldn't be used unless you really want the tape to stay put permanently—because it does.  You even have to be careful to make sure you don't put a small extra strip on the inside of your forearm for later use while you are working on a project because it won't come off without ripping several layers of skin and leaving a bright red mark that stays for days but fortunately is hidden by the long sleeve shirt that you wear to school--just saying.

Photo from gorillaglue.com

 Gorilla Tape is made to stick, but that is not the main point of this entry.

Culture of Coverage

At this time of year, many teachers are facing a major dilemma.  Because of snow days and delays, because of cram-packed curricula, because some topics took longer than anticipated, or because of a hundred other reasons, many of you are feeling the pressure of needing to cover the material before the year ends.  Adding additional pressure is the fact that Spring Break starts at the end of this week, and we all know that May is filled with AP tests, ECAs, and Final Exams.  That leaves almost no time to get it all in.

The danger of speed-teaching, of course, is that we can sacrifice understanding for the sake of coverage.  It's a huge problem with no easy answers.  Grant Wiggins writes about an epidemic in schools which he calls “The Culture of Coverage.”  The hallmark of this phenomenon is conflating ideas with information.  When teachers have only enough time to tell about ideas and don’t let students delve deeper, analyze, build meaning, or question, we contribute to the Culture of Coverage.  Wiggins argues that there is a vast difference between covering facts and uncovering understandings.  Unfortunately, efficiency often is the enemy of effectiveness. 

From Grant Wiggins:

Teachers often unwittingly conflate terms with ideas.  In their desire to make teaching more efficient, they often treat the theory or strategy as a fact related to definition…. By treating all ideas as facts to be learned instead of inferences to be validated and analyzed through use, we unwittingly end up inhibiting meaning and transfer.

Even though we know the research that says students must be allowed to construct their own understanding, we feel the pressure to tell and cover the content because of our time constraints.  The result, as might be expected, is the loss of long term retention and the inability to transfer knowledge to new situations.  The research is crystal clear: covering content is very different than students understanding content.

Made to Stick

So what should you do?  Admittedly, there is no easy answer, but we do have a really good question: Is it possible to cover and still get information to stick?  The easy answer is “no,” but a better answer might be, “It depends….”

Chip and Dan Heath in their book Made to Stick give some suggestions that may help us answer this key question in more positive ways.  The authors are brothers, one with a background in education and the other with a background in business.  They argue in their entertaining and memorable book—it better be memorable considering the title—that there are six principles that make ideas understandable and memorable.  You don’t need to use all six principles to create a “sticky idea,” but the more you use, the better the chance of your students understanding and remembering important ideas.

Below is an infograph of the Made to Stick model which comes from the Heath Brother website.  It does a nice job of summarizing the whole book—and hints at some of their stories that you may want to read later. 

For more information and details, visit http://heathbrothers.com/

In the next few months, you are going to be tempted to cover material quickly.  If you want to avoid the dangers of this approach, and you want your students to retain the learning beyond May 2015, somewhere along the way, you should work in as many of the Heath Brother principles as possible. 

After all is said and done, our goal is not to cover the material; it is to make ideas stick like Gorilla Tape to our students.

Have a great week and an even better Spring Break, HSE.  That’s my wish for you, and I’m sticking to it.

Phil