All of this reminded me of Ira Glass on the building blocks of a story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7KQ4vkiNUk

Similar ideas to this whole teaching as storytelling thing: we need bait, then content, then a moment of reflection.

* Act Two:
— mentors, allies, sidekicks, enemies, problems
— backstory
KEY FOCUS: tools, twists, turns, increasingly-challenging problems. Surprises.

* Act Three:
— we’ve solved the problem (mostly)
— but we’re SO not over… new issues arise
— ultimately, return to the village with the new elixer
KEY FOCUS: overcoming big challenge, THEN looking into what new vista/possibilities open up as a result

We try to do this in our books (often not successfully, but… we try) at two levels of scale — the book/course as a whole, and to some extent at the chapter level as well. Each chapter spirals through a “imagine you had to do [x]…” and on it goes, with each chapter’s end a resolution of one problem that opens up new possibilities (either challenges/problems we hadn’t seen before or really cool new capabilities). Tools/sidekicks are introduced just-in-time, and mentors and allies are there for guidance, also just-in-time or sometimes AFTER you failed the first test but learned something valuable.

Why they don’t teach screenwriting techniques to teachers is beyond me. We used to make all the authors in our tech book series read the screenwriting book “Save the Cat”, by Blake Snyder, and build storyboards for each topic using that simplified framework. It’s not an answer to bad teaching, but it’s a way of structuring a lesson that feels more like a hero’s journey for the learner rather than–as so often happens with difficult topics–the learner feels like the textbook author surely must be an orc, not an elf. ;)