2011 May 12: I gave this post another pass a year later.

The job of the dramatist is to make the audience wonder what happens next. Not to explain to them what just happened, or to suggest to them what happens next.

– David Mamet

Once you’ve learned something, my experience is that if you do something with that learning, if you turn your learning into something else for somebody else, it starts a flywheel spinning awfully quickly where you start learning more and then doing more with that learning and then you’re on CNN.

A recommendation: turn your learning into a story for somebody else.

Why a story rather than a persuasive essay or a pillow sampler? For one, the story is a medium that runs on greased rails between very different people. It’s an efficient transaction, even between me and my grandpa. For another, it’s hard for me to ignore how many elements of good teaching have their predicates in the three acts of a good story.

The First Act

Consider the opening shot of Star Wars, a movie which is nothing if not a story well told.

The moons. The tiny ship pummeled by the huge ship. The chase. The symbolism of the green and red lasers. The camera rolling just inches from the huge ship’s underside so it (the huge ship) appears to go on forever.

I’m not saying every lesson needs to (or can) open this way. I am saying there are obvious advantages to opening a learning moment with a series of clear, intriguing constraints (again: the tiny ship, the huge ship, the chase) that invite speculation and curiosity.

I’ll leave the injection of poor teaching onto the opening sequence of the first Star Wars prequel as an exercise for the reader. Hint:

The Second Act

During the second act of a story, your protagonist encounters allies and antagonists and uses the former to help resolve problems created by the latter.

During the second act of our lesson, students seek out the limits of the problem and try to determine valuable information and skills for resolving it.

The storyteller / teacher needs to assist the viewer / student just enough to make the viewer / student wonder what’s coming next and enable her to put that answer together on her own. It’s almost easier in these instances to help too much, to nudge a viewer or a student too forcefully, than it is to help too little.

Here’s an example from television where that goes right and wrong. These two shows both feature armed standoffs between criminals and cops. One show asks you to work hard to determine the motives and capabilities of the characters, the tone and possible outcomes of the scene. It’s a satisfying, tense experience. The other show signals all those answers awkwardly, and loudly, elbowing the viewer in the ribs with some ominous strings on the soundtrack.

You should be able to determine one from the other.

Obviously, I need a better illustration with fewer adult themes here. Perhaps think about those sloppy literary adaptations where the writer couldn’t describe the source text visually so she has the main character narrate all those thoughts on the soundtrack.

The mandate for filmmakers is show, don’t tell.

Question, don’t tell is far from the worst mandate you could choose for the second act of your lesson.

The Third Act

Consider, now, a) great movie endings alongside b) Ben Blum-Smith’s Pattern Breaking series. If we allow the relationship between storytelling and teaching, Blum-Smith’s broken patterns represent the third-act twist: Rosebud is a sled; Bruce Willis is really dead; Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father; 2, 4, 8, 16, 31. These patterns lull you into a false sense of certainty before yanking the rug out from under you, leaving you scratching your head, wondering what you missed, sending you back through the narrative again, scouring the story for other clues, conjuring up new theories.

Other movies choose to set up a sequel in their final minutes, like Batman Begins positioned the Joker as The Dark Knight’s next villain. Do you see how neatly that fits into Avery Pickford’s definition of great problems:

The problem should be deep. It should be rich enough to spend hours, days, weeks, months, or years working on variations, generalizations, and extensions.

Great problems and stories lead to more great problems and stories.

Questions

“Perplex them,” one of my old high school math teachers advised me when I told him I was going into teaching. Perplexity isn’t the same as confusion; rather, it’s a very, very productive form of confusion. My favorite teachers and storytellers perplex me repeatedly throughout a lesson or movie.

How do you teach people to tell perplexing stories? Even harder question: how do you teach people to tell perplexing stories about math?

My fear is that this skill, more than most others in my practice, reduces to character traits that can’t be taught. Storytelling requires empathy, an understanding of an audience’s expectations, their current knowledge, and their prior experience. I don’t know how you teach empathy. Perhaps it can only be modeled.

Certainly, here are fair pre- and post-assessments of storytelling:

• Tell me about something you learned recently that exhilarated you. Tell me about it in such a way that I understand your exhilaration. ie. “Holy cow. ‘Oman’ is the only country in the entire world that starts with an ‘O!'”
• Tell me about something you learned recently that exhilarated you. Tell me about it in such a way that I experience that exhilaration for myself. ie. “What is the only country in the entire world that starts with an ‘O?'”

It’s the assessments in between that mess me up.

But where do you find this stuff?

– some variation on this first quote has come up in every professional development session I have ever facilitated.

I just need to sit down and set some time aside to search for lesson ideas.

– a colleague at Google while we were spitballing curriculum ideas.

The fact is that I don’t find ideas for curriculum. They find me. And I mean that as literally as possible. I don’t sit down and start searching Google for “fruit as a metaphor for the coordinate plane” or “Flash games illustrating angle reflections.”

I graduated college several years ago and, like many of my friends, I had to fill that learning vacuum with something. All of us came around to Google Reader within months of each other, which represented (for me) an evolutionary leap forward in managing my own learning.

If we really believe that mathematical reasoning undergirds Everything, then we need to keep learning about Everything, not just about the technical skills common to our own field. (I went at this same concept some time ago, though perhaps a bit inartfully.)

My suspicion, also, is that education will improve fastest when teachers recognize the incongruity between their own most exhilarating learning experiences and what goes on in their classrooms.

Question: what tools are essential to that kind of exhilarating learning? What is in your learning Swiss Army Knife?

Let me urge you to consider that question under the following fictional constraint: every time you tell a teacher to download a new application or set up an account with a new web application, the teacher loses a fingertip.

Bracket, for a moment, the grossness of the scenario. I’ll let you decide how the teacher loses the fingertip. The point is that y’all don’t understand that you’re a bunch of freaks. Someone links up some new online Photoshop knock-off and on muscle memory alone you’re entering in your e-mail address and a password and clonking away at your new toy.

Real people aren’t like that. And you give them too much grief, sometimes, for their unwillingness to sign up for ten different web apps to service ten different nuances in their learning which you have judged to be equally essential.

So: fingertips. Be careful here. I would give the fingertip off my right ring finger for Google Reader. I would sacrifice a second fingertip for Delicious.

It’s been a lot of fun lately to get invited to speak to audiences of educators about things that interest me. Those experiences have been profitable in the short-run, in terms of getting paid for work, but also in the long-run, as I get to workshop new ideas and modify old ones with fascinating people who are inadvertently improving the conversations I’ll have with future groups.

I’m learning that I’m jumping into this WCYDWT this thing way too early. Or, perhaps more accurately, that the WordPress tag known as “what can you do with this?” comprises two huge disciplines. It’s to my discredit that I’ve gone so long without noticing and expanding them.

One is learning. The other is storytelling. I can’t imagine how trite these revelations must seem on their faces. I’ll elaborate and then I’ll ask you to help me edit my professional development song and dance.

A student in my online course did not appreciate the water tank lesson:

The [water tank video] is simply boring. I do not think middle school students would sit and be engaged throughout the entire video. [..] All we know is that someone is filling the tank; we don’t know its shape or dimensions, we don’t know the rate of the water flow, and, in the end, we don’t care. The video is too long and, quite frankly, uninteresting. I couldn’t watch the whole video (although I left it playing to listen for any changes) and I certainly can’t see a group of middle schoolers watching and being engaged.

This response gave me a good angle on three return volleys:

1. What if we decided not to show the entire video? What could we do with that?
2. The student mentioned that “we don’t know its shape or dimensions, we don’t know the rate of the water flow ….” Do you realize how much conceptual skill that critique requires? How many of your students can answer the question, “What do you need to know in order to solve this problem?”
3. This.

That third bullet is a response to a wager I made back in February:

Twenty seconds into watching the hose dribble water into the tank, ask “how long do you think this is gonna take?” Ask [your students] for guesses. Just guesses. Write them on the board next to the guessers’ names. Whenever anyone raises the maximum or lowers the minimum, point it out. Then turn the clip off. Turn off the projector and proceed to whatever else you had planned for the period.

I wagered that students would riot. I found the whole classroom anecdote worthwhile, but here’s the vindicating part:

After the students made their predictions, I abandoned the water tank problem and moved on to something completely different. In each one of my classes, eventually a few of the students made a comment along the lines of “you never told us how long it took to fill the tank.” Sometimes the comment came only a few minutes after we had moved on. Other times, it came much later. More convincing evidence of the students’ level of engagement in the exercise came at the end of the lesson when I played the rest of the video. With their focus on the screen, you would have thought they were watching a summer blockbuster at the movie theater, not a tank filling with water in a classroom.