Creating memorable lessons helps your teaching, establishes you as an expert in your content area and demonstrates your intellectual authority.
These high-impact lessons also create a deep connection and a solid trust with your students.
Your students are begging (hoping, wishing) to trust your knowledge and skill level, but dry, dispassionate, academic lecturing fails to resonate with them.
How do you "Pull Off" a Memorable Lesson?
The question is, "How do you build and deliver a great lesson? (A great lesson is one that your students actually take interest in, connect with and remember.)
But, maybe you still wonder how much work and effort it will take to fabricate such a lesson.
Well, creating and delivering a memorable lesson is a huge subject. There are countless ways to pull off such a feat.
But, this article will focus upon a simple formula for you to practice with. The formula involves three imaginary props…images to help you remember the creative pattern. These are:
- A knot hole in a fence
- The district championship game
- and a Celebration (or Consolidation) Pep Rally
The Knot Hole in the Fence
Old-time movies show kids with no money watching a baseball game by peering through a know hole in the fence.
By watching the game through a knot hole, you only get to see a small piece of what is happening in the game at any one time.
The "knot-hole-view" is far less reveling than the panorama that folks who paid for tickets got to see.
And, there is always a danger that the either a policeman or bigger kids might come by and drive our heroes away.
In the same way, the issue you face in developing a memorable lesson is that you know a lot about the lesson contents. You know what is happening in the whole stadium…as if watching from box seats or the radio announcers' booth. You want your students to know as much as you do about the lesson's content. And, it probably pains you that you must leave many aspects and nuances of the information out of view.
But, consider how long it took for you to learn all that you know about the subject. Months, multiple college classes if the subject was in your major, years of outside-of-class study, seminars and workshops.
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So how could you compress your months, years, or decades of experience and knowledge into a single lesson, or even a unit?
Your approach: Pick a single student and pretend to be giving them the kind of description that one friend would be giving of the game when several of them are vying for a glimpse through the knot hole. Focus upon the essential action. Describe as if it were a "play-by-play" of what is happening.
For example, as you introduce the lesson, entice your students with crucial information…but only as much as you can see through the knot hole in the fence.
The introduction should be an appetizer, not a buffet.
Dramatize
Next: Engage your students' imagination and sensory processing (learning styles, learning modalities) with drama. This means the kind of drama that tells a story, but with the importance and energy of the championship game, not the boring practices and team drills that got the team into the playoffs, finals, tournament, etc.
But, take a tip from broadcast television, keep the plot simple and uncomplicated.
The drama can be an engaging story, with just the essential details as if watching the game through a knot hole.
Use the drama of the story to communicate immediate understanding, and communicate your main points with the kind of interest that comes from sensory processing.
Take an experience that is common to your students, and map a concept to that experience.
For example…
Students understand the conflicts that teenagers experience in wanting the be independent, while their parents want to keep them safely under control. Describing this conflict
Or, students may be familiar with parents arguing about money. Describing a family drama when discussing how our political parties decide on a budget fits right in and connects with their personal experience.
Or, students may have seen their parents fuming and fomenting about being stuck in a traffic gridlock. So, connecting this experience to the drama and frustrations of African-American and Hispanic Americans who yearn to make progress with the American dream is a natural. (So is describing how our government fails to create opportunities for all Americans, but enabling the rich to "speed along on toll roads and with their cronies in the car-pool, fast-lane."
When you relate a lesson-metaphor-drama, you take an intellectual concept and craft it into an engaging, unique, and personal experience.
And, a visceral drama is real enough to burn itself into your students' memories.
A great lesson engages your students' senses. Reliving and replaying personal experience is more real than "thinking about" concepts.
The Celebration (or Consolidation) Pep Rally
Finally, help your students face the aftermath of the drama.
With a game, the home-team-favorites either win or loose. So it is with the content-area lessons of life that a personal drama engages.
Win or loose, the important thing is what we do next, what we apply in our lives to keep our winning streak alive, or to come back stronger, more fit, more ready to compete.
Your students may "understand the point of the drama, but they need a way to apply the principles in their studies and their lives.
For the lesson to really "sink in," your students need a way to take action on the lesson.
The results of your students' action-taking do not have to be successful, but trying and failing often produces more substantial learning than doing and succeeding.
So, avoid "fairy-tale, happy-ever-after" endings that "pitch a simple, one-size-one-off-solution" to all issues.
The follow-up to your drama must have a "do-able" learning task.
You are targeting more than a "That was an interesting story" kind of response from your students.
You want to launch them into a project, task, mission…an application that teaches something more profound.
The "application assignment" should build your students' desire to learn more from you, create trust in your knowledge and content-based authority, and strengthen your students' connections with real learning.
The follow-up should:
- Break down into a step-by-step process
- Identify two or three key activities
- Provide examples of success initiatives
- Be doable
You want to give away all your knowledge. Don't hold anything back.
The more you give your students, the more that they will want.
The more you teach your students, the more learning they will crave. When students engage real learning, their interest is insatiable.
Unfortunately, real learning is often a scarce commodity in our students' lives. And, with the focus upon high-stakes testing; superficial knowledge holds sway over application learning, service learning, project-based learning and learning-by-doing.
Remember, you didn't acquire your content-area "expert status" by reading a single article or book.
So, encourage any progress that your students make, and show that profound and broad knowledge takes months or years to master.
But, rather than feel frustrated by the complexity and the saga of really learning by doing, your students will be grateful. Your students will want to know more, learn more, do more.
Everyone you teach in this memorable lesson way activates their inborn, innate desire for mastery and achievement. This launches a process that we call "life-long learning," a "personal quest based upon real-world skills."
Of course, there are other ways to create memorable lessons. But, this method succeeds with minimal stress and maximum student involvement and engagement.
So, create a lesson that opens as if watching a game through a knothole in a fence, then build the drama of a district championship game, and provide an action-taking follow-up task such as a celebration (or consolidation) pep rally.
Let the drama of learning launch your students into hands-on, project-based or service learning experiences that cement concepts and life-experiences together.
Creating these kinds of lessons is easy, but you may have to work hard to keep up with your students when their active follow-up branches into so many creative and inventive paths to mastery and achievement.
And check back with your students in 20 or 40 years to see how a lesson of this kind launched them on a path toward life-long learning.
