Made to Stick

Chip and Dan Heath - Book Summary

The curse of knowledge – once we know
something, we find it hard to imagine what it
was like not to know it. Our knowledge has
cursed us. It becomes difficult for us to share
knowledge with students because we can't
readily recreate their state of mind.
Creative lessons consistently make use of the
same basic six principles that make a good
lesson stick.
Simplicity,
Unexpectedness creates attention
Concreteness, creates memory
Credibility, creates belief and agreement
Emotion, creates care
Stories create action
= Success.
Simplicity: finding the core of the lesson, stripping a lesson down to its
most critical essence. Weed out the superfluous and tangential elements.
The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important but just
aren't the most important. Giving students more ideas and concepts can
make them less likely to remember any of them. Quantity can cause
learning paralysis. It's easier to remember concepts than data. Compact
lessons have to be profound. Tap the existing memory of your students.
Create complexity through artful use of simplicity by staging and
layering simple ideas correctly. It's easier to learn a new concept by
tying it to one that is already known. Give the student just enough of an
idea to be useful and then come back with more. Avoid useless accuracy.
Use analogies.
Unexpected: Break a pattern. Constant sensory stimulation makes
students tune out. Surprise gets our attention, interest keeps our
attention. Plan unexpectedness by planning lesson components violating
student patterns. Unexpected lessons have surprises that are not
predictable but to be satisfying they must be postdictable (make sense
afterwards). Target an aspect of the students' minds that relates to your
core message.The Aha! experience is much more satisfying when
preceded by the Huh? experience. Use mysteries not just to heighten
interest and curiosity, but also to train your students to think. Curiosity is
feeling a gap in one's knowledge. It's the intellectual need to answer
questions and close gaps. Stories raise curiosity.Students need to be
convinced that they need the answer. Controversy raises question,
concensus blocks interest. Knowledge gaps create interest. Highlight the
existing knowledge first then prove that there are gaps to create learning
motivation.
Concrete: Abstraction is the luxury of the expert. Abstraction may be
subject to interpretation. Concreteness is detected through the senses.
Concrete language helps explore foreign concepts. Concrete ideas are
easier to remember. Hook the abstract into a student's interests or
background.
Credible: use vivid details, statistics, external validitation, but vivid
details are the best.
Emotional: For people to take action they have to care. Piggyback on
emotions that the students already experience. Emphasise lesson
benefits, not lesson features. Wiify: What's in it for you. Benefits have to
be tangible, not big, to make students care. Asking Why? reminds us of
core values and principles that underline our ideas. Why we are doing a
lesson moves our focus from a set of associations that have no power to
deeper, more concrete associations that emotionally connect with
students. Create empathy for specific individuals, show that ideas are
associated with things that people already care about. Appeal to self-
interest, but also appeal to their identities, not only the people they are
now, but the people they would like to be.
Stories: When we hear a story, we simulate it. Mental simulation works
because students have to evoke the same parts of the brain that are
evoked in real activity. Use these three basic story plots: Challenge,
Connection, Creativity. Challenge Plot: obstacles that seem daunting to
the protagonist, inspire students to work harder, take on new challenges,
overcome obstacles. Connection plots are about relationships with
people. they inspire in social ways, make students want to help others,
be more tolerant, work together. Creativity plots involves someone
making a mental breakthrough, solving a longstanding puzzle or
attacking a problem in an innovative way. Stories simulate and inspire-
Thats the great thing about the world of ideas: any of us, with the right
insight and message can make an idea stick.