General

Here’s a story from Dave Rendall, who has a blog called the Freak Factor. (I love his post that argues that if you’re getting rejected, you’re doing something right.)

I hadn’t seen Tammy in almost a year, when she approached me in the hallway. I was there to teach an evening class for non-traditional students. She told me that her cohort was about to complete their last class and invited me to join the celebration. When I arrived, she was anxious to share some news.

Tammy had taken my course in Organizational Behavior the previous fall and one of the topics is change management. The classic model for this concept is Kurt Lewin’s force-field analysis, which helps managers to envision the driving forces pushing change and the restraining forces acting against change. By understanding and manipulating these forces, effective changes can be achieved. However, this is a relatively abstract concept and can become very complex in the context of an organization.

In order to make this concept stick, I use a few of the SUCCES principles from MTS. I start by keeping it simple. Instead of applying this model to an organization, I start by asking students to choose a meaningful change that they’ve been wanting to make in their own life, but haven’t started yet. Selecting a change that matters to them also creates an emotional link to the activity.

They write this change in the middle of a piece of paper and then I ask them why they want to make this change. These reasons are the driving forces and are listed on the left side of the paper on arrows pointing to the right. We then consider the barriers to making the change. These restraining forces are listed on the right side of the paper on arrows pointing left.

To make the activity more concrete, I try to physically illustrate the action of the two forces. I stand in front of the class with a chair and ask for a volunteer. The chair signifies the change, I am the driving forces and the volunteer is the restraining forces. I push the chair and the other student pushes back. The chair doesn’t move. It is “frozen.”

This illustrates the importance of “unfreezing,” which is the first part of Lewin’s change model. “Changing” occurs when driving forces are strengthened or added and when restraining forces are weakened or removed. Before explaining this, I ask the students how I can get the chair to move. The suggestions usually include the four options listed above. Without even reading the text, students can figure out how the process works in the physical world. In fact, during one class a student’s 10 year-old son was in the room. When I asked how to move the chair, the room was silent. The first person to respond was the young boy. He said, “Add more force!” He was exactly right and I was very pleased. I had made Lewin concrete and simple enough for a child to understand.

The activity is also credible because it offers a testable credential. Students are asked to assign numerical values to the strength of their driving and restraining forces. The cumulative scores for each set of forces shows why they haven’t made the change yet (not enough driving force and/or too much restraining force). We then work to increase driving forces and decrease restraining forces. The students always come up with creative ideas that they can apply to their own life. We discuss these as a class so students can see for themselves how it can work in their situation and those of their classmates.

I also share stories of how I’ve used this model to create change in my life. Each time I teach this concept, I choose a change that I want to make and work through the exercise along with the students. This creates a growing list of stories of success and failure, which brings us back to Tammy.

She wanted to start her own business. During the course of the exercise, she explained her driving and restraining forces. I asked if it was possible that her current job might also be a restraining force. Since she liked her job and was paid well, she did not have a lot of natural motivation to go out on her own. Even though she had a good job, it might actually be a barrier to achieving her change. I don’t recall her response at the time and I didn’t think much about it or hear anything from her until ten months later.

When I went to her classroom, she explained that she quit her job shortly after class and started her own business as a Spanish language interpreter. The business was even more successful than she anticipated and she was very happy. She credited the Lewin exercise for giving her the necessary insight and motivation to make a major change in her life. Needless to say, this is a story that I now share with classes to demonstrate the potential power of applying Lewin’s force-field analysis.

I almost spit up my coffee when I got to the punchline on this one.

From Tony Pratt:

I’m a first year teacher (4th Grade) in the New Orleans Recovery School District. The one common thread that I’ve noticed between the lessons that have stuck was a relation to something the kids were familiar with or interested in. I frequently relate math lessons to the beloved Saints and create bizarre scenarios to maintain student interest. The best and most interesting story, however, came from a colleague. He was teaching the concept of probability and went into a long monologue about how small of a probability you have to win the lottery. He relayed the particularly sticky stat that it is more likely that you will be struck by lightning than win the lottery. The lesson was memorable enough that several students went home and told family members.

One student, Jarred, relayed his story, “I saw my uncle buying lottery tickets last night. I told him that he was more likely to be struck by lightning than he was to win the lottery and that buying lottery tickets was a bad idea because of probability.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me to get the F out of his face.”

[Preamble] If you ask someone to think of a sticky idea, a lot of times they’ll blurt out a slogan. “Wassssup!” “Just do it.” And, no question, these are sticky ideas. But because people tend to associate the notion of “stickiness” with things like slogans — i.e., short, punchy, cleverisms — they have a hard time imagining that stickiness could apply to really complex things. Stickiness is for marketers, not for engineers or scientists, or so goes the thinking.

Well, no. Chip and I may be largely to blame for this misperception — the word ‘sticky’ we’ve embraced is itself clever and vaguely marketingish. But sticky just refers to an idea that was understood, remembered, and changed something (opinions, behaviors, values). So the fact that someone is a practicing nuclear scientist means that, at some point, nuclear science concepts stuck. Which in turn means that a nuclear science teacher found an artful way to communicate really hard concepts.

Because of this backstory, we were thrilled to get a note from Andrew Singer, who teaches a digital signal processing (DSP) course at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Singer and I ran across each other as a result of a talk I gave on campus. He had read Made to Stick and shared some changes he had made to his course curriculum as a result. And, as you’ll see, slogans are not his bag. He deals with really complex topics that must be communicated to really smart people. After Chip and I got his note, we exchanged “Wow!” emails with each other. [/Preamble]

I teach a course on digital signal processing to juniors and seniors in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois. This is a course that describes the mathematics and theory behind applications like digital modems, HDTVs and MP3 players. Basically, whenever “signals”, that is information they you care about, are “processed” using a computer, cell phone, or anything that samples or “digitizes” the signals of interest, digital signal processing is used.

Needless to say, the theory that I need to teach the students makes this largely a math course for upper level engineering students. However, as you know, motivating students to learn more mathematics for mathematics sake (especially for non-math majors) is no easy task. I’ve struggled over the years in coming up with means to increase their interest and maintain this throughout the course so that I can supply them with the tools they need to be productive and successful engineers.

As a young faculty member, I used boundless enthusiasm and energy in my lectures, which managed to maintain their interest in my lectures, but this didn’t necessarily translate into deepening their understanding of the material. They would pay attention to what I was saying, since I embedded anecdotes of my time in industry or interjected jokes into the discourse, but in the end, the “smart students” did well, and the “not as smart” students did less well, and the results in terms of what I could discern they had learned, based on their exams and finals, was about the same. I did find over the last 10 years a number of things that did help to engage students in the learning process that did translate into broader and deeper understanding. It was after reading M2S that I saw the connection with the themes of your book and understood more broadly why these techniques worked. The problem that a professor has is a deep case of the Curse of Knowledge. Not only has it been a long time since we did not understand what we are trying to teach to students who have not yet grasped the concepts, but we have also taught it so many times, that there is a sense of “I’ve taught this 100 times, haven’t you understood it yet?” This is of course not a conscious phenomenon, but nonetheless, something that we all must battle.In the course of reading your book, I have also been re-writing the course lecture notes for this digital signal processing course and have been focussed on (using your term) “finding the core” of the course. I had come up with, over the last few years, a core set of ideas that I thought focussed on what it means to have taken and understood digital signal processing. When a student from the university of Illinois interviews at a company and says “I took digital signal processing from Prof. Singer” what are the 3 things that they need to know to both get the job *and* make the University of Illinois proud to have this graduate working in this field? By focussing on the core ideas of the course, I widdled away the extraneous details that basically served to separate the A+++ students from the A++ students, but largely fell on deaf ears on the rest of the class.Students need to understand what a mathematical model for a signal is, what happens when it is sampled, understand the concept of analog and digital frequency and how they are related, understand what happens when the digital signal is processed (in time and frequency) and what happens when this signal is then reintroduced to the analog world, through a digital-to-analog converter. This set of core ideas can be visualized in a picture, where the signals that touch the world—say a musical recording—are sampled and become a digital file, this digital file is manipulated, and then the file is played out through a D/A converter. By showing this to the class at the beginning of the term and referring back to this example, I found I could keep the class on track to the core messages I wanted them to learn. I also focussed on this core message when deciding what material to keep in the course and what should be left out. This was all before reading M2S, and now I see that I had successfully managed to get chapter 1 on my own, with a little of the notion of stories and concrete examples.

Post M2S: The night I finished reading M2S, I literally put down the book, went over to my lecture notes for the next day’s lecture and asked: “What is the core message of this lecture?” Where is it? Why am I burying this message so deeply in mathematics? I wrote a single page with the core message for the day on it together with a catchy diagram that illustrated these key concepts. Then, I focussed on creating a set of increasingly challenging concrete examples that illustrated this key concept and developed the supporting concepts one by one. Each example that I wrote, I looked at and decided were not yet concrete enough. For example, in one case I had a signal of the form “a^n u[n]” to express a one-sided complex exponential sequence. I thought, “Why am I introducing this extraneous variable ‘a’ ” in my supposedly “concrete” example?” I replaced this with the number “1/2” instead. Additionally, I provided a story to go with each concrete example. “Suppose the number of album sales for a particular record fell off geometrically, with half as many sold each day—that is, the sales took the form 1000(1/2)^n for the nth day of sales, beginning with 1000 sales the first day, 500 the next, and so on…”

Basically, I grounded each signal in as concrete an example as I could. Then, when I wanted to describe properties of the signals or how I would manipulate them, I gave the corresponding meaning (as close as I could) in the story of the album sales. The lecture went flawlessly, and I kept them in class past the bell at the end of the hour. Since then, I’ve added “mysteries” to be solved, introduced early in lecture, with the answer only revealed at the end. I’ve included such “riddles” in homework and laboratory exercises, to tease out the student’s interest in understanding the concepts sufficiently well that they *want* to find the answer.

I don’t know what the end result will be at this point, however I know that the course text that I write will be much more inviting, more concrete and focussed after reading M2S than it would have otherwise been, and, whenever I stand up in front of the students, I am constantly going through the “SUCCESS” list, where, in my case, the last “S” is for Student.

Here’s one of our favorite stories so far from the “100 books for 100 stories” contest. There are still plenty of books to giveaway, so make sure to tell your teacher friends: Email us — heaths@fastcompany.com — a story of a lesson that stuck and we’ll ship you a free signed copy of our book. (Must be a U.S. resident and a current teacher.)

Check out this tale from Saleem Reshamwala (a few comments below the story):

When I was a middle school student in Apex, North Carolina, I took a class called “Small Engines” with a guy named Mr. Trueblood. It was basically a class in how to repair lawnmowers, and a stepping-stone class for learning how to fix cars.

Here’s the four steps in making a four-stroke engine (the one in most cars) go:

1) Piston goes down, gas and air mixture gets sucked into the cylinder
2) Piston goes up, compresses gas and air (makes gas and air mix more explosive)
3) gas explodes piston is forced down (this is the explosion that makes your car go)
4) Piston goes up (exhaust is pushed out)

I don’t think a single one of us understood that about cars before we started the class. So, Mr. Trueblood tells us, a group of middle-school boys in rural North Carolina, that he’s going to teach us the basic science of how a four-stroke engine works. We’re expecting him to go to the blackboard with the chalk. He walks out of the room.

1) He then walks back in giving a monologue as if he were a mix of gas and air that had been sucked into a car engine. “Woah, got sucked in here, it’s not so bad lots of space to move around” and he’s kind of moving around the class a bit, acting as if he’s talking to various particles around the room. It’s a little weird, and some of the boys are laughing.

2) Then he starts acting as if the back wall of the class is moving toward him. He gets really into it. Laughing nervously at first, talking about how the piston is making things get really crowded for him and the other particles. Then he briefly looks genuinely scared. He’s talking about how being this crowded in, all he wants to do is anything he can to get out.

At this point, a few of us were like, ‘Uh, what the hell is going on here’

3) He yells something about a fire coming in the side of the class, and then SCREAMS and SPRINTS toward the back of the room, yelling that he’s burning. I was kind of terrified at this point. He looked crazy. And, like I said, he’s yelling about having come into contact with flame.

4) He slams himself into the back wall, stops acting crazy, and just acts like he’s exhausted, mentions how shocked he is at the force that he was able to push the piston away with, acts like it’s coming back towards him, and then walks out the classroom door.

I can’t remember if we clapped or not, but I know we all laughed. Nervously. And it sure as hell taught the concept.

There’s a lot to love about this: Note how the teacher is trying to turn a complex process into a concrete story. He is trying to get students to experience the four-stroke engine. And the fact that he freaks them out a little is just gravy. Also note that the initial student reaction to the, er, performance is not particularly positive. Sticky ideas won’t always get instant acclaim, and yet it wins in the end — here’s a guy who still remembers the details of a class from middle school!

[NOTE: This promotion is now over — we will be posting the accumulated stories soon!]

Calling all teachers! We want to trade you a free signed copy of Made to Stick for one of your stories. Here are the details.

We want your story of a classroom lesson that stuck. Maybe itâ??s one of yours, or maybe youâ??re bragging on the brilliant lesson of a colleague or one of your past teachers. Tell us about it â?? give us the details of what the teacher did and how the students responded. Tell us why you think it worked so well.

There are just a few rules: (1) Itâ??s got to be the story of a specific lesson, recounted in enough detail that a general reader, who of course wasnâ??t there the day it was taught, can understand the power of it. (2) Youâ??re giving us permission to publish the story, along with your name. (3) Youâ??ve got to be a teacher â?? weâ??ll need a school address to send the book to.

An example would be the post below this one about Oceanography. Note that this is a forward-looking storyâ??itâ??s about a teacherâ??s plan for a future class. Weâ??re anticipating that most people will want to tell stories about classes that have already happened, but if youâ??d rather talk about something youâ??re cooking up, thatâ??s okay too.

Teachers are on the front line of stickinessâ??is there another profession where making ideas stick is such an everyday necessity? Thatâ??s why weâ??re excited to start compiling these â??greatest hitsâ? stories. Our hope is that we can weave together this collection of stories and make it available for free via our site, so teachers everywhere can get a bit of inspiration.

So let your teacher friends knowâ??we want to share their sticky stories with the world! Have them email us with their stories. [Email address: heaths@fastcompany.com] The first 100 stories we receive will get a free signed book! [NOTE: This promotion is now over — we will be posting the accumulated stories soon!]