Reaching for the Peak

When I was a young theater student, my greatest moment of learning came not from a book or from a lecture, or even from watching a performance, but from being left on my own to work with an actress on her monologue, and then having the director put the actress through an exercise that completely changed (and improved) her performance. When I asked the director why he hadn’t just told me to run the exercise that he wanted in the first place, he said, “I could have, but then neither of you would have learned anything, would you?”

There is a difference between telling and teaching, and the difference lies not in what the teacher does, but in what the student does. The student learns. That’s different from merely hearing, or even repeating. You are not simply witness to something, like the audience at a play; you have to participate in and be changed by the event. (Can you be changed by a play or a movie? Sure. Maybe that’s the difference between entertainment and real art.)

Yes--to learn is to be changed. Maybe it’s your content knowledge or your ideas about the world that change. Maybe it’s a particular skill that you develop or improve. A learning experience is a workout; it stretches the muscles and leaves you stronger or more limber. It works upon you and leaves its mark on you. And if it doesn’t, then it wasn’t really a learning experience. It was just a thing you witnessed, a thing that happened in your presence—perhaps entertaining, perhaps boring, but either way not effective (in that I had no actual effect).

As a teacher, how do you know you’ve had an effect on students? How do you know your lesson has been a true learning experience?  Well, you can do what we’ve all been told to do: assess, assess, assess. Assess formatively. Assess summatively. Assess informally, with periodic check-ins. Assess formally, with quizzes and checks. Assess without grading, because you want to diagnose, not punish. No—assess with grades, always, because otherwise students won’t take the activity seriously (yes, we do a great of confusing ourselves).

Assessment of skill or content knowledge is certainly important, but there’s something else we need to be on the lookout for—and we need to be watching for it while we’re teaching. I’m talking here about that moment of revelation and comprehension—that moment when the pieces all fit together inside the student’s head and reveal something big, conceptual, and important—that moment when it all makes sense. I call it the AHA moment, and I mentioned it briefly in an earlier blog post. I said it was the brass ring we all reach for, because it’s a sign that something is actually changing inside the student—that a new idea is forming, or a change of perspective is happening. It’s a physical thing, and we’ve all felt it—we’ve all felt that moment where something just shifts and changes, and we suddenly see things differently. It’s thrilling. It’s addictive. If our students had more of those moments, they’d show up for every class we scheduled, every day.

In their new book, The Power of Moments, Chip and Dan Heath talk about what makes certain moments memorable. They talk about how we tend to remember only the peak experiences and the end or transition points, while other, more mundane details fade from memory. They talk about how peak experiences usually involve four things:

1.       ELEVATION—a sparking of joy, surprise, or delight
2.       INSIGHT—a moment of revelation or changed perspective (that AHA moment)
3.       PRIDE—a sense of accomplishment or courage in the face of challenge
4.      CONNECTION—a feeling of being part of something meaningful

Riding Space Mountain can be a peak experience, remembered long after a hundred other details of a trip to Disneyland fade.  Winning a race you didn’t think you had a chance of winning could be a peak moment. Playing a difficult piece at a piano recital could be a peak moment. I’m sure you could easily identify several peak moments in your life—moments when you stretched yourself, learned something about yourself, felt real pride in yourself. None of those moments happened because somebody told us something or showed us something. Maybe the telling and showing helped us prepare for those moments, but the moments themselves only happened because of what we did.

What are the moments you want your students to remember, a year from now? What do you hope they will look back on with happiness and pride? What AHAs do want them to discover?