Made to StickChip 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 attentionConcreteness, creates memoryCredibility, creates belief and agreementEmotion, creates careStories 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.