Teach Like a Pirate - Part 3

In the next section of Teach Like a Pirate, Burgess presents practical ideas for creating engaging lessons. His premise is, “a good teacher, like a good entertainer, first must hold his audience’s attention. Then he can teach his lesson.” (Hendrik John Clarke) If we consider our lessons in a Venn diagram of three circles: Content, Technique/Method and Presentation, we have to spend considerable time thinking about our presentation. We would probably all agree that most professional development programs focus on the content and technique, but Burgess argues that more should focus on the presentation as well.

1. Everything is a choice - designing lessons is filled with many presentation choices. We will be presenting in the next few posts lots of different choices to consider in your presentation. Some choices are major, while others are minor, but even the minor ones add up and make an impact. Here are just a few examples for now: Are the lights on when the students enter the room?Is there music playing, and if so, what? Is anything written on the board to draw students’ attention? Have the desks been rearranged? Do I pass out a handout right away or wait? What do I wear to class to present this lesson? Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you do not make these decisions before each lesson; you do. If there is no music on, it is because you chose not to put any on.

2. Transitions will kill you - One of the ways to tell the difference between a professional magician and an amateur is how they transition from one trick to the next. The amateur just strings together a series of unrelated tricks. He does one trick, then searches for the next prop or thinks about what to do next. A professional ties everything into one act; there are no awkward pauses. The audience is engaged throughout. The same is true with teaching. Some teachers work hard to come up with a good engaging hook, but then lose all the momentum in the transition to the lesson. Every time you allow for unnecessary delay in your presentation is another time you will need to regain the student’s attention. One easy recommendation is to get all the administrative activities out of the way before the presentation begins. This includes things like: attendance, getting books and notebooks, putting on the projector or computers, etc.

Here is the beginning of thirty types of hooks you can use to engage your students. My suggestion is read through them and break them into categories: ones you are good at, ones you have toyed with but need to develop further, and those that you have never tried.  Make a plan how you will try to incorporate these new ideas, one at a time.

1. The Kinesthetic Hook

• How can I incorporate movement into the lesson?
• Can we throw something, roll something, or catch something inside or outside of class?
• Can we get up and act something out?
• Can we turn the room into a giant opinion meter and have students move to one side or the other based on the statement?
• Can I use a game that incorporates movement and action to enhance the lesson?
• How can I guarantee that every student is up and out of their desk at least once during the lesson?

2. The People Prop Hook

• How can I make my lesson “play big” by using students as props, inanimate objects or concepts?
• Can we create a human graph, chart, map or equation?
• Can students be assigned a specific step in a process or an even and then have to order themselves sequentially?

3. The Safari Hook

• How can I get my class outside of my four walls for this lesson?
• Where would the best place(s) on campus be to deliver this content?
• Is there an area in the school that serves as the perfect backdrop?
• Can I plant items outside for us to discover?
• Can we leave campus to go to the ultimate location to teach this material

In the next set of hooks, we focus on the arts. As Pablo Picasso once said, “every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

4. The Picasso Hook

• How can I incorporate art into this lesson?
• What can my students draw or make that would help them understand and retain this information?
• Can they make some kind of non-linguistic representation of the material. i.e. a photography project or 3-D art.
• Can they create visuals of key information as a way to review for the upcoming test?
• Can they design word pictures in which the way the word is written reveals its definition?
• Can I create an art-based option that students could choose instead of another assignment

5. The Mozart Hook

• How can I use music to aid my presentation?
• What would the perfect song or type of music to create the right mood and proper atmosphere?
• What songs have lyrics that relate to this lesson?
• If I don’t know, can I ask students to find examples from their music that relate to this topic?
• How can I most effectively use music as they enter and exit the room?
• How can I improve the start of my lesson with the perfect song selection?
• What should we listen to when students are working in groups? When working independently?
• Can I use music to make my transitions smoother?
• Can I offer alternative projects that would allow my students with musical talents to be creative?
• Can students change lyrics to popular songs to reflect course content?

6. The Dance and Drama Hook

• Can I provide the opportunity for my students to do skits or appear in videos relate to what we are learning?
• Can they learn and perform a relevant dance?
• Can some of the students teach a dance to the class?
• Can the students impersonate key people from history in a panel discussion or interview?
• Can they write a script and create a video to play for the class

7. The Craft Store Hook

• How can I incorporate a craft into this lesson?
• What can my students make that relates to this material?
• Can I give the most artistic students an opportunity to teach the class how to make something that relates to what we are learning?

These are the first seven types of hooks. Which of these do you want to try next?

Links to Interesting Articles:

1. The 10 Most Popular EdTech Stories of 2015
2. Allergies May Boost Chance of Anxiety and Depression

3. When Was the Last Time You Failed in Front of a New Teacher

4. What is a Growth Mindset? 

Links to Interesting Web Tools:
1. Personalize Email Communication with YAMM
2. Padlet
3. Vocabulary Strategies to Help Students Decipher Unknown Words
4. The Differentiated Classroom: DVD Series

Quote of the Day:
1. “Education...is painful, continual and difficult work to be done in kindness, by watching, by warning,...  by praise, but above all -- by example.” -- John Ruskin
2. “The job of an educator is to teach students to see the vitality in themselves.” -- Joseph Campbell 
3. “The greatest sign of success for a teacher ... is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.’” -- Maria Montessori