Teacherscribe's Teaching Thought #41

Teaching Thought #41

The four Elements of peak moments for your classroom.

In The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath, they explore how businesses and teachers can cater to the customer service experience so that your business or classes are filled with great experiences.  They examine ‘peak’ moments; their research has revealed that there are four elements inherent in peak moments. Element #4 – “Connection.”

CONNECTION.  Defining moments are often social.  Think about weddings, graduations, vacations, baptisms, and so on.  How do you get your students to share and connect to help forge this type of moment?

One way that I try to capture connection in College Comp 2, anyway, is on our last day when I hand out my personalized senior letters.  The students all pause for several minutes and read their letters. Some cry. I often cry. We have a moment of connection. Then I turn it over to my students as they share their final projects with the class.  Their final projects are usually multi-genre research papers. Students are often quite jacked up to share them, for they research and write about whatever they are passionate about. I watched how Kylea talked about her MGRP on teaching with absolute glee as she illustrated how the entire project was presented as a backpack.  I had Mariah share her clever MGRP on Fortnight. It was great seeing how she hand crafted controllers to go along with the game manual that was her final format.

So how can you build ‘connection’ into your classes.  Make time for them. Have demonstrations and allow students to work collaboratively.  If you’ve attended the session Lisa and I do on passion projects, you’ll see how connected the students are during our final presentation days.  But again, you can rarely do this if you’re chained to your curriculum because you’re too busy covering material.