When Teaching, it Pays to Think Like a Novel Writer

Let’s face it, we enjoy learning from people who are funny, engaging, celebrate our failures, and who build an experience that unfolds like a story.  Thinking like a novel writer supports effective learning by engaging the needs of students’ psychologies throughout the semester. It forces the instructor to facilitate related experiences that build one another. It also allows the instructor to slowly and responsibly build to a higher level of intensity necessary for transformative learning.  Much like a novel writer needs to bring the reader along, so an instructor needs to lay the foundation before jumping into the climax. Although it’s a horrific image, we have long used the metaphor of boiling frogs within our program to help new instructors understand this idea.  In the late 1990’s a story circulated via email that if you threw a frog into a fully boiling pot of water, it would jump out to save its life; however, if you put it into cool water and turned up the heat slowly, it would allow itself to be boiled alive.  This may not be true for frogs, but it serves as a powerful reminder for us to think like a novel writer. In Parks’ and Heifetz’s language (Leadership Can Be Taught, 1995) this would be akin to turning the heat up slowly so that students can tolerate the tension enough to benefit from it.  

Another purpose of thinking like a novel writer is that much like a good novel, a good class draws our attention in a way that keeps us up at night thinking about it; our identity gets wrapped up in it and it haunts us as we think about things we have not before. As Sir Ken Robinson so aptly points out, “An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak, when you are present in the current moment, when you’re resonating with excitement at this thing that you’re experiencing, when you are fully alive.  An anesthetic is when you shut your senses off and deaden yourself to what is happening,” (http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html). 

Creating exciting, aesthetic experiences opens students to learning in ways that cannot occur in ordinary classrooms. Isn't that what we are all looking for? Moments of wonder, surprise, and mystery? Why should the classroom be any different?