The Answer - A blog about Education, Preparation, and Commitment.

Best Selling Author Dan Heath Addresses YES Prep, KIPP Houston and Teach For America

August 23, 2010 by Jeremy Jones

 "Companies spend millions of dollars on ways to get our students’ attention for a few seconds. You (teachers) have hours, weeks and months with them. What will you do with that time?"

- Dan Heath, author of Made to Stick, from the 2010 Kinder Excellence in Teaching Awards

It was a grand night to see the power that three great organizations (YES Prep, KIPP Houston, and Teach For America) are having on the educational reform landscape in Houston. On top of all the award recipients, the audience represented a who’s who of school leaders, teachers and supporters of our organization that are enacting true change on Houston. This was not lost on the keynote speaker, best selling author Dan Heath, who lamented that this room was not a representation of what education looks like as a whole across our country. The majority of his talk, though, was on how we can make what we teach "sticky" and empower more students to retain what we teach. He used the example of Jane Elliott who in 1965 in Riceville, Iowa separated her students based on eye color for a two-day experiment on segregation and racism. The experiment to this day has had such an impact on each student that went through this exercise that they tend to be less prejudiced and more racially sensitive as adults than their demographic counterparts who never went through this experience. He also talked about teachers overcoming "the curse of knowledge" which happens when you become such an expert in something that you can no longer explain it in terms that someone else can understand or learn from. He used as an example a group of algebra teachers that attempted to come up with an answer to give to students when they asked the question "when are we going to use this?" Several teachers in the group came up with answers that involved terms like relationships, logical problem-solving, variable quantities, etc. One teacher came up with a more simple answer and that was "never". The analogy he portrayed was that when you weight-train or exercise you are not preparing for the moment in life when you will have to push a barbell off of your chest to survive or run 26.2 miles to save the world. You do these things to train your body, to be fit, challenge yourself, have energy and be healthy. You do math to make your mind fit and to train your brain. To be successful in life your mind has to be strong. These two points resonated last night – making things sticky and never losing touch with how to make strong connections with your students.

We have already had ten school days at YES Prep this year. With only 165 more to go, how will you make each lesson so memorable that each student will walk away being changed and more connected to something they never knew possible? That is the great challenge that pushes us each year to ask what we can do to be even greater, to reach more students and to impact more change on everything around us. Every single one of you is a part of how we figure that out and learn how to maximize every second with our students every single day.

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