Reflection on Chap. 4

This chapter begins with a bang! Burmark describes how different people approach prioritization of educational goals.  Her point is that effective teaching boils down to two things: 1. Get their attention, and 2. Make the presentation stick. She then describes how she used humor and props to start a memorable presentation to a school board association. I've been present at some presentations and speeches where the speaker began with a joke or a song or with props, and those are the ones that grabbed my immediate attention. Burmark uses the example of Velcro as a metaphor for education...what are the hooks? What are the loops? Teaching must be able to "hook" the students, and the "loops" should make the kids "stick". I know that when I taught kindergarten, we had a lot of hands-on activities that tied in with the alphabet books used by the students. To this day, some children and their parents remember the "alligator pie" we made for the letter A, or the "gold hunt" for the letter G...the hooks and the loops. Burmark lists some hooks that comprise the acronym "CHIMES2": connections, humor, images, music, emotion, story and senses. As I read her explanations for each hook, I thought back to my classes, and how I used some of these hooks in my lessons. I realized that while I used at least one or two, I probably could've used more. I'm interested to read further in the text about the different hooks, and learn how to incorporate these hooks in lessons.