Made to Stick: SUCCESS Checklist
8:00 AM
Edit
Made to Stick: SUCCESS Checklist:
The ideas below are all taken directly from Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, a book that all teachers should read. It has advice for anyone who needs to get a message across to an audience and make that message stick and is based on the concept of “sticky-ness” from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. It draws on research in psychology and educational theory and other disciplines. The authors put forth a template for sticky ideas which is based on a Velcro model of the mind; they analogize the brain to the loops in Velcro – the more “hooks” you can get in those loops, the more likely an idea is to stick. According to the book a sticky idea should be as many of the following things as possible; Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, contain a Story. The “villain” of the book is something named the “Curse of Knowledge.” This is what happens when one becomes such an expert in a field that they simply cannot imagine what it was like to not have this knowledge, and therefore struggle to communicate effectively with audiences that do not have this knowledge. The way to avoid this curse is to simplify ideas, which is the first principle addressed below.