Metaphors in Teaching

There is support in the learning literature for the use of metaphors in teaching. Connecting unknown material to known material through the use of common metaphors supports learners in comprehending and organizing new information.

I have used lots of metaphors in teaching and will often create a metaphor at the start of a new curriculum design project to organize all the pieces into a unified whole. I use the metaphor as a graphic organizer, which is a visual representation of the concepts, skills, and issues of the course or training. Designing a metaphor helps me organize new content with which I may not have a lot of familiarity. The resulting metaphor becomes a road map of sorts for the concepts, issues and skills that will be covered in the course or training.

Metaphors not only provide a road map for the instructional design but they organize and make accessible for the learner, new material that may be overwhelmingly complex or detailed. By weaving these seemingly disparate but important details into a metaphor that is familiar and engaging, there is a greater likelihood that learners will be able to comprehend and more easily apply new learning. Here is an example of a sailing metaphor I created for a training for new mentors. I used this as a road map both for my design but also as an active part of the delivery of the new concepts.

Metaphors can be designed as advance organizers to help learners know how all the pieces fit together or they can be used as a check for understanding. You can ask adult learners to create a metaphor to demonstrate their understanding of the material they've learned.

After I presented the above sailing metaphor as a part of a new training curriculum I'd created for the mentoring group, I asked them to use the same key elements of the training to create a metaphor relevant to their individual geographic areas that they could use in the delivery of the training at their sites. Each of the metaphors, though quite different from the others, had all the essential elements of this particular mentoring program. The result was a wonderful mix of culturally and geographically relevant metaphors, tailored to the needs of the different chapters of the organization, from all over the country, each containing the key elements of their common program along with how those elements worked together, but contextualized to their geographic regions. The Seattle, Portland and Klamath Falls chapters used the key elements to create a mentoring metaphor around mountain climbing. The New York City and San Francisco chapters used the key elements to create a mentoring metaphor around riding public transportation in the big city. The Cincinnati chapter created their mentoring metaphor around a football field and game, which made sense as they'd had a winning football time that year.

Metaphors are a wonderful way to organize the writing and learning of new curriculum content, and they often help to make sense out of confusing and overwhelming details for the learner or trainee. By using a story or picture to connect the familiar to the unfamiliar, they make unfamiliar content more engaging and  accessible to the trainee or learner who is being exposed to it for the first time.