Metaphors as Checks for Understanding

Last time I wrote about my use of metaphors as an active and cooperative teaching strategy to engage learners with a big picture overview of new content. This week I'd like to share how I've also used metaphors as assessment tasks or checks for understanding.


For students to create a metaphor, they have to be able to synthesize their learning and understand the intricacies of the parts and whole and how they relate to each other around the content, skills and concepts they've learned in your course or training. Asking students to do this, to synthesize their learning and create something new from it, demands the use of higher order thinking skills.

As an example, in a curriculum design project in which I was asked to design a new mentor training for the National Friends of the Children (FOTC), I created a sailing metaphor to provide the big picture overview of the FOTC program. This sailing metaphor contains all the important components of the program that make it unique and effective. The metaphor provides an easy-to-understand big picture introduction to how these components fit together in the work of the mentor to support children in meeting rest-of-life outcomes.

I presented this sailing metaphor at the opening of the train-the-trainer session I conducted for those who would be using the new curriculum to train new mentors at their chapters. At the end of the training, I asked the trainers to create their own metaphor to demonstrate their understanding of the pieces of the new mentor training and how they addressed the important components of their program. What was fascinating about this assessment task is that these trainers were from 7 different chapters of the Friends of the Children, from all over the country. Their wonderful metaphors represented the geographic terrain and cultural milieu in which their chapter was located while at the same time getting the job done in demonstrating their understanding of what they'd learned! So from the New York and San Francisco chapter trainers we saw an urban rapid transit metaphor used to convey the key components of the new mentor training and the FOTC program.

From the Portland and Seattle chapter trainers we saw a mountain climbing metaphor.

From the Cincinnati chapter trainer (who just happened to have their Bengals in the playoffs that year), we saw a football metaphor.

Each trainer then took their metaphor back to their chapter to train their new mentors using a relevant, contextualized to their community Big Picture view of the Friends of the Children model.

Metaphors are a great active and cooperative teaching strategy for delivering new content as well as a great way for students or trainees to demonstrate their learning using higher order thinking skills.