Metaphors as Teaching Strategies

This morning I find myself on a very early flight to Denver, enroute to Toledo, OH to deliver the active and cooperative learning workshop for college faculty I wrote about last time. The focus of last week's post was on the use of demonstrations as an active learning strategy in teaching and training. Another strategy on the training agenda and the topic for today's post is the use of metaphors as an active learning strategy for delivering new content.

The use of metaphors - relating new, unknown content part-by-part to widely familiar content, has been shown to be an effective way for adults to engage with and learn new material. The caveats are to make sure the metaphor you plan to use is something widely known by your general population, and more specifically, is familiar to and culturally relevant for the specific learners you will be teaching.

In addition to providing the research around metaphors for this college faculty team, I also plan to share photographs of different metaphors I've created and used as graphic organizers. The purpose of these graphic organizer metaphors is to introduce a Big Picture view of new content. Big picture metaphors serve as a table of contents for the course as well as a visual map of how the parts relate to the whole and where we are in the study of those parts and wholes. Getting the big picture feel and how the parts interact with each other through a familiar metaphor can help orient students and make the learning task more manageable. Quite simply, when related to something familiar, metaphors also make learning more memorable.

In addition to sharing these photographs in the upcoming workshop, I've also included them in the participant's packet. Here are a couple I've created.

The first metaphor I created was for a prison parenting program, Parenting Inside Out. In this road trip metaphor, the destination was the healthy, successful adulthood of the children. The cars represented the children and the station attendants represented the parents in the program.

Each parent was invited to create and post a car for each of his children along with an attendant to represent himself. On each car the parent learner wrote the name, age and positive attributes of that child. On the attendant they wrote down all the ways they "fill up" or nurture their children for the journey. Each parent posted their cars and attendant on the wall while sharing with the group what they'd written. Here's a compressed version below. With 20 parents in a class, this metaphor can take up the better part of a wall.

After the parents had a chance to post their cars and attendants, I posted and briefly gave an overview of the "parenting guardrails" we'd be studying and practicing together. Next, we added some additional signs along the road representing the family mission statements they would create to guide them, and additional skills that were a part of the program. We added a few blank signs and I invited parent learners to write what else they'd like to learn and add them to the picture.

This metaphor was built on the wall in the classroom, much like a giant story board. It stayed on the well for the duration of the program and instructors often used it as a table of contents of sorts, to orient parents and help them move between parts and whole, connecting each skill or concept learned to the goal of helping children reach Destination Adulthood.

Not only did this metaphor serve as a graphic organizer relating parts to whole, it served as an attention-gainer on the first day of class and helped build buy-in. Additionally, it created a shared vocabulary that parents continued to use throughout their 12 weeks together, often referring to "providing guardrails" in visits with their children in order to stay focused on the goal of helping their children reach "Destination Adulthood."

One of my favorite student epiphanies around this metaphor happened in week 9. One of the dads I was teaching zipped into class and skidded to a stop in front of the journey metaphor that covered one wall. He said, "You know, Tracy, I signed up for this class to get my 4 and 5 year olds to mind me once I get out. But I don't think that's what this class is about." Then, touching his "family" with kid-cars and himself as attendant, he slowly traced his finger along the highway until his hand reached "Destination Adulthood" while he said, "Instead, I think it is about me doing my parent job so that my kids can reach their potential, what do you think?" What do I think? Are you kidding? RIGHT ON! is what I think but not wanting to steal the joy and power of his discovery, I said, "That's really thoughtful 'Joe' would you be willing to share that with the group at check in?"

Another key point to make about the use of this metaphor in the PIO curriculum is to note that the population of adult learners this course serves has often not experienced a great deal of educational success. Many attend the class on the first day reluctantly, as they contemplate the 90 hr. commitment plus time for homework that they are making. The use of this active learning strategy is a very safe first activity that allows the parent to experience immediate educational success because he knows all the answers! All the parents could tell us what's terrific about their kids and all they ways they show them love and fill them up! This success in getting all the answers right encourages them to hang in there and return the next day for class.

Another sample of the use of a journey metaphor is the one I created to train faculty new to the Project DEgree  outcome-based and integrated curriculum approach. I created and used this metaphor in faculty start up training to provide a big picture view of all the moving parts and to give them an overview of the paradigm shifting instructional approach they were about to embark upon. Because this program asks academically autonomous faculty to collaborate with their colleagues to teach integrated curriculum in a learning community that crosses two or three courses, and then evaluate the resulting student products together while sharing a common syllabus, we needed a way to talk about that so that it seemed natural and manageable! I used this metaphor to build the journey they would take together, piece by piece.

Instead of building this one on the wall, I used photographs delivered through a slide show, along with narrating a story relating the unknown to the known. You can find the metaphor photographs and narrative here.

These are some of the ways I've used metaphors as an active and cooperative teaching strategy. Next time I'll share how I've used metaphors as checks for understanding or assessment tasks. I'd love to hear how you've used metaphors in your teaching and training. I hope you'll share your good ideas in the comments section below.