The Head Shall Follow the Heart

Maya Angelou once said, “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

When I began thinking about how I would implement change, I initially began laying out which facts and statistics I could lay out for my audience. The issue is, no one wants facts thrown in their face, and being told the way they are doing things is incorrect. Sinek presents the golden circle in his TED Talk, which details what, how, and why. He explains that people know what they do and how they do it, but the hesitation comes from WHY. This statement is crucial to how we approach promoting change in education. To get others to “buy in” to our changes, we must first know why we want to incorporate them; once we have established our why we can easily translate it to our audience and create the needed sense of urgency. Stating facts and the logistics of the what and how will not entice people to want to hear more from you, even if you have an airtight plan with research to support your claims. We must truly sell what we’re doing because anyone can initiate change, but others need to believe that we believe in what we are working to achieve.

Source: http://www.harapnuik.org/?p=5461

I recently presented a new summarizing activity for my students; they would have to pick a chapter book from my classroom library and make a Netflix summary page on a collaborative PowerPoint in OneNote. Initially, they were not happy when I mentioned the requirement of it having to be a chapter book, but then something really special happened. I brought in books from my sister and I’s childhood home library, there were Hannah Montana, Romeo, Junie B. Jones, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and an array of other books. None of these books are accelerated reader books, and they have absolutely nothing to do with our curriculum, but I instructed them to choose wisely and find a book they would be interested enough in to complete an assignment on it. One of my students chose a book that was over 150 pages, she completed it by the very next morning (we are talking about THIRD GRADERS here)!!! The entire class has been glued to their books; they pull them out even if they only have two minutes in between each activity. I have never in my five-year career seen young children be so dedicated to reading. Allowing my students to choose a book based on their interests unconsciously appealed to their affective domain. As I was reading through our links to this discussion I reflected and asked myself, how much more engaged would they have been if I was intentionally appealing to their hearts instead of their minds with our curriculum? In my opinion, we may have more success beginning with the affective domain, before attempting to dump on the cognitive domain. Since this current activity is preparing them for the graded assignment, I will analyze how much more effort they put into their assignment.

These findings will help support my claim that we should appeal to the heart before the mind, because we may have better results once we have enticed others and made them interested in what we are trying to change.