Inspired Teacher                  October 26, 2009
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An Inspired Teacher sparks students' natural intellectual curiosity, is well-versed in subject matter, and employs many methods of enabling students to learn it.
In This Issue
Inspired Teacher Blog
Steps for Creating Student Generated Analogies
Research You Can Use
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Dr. Ted Sizer, who died on October 21, was considered by many to be the greatest educator of our time. His writing, his teaching, and all he stood for profoundly influence our work here at Inspired Teaching. He described in vivid detail the sights, sounds, and visceral experience of walking through the halls of American schools. He shed light on the way the structure of our education system forces teachers into roles that undermine their ability to teach and their students' ability to learn.

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Are metaphors teaching's secret ingredient?
Raise your hand if this sounds familiar:
 
You've just spent 20 minutes teaching a new concept and students are hunkering down to apply what they've learned to independent work. Your instruction tapped into all the learning modalities: students moved, spoke, and listened. But as you walk around the room it becomes clear  - very few students "get it."
 
Hand raised? Thought so.
 
This kind of disconnect between seemingly good teaching and student comprehension happens all the time and it happens most often when the concept being taught hasn't become relevant to students' lives.
 
Brain research shows that as human beings we put forth the mental effort to learn things that matter, but with a young mind's perception of the wider world the stuff in the standards doesn't always fit into their schema of importance. This doesn't mean the content isn't important (though it's always worth asking yourself if indeed it is) - it just means you have to find ways to make it important to your students.
 
Enter the secret ingredient.
 
Consider the following:
Teaching with metaphors and analogies can accomplish many things including:
  • Activating prior knowledge
  • Making abstract concepts more concrete
  • Reinforcing conceptual understanding
But using metaphors to teach concepts is just the first step to unleashing their magic in your classroom. If you really want to make metaphors meaningful in teaching, students need to be able to create them themselves. The ability to create a metaphor or analogy for a concept learned is at the highest level of Bloom's Taxonomy.
 
The resources below will give you research backing the use of metaphors and analogies as well as some related teaching strategies. Want to start using them more today? Simply get in the habit of looking at each day's lesson and thinking of student connections beyond the concepts.
Steps for Creating Student Generated Analogies
Teaching through metaphor and analogy is considered a highly effective practice, but an even greater use of the skill is in teaching students to do the same.

Learn how.
Research
You Can Use
Teaching with Analogies Model
Links and a reading list of articles about teaching with analogies in science.
 
Metaphors and Analogies in the Classroom
Good definitions and concise connections to research for this teaching strategy - page two gives specific examples of how to use metaphors in different subject areas.
 
Metaphorically Speaking
Teachers describe their profession through metaphor.

Humor, Analogy, and Metaphor: H.A.M. it up in Teaching
This is a paper on teaching college classes - but it contains relevant research and discussion for elementary and secondary school.
 
Metaphors in "Teacher Talk"
An exploration of the linguistic implications behind using metaphors in the classroom.
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