Steal Students' Attention Back with Lesson Hooks
As a student, you must have sat in a lecture that went off something like this:
"Good morning. Today, we will discuss the concept of organizational ambidexterity. There are two types of organizational ambidexterity. The first type…"
Without any preamble, the lecturer jumped straight into the content. And you were sitting there, not knowing organizational ambidetitity-or-whatever was even a thing, let alone why you should care. And then you opened Instagram.
But had the lecturer begun differently, you could have been dying from curiosity to learn all about the clever concept and what types there are and how they apply to the real world and everything. All the lecturer had to do was to start with a good lesson hook.
A lesson hook is an instructional strategy used at the beginning of a lesson to grab students' attention, spark their interest, and motivate them to want to learn more about the subject matter. Effective lesson hooks often work by surprising or mystifying learners, and can take the following forms:
1. Intriguing Questions: Posing a thought-provoking question that challenges students' assumptions or piques their curiosity.
2. Mysteries or Puzzles: Presenting a mystery, puzzle, or problem to solve that is directly related to the lecture topic.
3. Storytelling: Sharing a relevant story, anecdote, or historical event that ties into the lecture objectives.
4. Visual Aids and Multimedia: Using compelling images, videos, or interactive media to introduce the topic in an engaging way.
5. Real-World Connections: Demonstrating how the content applies to real-life situations, current events, or students' personal experiences.
6. Experiments or Demonstrations: Conducting a live experiment or demonstration to visually introduce a concept or phenomenon.
7. Quotations or Provocative Statements: Starting with a surprising fact, statistic, or quote that relates to the subject matter.
8. Role-Playing or Simulations: Engaging students in a brief role-playing activity or simulation that introduces the lesson's themes.
Good lesson hooks aid learning, because they make students care. And the feeling of caring is important in the learning process, because, put simplistically, the brain uses the feeling to decide where to allocate attention and mental effort, both finite and instrumental resources for learning. Knowing this, great lecturers use lesson hooks to "hack" the brains of their students to make them care about a topic before they go on to talk about it.
Now, if you have sat through all your lectures and are now a lecturer yourself, let's go hack some brains! Experiment with different types of hooks and see which ones work for you and your audience. They can take time to create, but fortunately, there is a GPT to help you get started (a paid ChatGPT license is required). Good luck!
This post and image were created with the help of ChatGPT Plus.
