Lead with the "interesting"

How did I last through 6 hours of classes during my school days I wonder? No PowerPoint, not easy to get a water break and no way to show disinterest. How do school kids do it today? Today, in these times of the pandemic, zoom calls and laptop carrying high schoolers, how do teachers make things interesting for a whole year and keep high schoolers hooked to learning.

In corporations, we are taught to do facilitate meetings effectively and to keep meeting communications crisp and effective. Many tricks are taught- "Structure your thought", "Keep it simple", "Have clear objectives". All well intentioned and yet, prevent 'slow death by presentation'. Onboarding colleagues to a new job or a new process is even harder. Organizations love change and change needs "onboarding" almost leading us all into the valley of 'meeting boredom'. 

I looked for inspiration from my 9th grade daughters' teachers. One of her classes caught my attention - her computer science class. Her computer science course in 9th grade started with programming, algorithms, and flowcharts. Their class is dealing with fundamentals of computers for 2 years - 9th and 10th grade. The best part of their curriculum is the flowcharts, algorithms, basic programming, and databases. The rest is the mostly knowledge concepts- binary, input / output devices and Von Neumann models. With this content, the structured courseware (as all textbooks do) would have begun with binary systems, binary to decimal conversions, logic gates and Von Neumann models. Nothing wrong with that approach, but half the class would be bored stiff by the time they got to the good stuff - programming. Once you have lost your audience, there is no way of winning them back... not teens who live Instagram lives.

The teacher took the best part of the course and allowed the class to sample that first. Given the audience, he knew that programming would hook them the most. Not the math, not Von Neumann. He also knew he had to redo these concepts. But the first month was most fun with flow charts, algorithms, and some programming. It did not matter, that it was taught in a procedural way, without much context of how it fits into computers. The class loved it, nevertheless. They were ready to take on Von Neumann and abstract logic gates after a month of competitive programming. Bragging right apart, it felt like a cool way to start 9th grade.

"Lead with the interesting" - Lead with the stuff that everybody would love to see. Graphs, inferences, bold assertions, and results. Do not build the suspense, do not walk through the "how we got here" stuff. Your audience will consume loads of that once they are interested. Invest into your presentation to find out what the interesting content is. It is not always the graphs or the tables. Understanding that complexity is your job. 

If you are driving change and onboarding people to a new concept or facilitating learning, then it is imperative that you re-think your outline. Teaching somebody new stuff always involves the "cool" stuff and the "drudge". Start with the good stuff even if you must cover it again. 

The interesting stuff need not be simple or bold implausible assertions. Your content must be authentic and appropriately deep. Leading with the interesting is a suggestion to structure your existing content with a "prologue" and then starting the story. Linear story-telling that ends on a high note is not always the best option.