My fall reading list has been piling up since the day school started, but I recently made time to engage with Rick Wormeli’s Metaphors & Analogies. Wormeli, a National Board Certified Teacher and a columnist for Middle Ground magazine, considers metaphors and analogies to be “power tools” that can electrify learning and show students how to make connections between the concrete and the abstract, prior knowledge and unfamiliar concepts, and language and image.

Although typically viewed as the domain of the English classroom, Wormeli illustrates that metaphors and analogies can be used successfully in every subject and across all grade levels.  Beginning with the notion that metaphors are comparisons that offer new information, he plants the seeds of effective lesson planning and assessment incorporating metaphorical thinking and then details specific strategies for the classroom.  In absorbing Wormeli’s practical insight, I was struck by three key ideas: students should be taught to evaluate the quality of metaphors in addition to recognizing and using them; if students don’t have the personal background to recognize the metaphor’s connection to the content, we must work to create the context; and metaphors are not limited to words.

Evaluating Metaphors

All metaphors are, by their nature, flawed, but some are more useful than others. According to Aristotle, the ability to create memorable metaphors is “a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.”  Consider John McPhee’s metaphor for the magnitude of geologic time: “If the history of the Earth were represented by the old English measure of a yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the end of his outstretched hand, all of human history could be erased by a single stroke of a file on his middle fingernail.”  While we may never achieve McPhee’s level of linguistic prowess, Wormeli provides a simple and efficient quality scale that can improve our use of metaphors (p. 12):

• The items being compared can be identified by the recipient.
• The metaphor does not distort the truth or present false facts.
• When taken literally, the metaphor is false.
• The items being compared exist in different domains.
• The metaphor engages the recipient personally; it’s clever, insightful, and sometimes witty.

A strong metaphor has 4-5 of these characteristics; it clarifies and strengthens the recipient’s understanding.  As a simple exercise, consider the most recent metaphor that you used as an instructional strategy; would it be considered effective under these terms?

Context is Essential

Context (aka background knowledge) is essential for learning.   As Wormeli notes, “According to cognitive science David Sousa, very little goes into long-term memory unless it’s attached to something already in storage.”   When students lack prior knowledge, Wormeli asserts that we have an obligation to provide it for them.

Consider the aforementioned example from McPhee; would a student who has never used a nail file appreciate the richness of McPhee’s metaphor?  Perhaps, but it would be unwise to make presumptions.  The challenge, which Wormeli rightly points out, is that teachers don’t want to include material beyond the curriculum just to teach a portion of the curriculum, but if students are going to move information into long-term memory they need a base on which to hook the new learning.  It is here that knowing one’s students becomes invaluable.

Large, heterogeneous classes set against the rapid pace of the instructional day can make this challenging, but Wormeli suggests even a simple activity like a student background survey (p. 44) can be enlightening.  Having a sense of students’ travel experiences, family structure, interests, and aspirations, coupled with sustained efforts to build personal connections, can lead to a shared understanding of background and facilitate differentiated instruction.  In this setting, metaphors and analogies are truly the “power tools” he describes.

Metaphors Are More Than Words

Wormeli makes the claim that nothing in the K-12 curriculum is too symbolic or abstract to be represented physically.  At first pass, this seems rather implausible; how does one make nuance, Taoism, or existentialism experiential?  His answer is that metaphors are grounded in physical experiences.   To be effective, however, we need to ensure that physical and symbolic connections to content match the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic inputs that students are primed to receive.

Wormeli suggests three basic steps for making the curriculum more physical for students (p. 64):

1. Identify the essential components or definitions of whatever you’re teaching.
2. Develop physical representations as metaphors and share them with the class.
3. Ask students to critique the metaphorical physical representations for accuracy, comprehensiveness, appropriateness, and clarity.

Just as charades, dramatizations, and other physical techniques can bring concepts to life, so can visualizations.  Wormeli observes that “Students best remember information if it is presented in a coherent structure the first time they experience it.  Metaphors and analogies provide that structure.”  Photographs, graphic organizers, tables and charts, even cartoons and comics can be powerful visual metaphors that  promote understanding.

Personal Metaphor Wrestling

In addition to the numerous, varied, and well-researched examples throughout Metaphors and Analogies, Wormeli shares several personal metaphors with which he is currently wrestling.  Each is worthy of considerable reflection, but I was especially drawn to these three (p. 141):

• Schools  shouldn’t be places of stability.  Instead, they should be places of compelling disequilibrium.
• Teaching is not a 50-50 partnership with students.
• School shouldn’t be about the information presented to students; it should reflect what students carry forward after learning.

Every educator has conceptual metaphors to contend with, and it’s important that we periodically reflect on how they shape our philosophy and practice.  Metaphors and Analogies provides an excellent starting point for understanding the promise and pitfalls of these important devices, and I would encourage you to explore Wormeli’s book for yourself.  In the spirit of its title, it truly is a buffet for the hungry mind.

*Metaphors and Analogies: Power Tools for Teaching Any Subject is available from Stenhouse Publishing.  You can browse the entire book online here.

Posted: 12|17|09 at 1:41 pm. Filed under: Reviews.
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