My introduction  to Wow! occurred many years ago when reading Tom Peters’ book the Pursuit of Wow.

Peters extolled that in the face of ever increasing competition,  businesses needed to create a way to stand out from the crowd; to cause your customers to say Wow! It can be as simple as handing me a hot cookie along with my hotel room key or  as complex as designing “knock your socks off” customer service when I have a problem with your product.

That read and reflection led me to consider how teachers can Wow their students and how school leaders Wow their staff’s. As I discussed the concept, I heard more and more stories of how educators do it. (Read about Everett School District in PA.)  Those stories eventual lead to my book Wow! Adding Pizzazz to Teaching and Learning.  

Michael Hyatt posted a blog describing The How of Wow which illustrates how to plan for Wows. Hyatt labels experiences as:

Disappointing – not meeting my expectation

Good- meeting my expectations

Wow!-exceeding my expectations

He suggests five questions that help in planning for Wow. I believe they work for educators wanting to Wow students or teachers. Consider using these as you plan for the start of the upcoming year.

What is the experience I want to create or transform into a WOW?

How will the customer feel as a result of this experience?

What specific expectations does the typical customer bring to this experience?

What does failing to meet customers’ expectations for this experience look like?

What does exceeding customers’ expectations for this experience look like?

What are students expecting as they enter math class on the first day of school?

One teacher surprises students by standing at the door handing each of them a dollar bill as they enter the room. As students sit with their dollar the teacher snaps his a few times and announces, “Here is the deal. Pass this class and you keep the dollar. Drop or fail the class you owe me the dollar back…with interest compounded daily.” The class proceeds with calculating daily interest at various dates of the year. During the year when a student is investing insufficient effort (no homework) the teacher pulls a dollar from his pocket and snaps it….with a smile… a friendly reminder.

Here is how administration at an international school wowed their teachers.

Following a year of change focusing on collaboration, assessment, coaching and teamwork, staff had been called for an end-of-year staff meeting on the final day of work and informed that the topic would be “Data Collection”. What do you think they were expecting?

They arrived at the meeting room to find music (Kool & The Gang’s song ‘Celebration’) strobe lights, balloons, streamers, and Hawaiian leis.  The room had been transformed with dozens of videos on laptops, photos, student reflections and artifacts representing the school year’s growth and development of coaching, teamwork and assessment. Colleagues were amazed as they wandered around, engage in reflective discussions triggered from the ‘collection of data’ that represented the school’s goals for the year.

Staff had been encouraged to bring artifacts that demonstrated something in which they were proud and those became one of the many displays. Teachers enjoyed cake and toasted to their success as they saw evidence of the year’s hard work. Displays included a Wonder Table that was covered with index cards with questions such as, “Did you know that Grade Three switched classes on the 17th of every month – so each teacher went and taught another teacher’s class! Ask a Grade 3 teacher about it!” or “I have seen a great Grade 1 lesson where they show kids how to pick “a just right book”. Curious how they do it? Ask a Grade One teacher!” Teachers were also encouraged to add a question that they would like someone else to ask them about.

Staff had the opportunity to celebrate, see what fellow colleagues had accomplished throughout the year, and reflect on the enormous impact they had on students.  They were wowed and in many ways wowed each other.

Some additional thoughts from Hyatt:

…you don’t have to make every experience in life a WOW. If everything is a WOW, then pretty soon, nothing is a WOW. But you must be able to identify which experiences you want to make a WOW, and then have a process—or a “technology”—for creating that outcome.

…each successive WOW creates a new threshold for the next one.

That’s the challenge of the Wow. Once I get the hot cookie and am wowed, when I don’t get them in the future I move to disappointed. After getting the cookie several times, it will take a new experience to reach Wow. Within an hour of the end of the year staff Wow, administrators were already discussing what they’d plan for the following year.

I promise to pass on any Wow’s that readers share.

I am excited to announce that the revision of my book about Wow’s is nearing printing (available in an ebook version, too).  Several years ago Tom Peters’ book, the Pursuit of Wow, caught my attention. He described how businesses needed to Wow! their customers and how it could be done by some pretty simple purposeful things. Think being handed a hot cookie with the keys to your hotel room.

I began examining the need for students to be wowed at school.…especially at the start of the year. As I shared the stories I heard about teachers who wowed, more stories were shared with me so I gathered them into a book.

WOWs are events, creative lesson plans, games, changes in the environment or the rules, things out of the box or on the outer edge. They contain elements of novelty, spontaneity, quality, and fun. They surprise. They make people laugh and feel good inside. The point is to do something to elicit a WOW! from students, teachers, parents, and others. This can take the form of a big, broad, astonished and amazing WOW!! or a small, lower case, italicized wow, as when something is touching and meaningful. The purpose of a WOW is to grab attention.

John Medina in his book, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, cites “attention” as one of the 12 rules of stimulating the brain to “survive and thrive.” A WOW arouses a sleepy brain. It triggers curiosity and it provides a hook for memory. In short, WOWs are brain-based. Often multisensory, WOWs also become meaningful as they generate good feelings and a sense of quality.

According to Arnold Scheibel, Ph.D., director of brain research at the University of California, Los Angeles, “unfamiliar activities are the brain’s best friend.” The brain is stimulated by novelty, and Scheibel theorizes that this might be a survival response. Without it, we may never have left the cave. Something new stimulates the brain to move out of its routine thinking and new dendrites are created, branching out.

Medina’s Rule #4 “People Don’t Pay Attention to Boring Things”

. . . we have known for a long time that “interest” or “importance” is inextricably linked to attention. Researchers sometimes call this arousal . . . We know that the brain continuously scans the sensory horizon, with events constantly assessed for their potential interest or importance. The more important events are then given extra attention. Can the reverse occur, with attention causing interest?

          Marketing professionals think so. They have known for years that novel stimuli—the unusual, unpredictable, or distinctive—are powerful ways to harness attention in the service of interest. 

Here’s a wow!

A teacher walks into a room carrying a leather suitcase and places it on his desk. He snaps open the suitcase loudly and tips it toward the students so they can see that it is full to the brim with neatly stacked $20 bills. The teacher gains the desired gasp from the students and thus begins his economics class. In actuality, the $20 bills were sitting on top of bundles of cut-up newspaper that served as filler—an old gangster trick. But the appearance created a WOW and provided a concrete way to talk about the value of money and its place in society.

Read here how one elementary staff consistently and consciously explored, “How might we wow?

If you’d like to receive an announcement when Wow! Adding Pizzazz to Teaching and Learning is available, email Lorene Malanowski at lmalanowski@pls3rdlearning.com.