The Hook

In the acclaimed book on screenwriting, Save the Cat, author and screenwriter Blake Snyder refers to the first beat of his screenplay structure as the opening image. This may extend beyond the very first frame to include an opening scene where, in a well-crafted film, this opening image accomplishes a great deal: “It sets the tone, mood, and style of the movie, and very often introduces the main character and shows us a “before” snapshot of him or her. But mostly what it does is get us to scrunch down in our seats in the movie theater and say: “This is gonna be good!””(p.73, 2005).

Similarly, the opening hook in a Story-Designed educational experience seeks to achieve these very same things. The opening hook provides an opportunity to engage students by arousing their curiosity and giving them a taste of the content, style, learning objectives, and approach of the educational experience. A well-crafted opening hook can also orient the students/participants as characters within the story of this course, enabling them to consider what their “before” snapshot looks like – where their skills or knowledge of the subject matter sit at that point in time and set them up for taking some initiative to make progress on the learning goals introduced here. And perhaps most importantly, a great opening hook will get the participants to get on board for the story journey that is about to begin. Even if participants are there of their own choosing, it doesn’t mean they’re automatically excited and engaged (as anyone whose stood in front of a class probably knows). So as an educator part of our job can be to pull them in from the get go. Plus, it’s more enjoyable to teach when students are leaning in and ready to participate.

So what could an opening hook look like? Many guidelines on lesson plans stress some sort of opening activity to focus attention and convey a day’s theme or objective. Taking some inspiration from screenwriting, I’ve often appropriated the adage “come in late and leave early” (an extension of Aristotle’s in media res, “in the midst of things”). That is, it can automatically be more engaging to the viewer to enter a scene in the middle of action where the viewer has to do some work to make sense of what is happening, who is who and what the point of the action is. Similarly, leaving the scene “early”, before a conflict or action is resolved provides a small cliffhanger to keep the viewer interested.

In an opening hook, coming in late could take a variety of shapes; a seemingly unrelated activity you ask participants to do without explaining why, a survey you conduct where the purpose isn’t made clear, a specific anecdote about one of the elements from later in the lesson. Lacking context, all of these could serve the purpose of pulling students in, focusing their thinking, and arousing curiosity. But it’s important to keep in mind that an opening hook activity needs to be relatively brief – not much more than a few minutes, so as to engage students without alienating them. We can watch a film or television show for a couple minutes without knowing who’s who or what’s going on, but much more than this is frustrating and results in confusion rather than engagement.

An example from my own teaching involved showing a video clip without much context or only a minimal prompt. For example, for a lesson on film style and opening scenes (coincidentally), I started class with a short clip from a the television show Breaking Bad, without a prompt (other than, “I want you to watch the beginning of this episode carefully”). I then followed this by asking what their experience of the scene felt like, what they understood about the characters, and what questions were raised in their minds that they hope were answered later. We then rewatched the scene to break down how the shot content, structure, point of view and editing worked to create these things, framing the rest of the lessons’ activities.

As the previous example suggests, another approach to an opening hook is an activity or experience that raises a number of questions that will then be taken up later in the lesson plan. For example, in a history lesson on the end of the Cold War in the 1980s, an opening hook could be a brief anecdote about the 1987 concert David Bowie performed near the Berlin wall that was followed by intense rioting in East Berlin. The lesson following this anecdote could then fill in the context and backstory through additional lecture material as well as student-led investigation into factors contributing to the ending of cold-war tensions.

The Recap

A “recap” may be useful as part of, or immediately following, an opening hook. I think of the recap as the “previously on” portion of an episode of a television series that serves to catch the audience up on where the story is at, and where it will pick up from in the present episode. This is similarly useful in a course where content from a previous class can be reviewed, especially content that directly hooks into the present lesson. If one has used elements of Story Design to construct a course as a narrative, then each class meeting is like an episode in a series, and the recap serves the same function as the previously on by orienting the student to where they are in the story journey as well as reminding them of what key storylines, character development and motifs will continue to play out in the present lesson.

In teaching a film history course, and one that impossibly compacted 120 years of film and television history into an 11-week quarter, I found it extremely helpful for myself and for the students to build in both a recap and a preview in each class meeting (more on the preview later). As “previously on” and “next on” structural elements in my lessons, the recap and preview (occurring at the beginning and end of each class, respectively), allowed me to construct storylines through these 120 years and helped me to determine what of all of this material I should be including and what I’d necessarily have to omit (as is always the case in survey and history courses). In using these storylines, I was better equipped to demonstrate how German expressionism later influenced Hollywood horror films, for example. This underlying story of Hollywood influencing national cinemas and vice versa became an important way for me to construct a cohesive narrative thread through 11 weeks that both motivated my choice in content to cover, and, hopefully, reinforced connections between seemingly disparate material. So each class sessions recap involved looking back at the previous classes’ content to look at how that era, practice, or style will relate to class at hand. As an opening hook, that kind of recap also helped students tune back into the story and set them up for the day’s activities.

In his foundational book on screenwriting, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, Robert McKee writes that the inciting incident is “the first major event of the telling, is the primary cause for all that follows…The INCITING INCIDENT radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life.” (p.181-189, 1997). This is the event in a film where the main character(s) must choose to take action in the pursuit of a goal, even if it’s not the ultimate goal of the film. Blake Snyder similarly describes this as the catalyst moment, where something comes along that upsets the status quo we were introduced to in the opening set up. “The catalyst point is the first moment when something happens! Thank God! And if it’s not there, the reader will get antsy” (p.77, 2005).

In a film, the inciting incident is often the point where the viewer starts to grasp, “ok, this is what the film is going to be about”. In Die Hard, the inciting incident is when terrorists first disrupt the Nakatomi plaza’s Christmas party, forcing John McClane to decide how he’ll respond. In The Wizard of Oz, it’s the twister transporting Dorothy to Oz – she hasn’t yet been set on the journey to see the Wizard – that goal has not yet been set – but it’s the point in the film where the audience understands that the rest of the film is probably going to be about her trying to return home. In Back to the Future, the inciting incident is where Marty McFly escapes Libyan terrorists only to be transported to 1955. We know the rest of the film will likely involve him trying to get back home, and we’re curious about how he’ll do that (and I just realized how similar The Wizard of Oz and Back to the Future‘s plots are).

In an educational experience, the inciting incident is the point early in the lesson, after the theme has been introduced in the opening hook, where the participants learn about the scope of the lesson plan and what their objectives are. The participants are positioned as characters in the story of the course and their objectives are coming into focus for them. They, like their filmic counterparts, will be forced to take action, and perhaps face some obstacles in pursuit of their educational goals. I consider the inciting incident to be comprised of a few parts: necessary backstory, outline and a call to action.

Backstory

The inciting incident picks up from the opening hook in starting to connect it to the objectives of the course, as well as provide other useful backstory that participants will need as context for the lesson’s objectives. This might take the shape of a 5-10 minute lecture for key concepts and context.

Outline

This is the agenda of the lesson or workshop. We all like structure, in one form or another, and while we may not always recognize structure as such in films or classes, we feel it’s presence and it’s absence. In the case of the latter, we feel adrift, aimless, or unclear about the relationship of the parts to the whole. This is where the outline sets up the whole of the educational experience. With a better sense of the structure, participants will understand more of where they are traveling in this story journey and, critically, why. The why is/are the educational goal(s) or learning objective(s). As with any proper inciting incident, the participants must be given the incentive and motivation to pursue these goals. For Marty McFly, he needs to get home and fast, before his whole family is erased. How can you similarly incentivize a student in your workshop to want to see this story through to the end (and even try their damndest to achieve any and all learning outcomes along the way)? That is a critical part of sharing the outline. It isn’t simply a “We’re going to do X, then Y, then Z” but more a “You’re going to tackle W and X in order to get to Y, because Z”. Making them care enough about Z, or the “why”, is always the challenge for the educator, and sharing a description of their journey can be extremely helpful in this regard.

Call to Action

As the last piece of the inciting incident, the call to action is the logical result of a well-crafted backstory and outline. Armed with the knowledge and a better sense of the whole of the educational experience’s story, the incentive to action for the students/participants should hopefully be felt. If the opening act of a film does it’s job, the audience is on board for the rest of the film – they want to see this story through. Likewise, if the opening act and inciting incident of an educational experience is done well, students will feel good about their own agency in seeing how they can work to achieve the educational goals set forth my the educator. The call to action, then, is the invitation to continue on the journey, starting with the very next step, Taking Action.

In a three-act story structure, the move from the first to the second act is marked by a significant plot point. In The Definitive Guide to Screenwriting, author and renowned screenwriting instructor Syd Field defines the plot point as “an incident, or event, that “hooks” into the action and spins it around into another direction. It moves the story forward. The plot points at the end of Acts I and II hold the paradigm in place. They are the anchors of the your story line” (p.232, 2003). Blake Snyder refers to the first act break similarly, but more strongly, as “the moment where we leave the old world, the thesis statement, behind and proceed into a world that is the upside down version of that, its antithesis” (p.79, 2005).

In Story Design, these “act breaks” are purposefully key moments in a course or lesson plan where the participant/student as character takes action. These moments involve student agency undertaken via a structured activity that may be prescribed in part by the educator or arrived at by the student. The first of these I refer to as Taking Action, and like Field’s “plot point I” or Snyder’s “Break into Two” moment in a script, taking action is where the student first engages in an activity designed to take information gathered from the opening set up and step out on their own in the story’s journey. Taking Action’s place at the end of the first act of a lesson plan also lines up with the premise of sequencing and chunking in instructional design. As a structuring device, having participants engage in an activity nearly a third of the way into a lesson plan shifts class activity from more passive to more active participation and encourages continued engagement.

As for what shape Taking Action should take, this depends on the lesson plan, course content and desired learning outcomes, but a general premise of this stage in a lesson plan is to have students engage in a partially self-directed activity that allows them to apply previous information in a way that challenges them to build on their existing skill or knowledge level, working towards the lesson’s learning outcome(s). For example, in leading a workshop on Digital Storytelling, my co-facilitator and I integrated opportunities for participants to build a digital storytelling project piece by piece, interspersing these throughout the workshop. But the first opportunity for faculty to do so came about a quarter way into the workshop, after faculty learned about the landscape of digital storytelling projects in the opening hook and inciting incident stages. Here they created their own logline for a digital storytelling project they wished to work on so that for the remainder of the workshop they were constructing their project alongside learning, discussion and skill-building. But that first step, the logline, was their taking action, where participating faculty as characters in the story of this workshop first set out on that “transformational” journey towards creating digital storytelling projects (okay, so maybe “transformational” is overstating it, but their learning-by-doing was impactful, or so we heard in our workshop evaluations).

The second act in classic three-act storytelling is often marked by confrontation. This is where characters confront obstacles – physical, mental, emotional – and often struggle against challenges presented by antagonists or antagonistic forces. Through this, characters gather skills, knowledge and make incremental progress, but also experience setbacks repeatedly while in pursuit of their goals.

In Back to the Future‘s second act, Marty meets up with Doc and convinces him to help him get back to 1985. They even figure out how to harness lighting to make it happen. He coaches his weak-willed Dad into asking out his Mom to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. He faces off with Biff and is able to evade him successfully at multiple points, but still Marty’s family continues to get erased. Doc still won’t let him tell him about being murdered by Libyan terrorists so he can avoid that fate. Biff interrupts their plan to reunite his parents, and locks Marty in a trunk. So despite progress, it’s not looking good for anyone’s future near the end of the second act.

In the middle of act two sits a film or television show’s midpoint. Blake Snyder describes the midpoint as “either an “up” where the hero seemingly peaks (though it is a false peak) or a “down” when the world collapses all around the hero (though it is a false collapse), and it can only get better from here on out” (p.82, 2005). This is also where the stakes are traditionally raised in films, a “point of no return” for our characters (McKee, 2003). In a story-designed educational experience, the second act isn’t meant to be quite so discouraging, but it is where participants should be challenged to make progress while engaging with the material.

So how does all this relate to confronting challenges in a story-designed educational experience? Well, whether the second act and midpoint of a lesson plan is an “up” or a “down” for the participants has to do with how the taking action activity went and how it is reflected upon by participants. This period in the middle of a course is an opportunity to unpack any lessons learned from the activity. It’s an opportunity for participants to reflect on what, if any, progress they’ve made towards the learning objectives. Similar to the inciting incident, I like to structure the middle act in three parts: reflection on activity, more plot development, and evaluation.

Reflection on activity

To truly reflect on what was gained from the participants taking action, the educator needs to do more than call for information sharing. You’re probably familiar with the ever-popular conference session or workshop format where you’re put into groups to discuss, and the facilitator wastes too much time exhaustively going around the room and having each group “report out” the results of their conversation. I’ve seen this format used well only a handful of times, and only when the facilitator is really skilled and teasing out the useful, relevant tidbits and using them to generate concise, fruitful follow-up discussion. Too often its a rote exercise in summarizing and repeating each other’s points. This is NOT what I mean by “reflection on activity”. It should not be an exercise in sharing what was done, but what was gained from what was done. What did participants struggle or succeed in doing? What were the challenges and what strategies were used to overcome them? How did what they do and learn contribute to the larger educational goals of the educational experience? Given what they learned, would they approach this activity differently in the future? Facilitating reflection along these lines is more challenging than listing to reportage, but the payoff is well worth it. This also allows the educator to more easily transition to more fruitful plot development.

More Plot Development

“Plot development” here refers to providing more information to bridge the taking action and the synthesizing action stages – such as additional backstory, or new concepts or material to consider. This may take the form of a pre-designed short lecture, or it may be a more flexible content sharing based on what participants’ experience with the taking action activity calls for. For example, if the taking action activity was for students in a film editing class to break down a 30 second commercial and analyze the editing style, and then in the reflection period it becomes clear that students struggled with how to analyze pacing, then I’d spend more time in this plot development period focusing on how shot length and transitions affect pacing and rhythm than I might have otherwise, even if I had a tightly-designed presentation on other aspects of editing at the ready. Few things are more discouraging for students than to have a fruitful discussion about where they’re at in relation to the learning objectives, only to have that disregarded in the next stage of the class by moving on to other content. Therefore, the second part of a successful reflection activity is integrating it effectively in the presentation of more plot development.

Evaluation

With some reflection and additional plot material, before being able to move into the synthesizing activity, it is helpful to evaluate where participants are at in terms of their tools. Do they have the background information and content knowledge to successfully start synthesizing the material in a final activity? Blake Snyder refers to this stage as a three-beat sequence: “bad guys close in”, “all is lost” and “dark night of the soul”. This is where “mentors go to die”, he says, because that is often literally what happens as with [spoiler alert] Obi Wan in Star Wars (p.86, 2003). This is where the strength and guiding force of your characters seems most compromised, where it looks like the end. This is where and exhausted John McClane is picking glass out of his feet in Die Hard, talking with Powell about his failures as a husband and father, and worried he might fail to stop the terrorists. This is also where Dorothy and Toto are captured by the Wicked Witch’s winged monkeys in Wizard of Oz, where she’s brought back to the castle and imprisoned by the Witch. This paradigm plays out in film after film, and even in 22 minute TV sit-coms. I happened to be watching the Soda Tax episode from season two of Parks and Recreation while working on this, and in this episode Leslie Knope in her first act as a city councilwoman is attempting to pass a soda tax to encourage healthier habits in her town. But the opposing camps are causing her to doubt her principles to the point where she faces an identity crisis by the end of the second act.

So how does this trope relate to evaluation in the confronting challenges stage of an educational experience? Hopefully the students in a story-designed course won’t face death or identify crises due to the narrative arc of the lesson, but they can still benefit from what the “dark night of the soul” provides, and that is often the evaluating and summoning of internal strength or, in the case of a class, knowledge and skills. The evaluation portion of the confront challenges stage may be as simple as an anonymous online poll to assess where students are at with certain learning objectives, or an open discussion, or small group activity where they share what they know and fill each other in where there are gaps. It’s just a last stop opportunity to shore up some additional skill or knowledge that will be useful to go into the synthesizing action.

Like the taking action step earlier, synthesizing action is where students take initiative to engage with the course material in a way that hopefully pulls together various “storylines” from earlier in the lesson plan to synthesize the material for them. Snyder refers to this (and most of act three) simply as the finale, “where we wrap it up. It’s where the lessons learned are applied. It’s where the character tics are mastered. It’s where A story and B story end in triumph for our hero”(p.90, 2005). In fact, the archetypal film character proceeds through a film in much the same way the ideal learner would progress through Bloom’s taxonomy. In this way, the synthesizing action of the students, like the films’ main character in act three, is intended to spur the highest order of thinking and ideally constructing or creating something that serves to synthesize the course material to obtain the ultimate learning outcomes.

Like taking action the approach in this stage is one which involves student agency – they are co-authors of the educational experience in that they are writing their own ticket to successful attainment of the educational objectives. This higher-order ambition may be more feasible if considering story design at a course level, where a weeks-long final project represents the synthesizing action. It’s obviously more difficult to work this is in every 50 minute class session, but an opportunity to engage students in this way even at a small scale would be motivating. For example, in the same editing course mentioned earlier, the synthesizing activity often took the form of students editing their own 30 second commercial, or two-minute film trailer, or whatever type of project whose editing we were analyzing. Of course, this takes time – editing a 30 second commercial could take a week alone – so as an alternative I’d provide a shortcut where I’d give the students all five shots they needed, as well as a finished structure they had to recreate. This took much less time, but it didn’t allow them to flex their creativity (assignments later on did allow for that). So in this way, it was about skill building, but even recreating a defined structure still served as a synthesizing activity as it put into clear practice the concepts we had looked at earlier in the one class session.

“It’s not enough for the hero to triumph, he must change the world. The finale is where it happens. And it must be done in an emotionally satisfying way”, or so says Snyder (p. 99, 2005). And it is true of most films that the states of affairs in the end are very different from the status quo we were introduced to in the beginning of a film, and the character growth is what brought that about. Sure, the German terrorists are all dead by the end of Die Hard, but more importantly, John and Holly’s struggling marriage shows the promise of being healed due to them realizing what’s truly important through this tragedy. And for Marty, things are back to normal by the end of Back to the Future, only now because of his intervention in 1955, he has a functional, successful family, Biff is no longer a bully, and he has the truck he always wanted.

As Field points out, “resolution does not mean ending; resolution means solution…it resolves the story”(p.14, 2003). Similarly, in Story Design the resolution that happens in the third act involves looking at the synthesizing action to evaluate whether and how the story has been resolved. Did the students achieve the learning objectives? How do we know? What could they still do, or do differently? Importantly, the story-designed educational experience does not end with content. It’s not about delivering material up to the end of a class session, or the allotted time for a workshop. The resolution period, if properly built in to the structure of an educational experience, allows for reflection on how the story of the course has been resolved. This also allows for students to reflect on their synthesizing activity to solidify knowledge gained from the experience.

One simple example of a type of resolution activity that could be used in a single class session is the short survey, or “muddiest point” exercise to ask students to reflect on what they feel they’ve gained, or still lack knowledge around. Though, I agree with Angelo and Cross (2016) who, referencing Mosteller (1989) point out that “there are drawbacks to asking students to focus only on what they don’t understand. Such an emphasis can undermine both the students’ and the instructor’s motivation and sense of self-efficacy”. Therefore, the resolution stage should also emphasize what students were able to achieve over the course of the educational experience.

Blake Snyder (2005) describes the vital final image as “the opposite of the opening image. It is your proof that change has occurred”(p.90). Like the final image, the final thought in story design calls back to the opening hook to bring the story full circle and invite the participant to consider the journey and what they’ve gained along the way. As an example, if I’ve used a film clip to start the class, as an opening hook, I’ve sometimes found a clip from later in the film, or later in the genre or director’s filmography to provide a short wrap up at the end of the class session to both harken back to the opening and illustrate change – it’s a tidy way to provide closure and sense of the “whole” being achieved.

The Preview

Like the recap at the beginning of a lesson plan, the preview can be used as part of the final thought in the same way a “next on” segment appears after or with the closing credits of an episodic television series. In a television show, the next on serves to try to entice the audience to return to show next week, or to binge watch another episode, as the case may be. It also hints at some plot development or closure you might be hoping for in an ongoing storyline. The preview in Story Design does something similar in that it provides a sense of how this lesson will connect with the next lesson and it contributes to the impression of a cohesive whole, a larger overarching narrative structure to the course. It conveys a sense of purposeful, deliberate course design on the part of the educator which can be reassuring and comforting to student participants who want to be engaged, but also want to know that their educator is also invested enough in the telling of this story that they’ve given thought to the overarching structure – you too care about the journey they are on, and so should they.