Is That a Dragon? The Power of Optimal Certainty (Crafting Valuable Experiences, Part 5)
In this episode of the MME podcast, we dive into the concept of optimal certainty and challenge the common mindset that our goal is to teach visitors something completely new.
In between a story about a giant cardboard dragon and an analogy about dressing a mannequin, you’ll discover the importance of creating a learning environment that balances a visitor’s prior knowledge and experiences with their own powerful curiosity.
Key Takeaways include:
Learning is a cumulative and individual process that occurs over time and across different contexts.
Visitors are more likely to learn and engage deeply with topics they already have some prior knowledge about.
Curiosity is a natural motivator that drives visitors to explore and seek answers to their questions.
Striking the balance between familiar knowledge and opportunities for curiosity, otherwise known as “optimal certainty” is a powerful way to engage visitors.
Real-life examples you can try out in your programs today.
Resources Mentioned:
Looking for your next professional development read? Links to Rachel’s recommendations, including Learning From Museums and The Value of Museums, can be found at the Bookshelf.
Did you know Rachel can run a personalized workshop for your staff, based around the latest research on creating valuable programming? Find out more at here.
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hi, I am Rachel, a resource expert and career coach for museum educators who are stretched thin, but long to fall in love with their world-changing work. After over 15 years with my own hands in the glitter, I know how it feels when your Board thinks your work is childish because you work with children.
I know how hard it is to lead a tour on a difficult subject, and I know the frustration of waiting on a school bus that is 20 minutes late or worse, 10 minutes early as I'm heading towards the second half of my career. I find myself with a passion to help my fellow educators reverse the chronic state of being overworked and underappreciated so that they can reclaim their creativity and emotional energy.
Join me and my museum buddies as we share our best tips, tricks, and techniques for modern museum education.
Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Modern Museum Education Podcast. My name is Rachel, and I'm your host. As we get started today, [00:01:00] I wanted to let you know that I am in the process of building out something really exciting that will help you juggle all of the administrative tasks that you have to do when running a museum education department,
along with all of the education things that you have to do as well. So I know you're really gonna love this, but you're gonna wanna be signed up for my email list in order to be the first to know about it, when it launches in a few weeks. So make sure that you head over to my website, ModernMuseumEducation.com, and you can find the link to sign up there.
And I'll also put the link in the show notes, of course. Also, before I jump in today, I wanted to give a shout out to Lisa from Amsterdam, who messaged me on Instagram recently, telling me how much she was enjoying this podcast. And that just made my day getting messages like that just thrills me. Um, if you have also found this podcast to be valuable, would you please do me a big favor?
Rate [00:02:00] it, review it, share it with your colleagues and your coworkers so that more people can hear about it. And we can just grow this community of museum educators who love what they do, but wanna do it, you know, better and easier and with less stress. Also, along those same lines, if you would like to be a guest on the podcast, you can find the link to fill out the form, in the show notes.
And of course, you can find it on the website at ModernMuseumEducation.com/podcast as well. You can also DM me on Instagram @modernmuseumed, or you can find me on LinkedIn and message me there as well. I really want to make this podcast a hub where museum educators of all kinds can come together and share their experiences, their feelings, what's working for them, what's not working for them, and we can continue to make this more of an, an actual conversation.
That's really my [00:03:00] vision for the podcast. So if you are museum educator, I don't care if you've been doing it for a really long time or if you are brand new at it, if you are a history museum, an art museum, a science museum, I wanna hear from you. I want to have a conversation with you about what is happening in your institution, what does education look like for you right now?
That's really important for me to know, and I really want to, to talk more with the community at large. So if that's you, if you are a museum educator, then you are qualified. So, head over to the link in the show notes or at ModernMuseumEducation.com/podcast and fill out the form, and I cannot wait to welcome you onto the podcast.
Okay, so with that said, let's jump right into today's episode. Today we are talking about the idea of optimal certainty. Now, I think as museum educators, a lot of times we fall into a mindset trap [00:04:00] of wanting visitors to learn something new. Now, learning something new is a noble idea, and we, of course, do want visitors to learn something new when they come to our site.
That's kind of why we're there in the first place. As educators in a museum, we want to, you know, educate people. And the idea of education inherently means that you are learning something you didn't already know before. But when we have the mindset that teaching someone something completely new is our end goal, then essentially, that's a trap that we fall into. Because what you're gonna find as we talk through this today is that how much we can teach someone something they didn't already know is limited within the boundary of the museum space. [00:05:00] So that's why I think that this idea of wanting desperately to teach someone something they didn't already know is a trap that we fall into because we can't actually accomplish it.
Okay, so let me back up and give you an example and then I'm gonna explain what I mean.
For years and years and years and years, I used to run a regular monthly class for homeschool families at the museum where I worked.
And one, one particular time, we were gonna be talking about the history of dragons, which I know that sounds bonkers because, you know, I was working at a Southern historic house museum, which I've mentioned before.
Why would we be talking about dragons? But in the context of that particular program, we were able to go far and wide away from the central narrative of the site where I worked. That was kind of the point of the program at large. But anyways, the theme that year, we were, we were doing [00:06:00] a sort of bounce around the world.
So we were looking at each, we were taking broad examples from each continent, more or less. So that particular month we were looking at Asian culture or Asian history and so what my, so well, I have to give credit where credit's due, this whole dragon concept came from my, at the time intern. Her name is Paige.
I have to give a shout out to her. She was an amazing intern. She's fantastic. Paige had this idea to look at the idea of dragons, because dragons are very important in Asian culture, but they, they sort of show up across Asia in slightly different ways. And then especially when you compare them to dragons in Western culture, like, you know, Germanic or English, fairytales that involve dragons.
So the kids coming [00:07:00] into the program that day did not know that we were gonna be talking about dragons. So they walked into my classroom area and sitting on the table was,
I'll have to see if I can find a picture of it and put it, in the video for this podcast, if you're curious to see Paige's handiwork, but she built out of cardboard, a massive dragon, like a boxy
shaped dragon out of cardboard. It was massive.
But it was the, the, the, the body of the dragon was just a big cardboard box.
And then we put inside of it, our smoke machine so that when it was all plugged up, this dragon actually breathed fire. You know, it was smokey.
It was so, so cool. So I bring the kids into this area and sitting on the table is this big green boxy monster of a sort. But when you first [00:08:00] looked at it, it wasn't entirely clear whether it was in fact a dragon or perhaps it was a dinosaur, because it was sort of ambiguous in the way that it actually, um, came about.
Now, this was not Paige's intention. She was trying to make it look like an actual dragon, but, you know, she was limited by time and resources really. You know, she was trying to create a dragon out of cardboard boxes and green paint.
And so it, it did, to be honest, it was a little ambiguous. Was this, what, what is this creature?
So the kids walk in and they immediately, and this is what I found so interesting, because I didn't expect it. I expected them to be like, "oh, it's a dragon," and and be super excited about it. But instead what they walked in was about a half of them said, "is that a dragon?"
And the other half said, "no, I think it's a dinosaur." And then they start to have this, like, before I even start talking, before I even start [00:09:00] teaching, these kids start having this conversation amongst themselves. "Well look at this feature. Like it's got this long green neck. I think it's supposed to be a dinosaur."
But then they, another kid said, "well, look at these spikes on its tail. I think that's, I think it's supposed to be a dragon." And then other kids would say, "well, no, there are dinosaurs that have spikes in their tail." And they would say, "but those dinosaurs have spikes on their heads." And they're having this conversation amongst themselves based on, and this is the important part,
based on what they already knew about both dragons and dinosaurs. And then they tried to predict what we were gonna be talking about. Now, of course, once I actually plugged in the smoke machine and the smoke starts billowing out the nose of this, this dragon, they obviously at that point knew, "oh, it's a dragon."
And then they got super excited because we're talking, you know, dragons are, you know, [00:10:00] that's an exciting thing to talk about. What, what ended up happening here from this example that I didn't expect going into it, is that the kids were completely engaged because from the very moment that they saw this green monster sitting on the table, there was a perfect blend in their minds of both the familiar and the novel.
It was both something that they recognized and something they weren't completely sure about. So it felt accessible, "Oh, I already know something about this." So they kind of felt, they weren't overwhelmed by knowledge that felt too far afield from where they already were located. Like they're, they already knew something about this.
They had a jumping off point. But because they didn't completely understand what they were looking at, they were very curious. And those two things together are what make [00:11:00] up optimal certainty. It is a blend of both familiar knowledge, certainty, blended with the opportunity for curiosity. And that's what we're gonna be talking about as we go through today.
So if you've been with me over the last several episodes, you know that we have been walking our way through the different areas of wellbeing that Dr. John Falk sets out in his book, " The Value of Museums," and talking about the ways that we as museum educators can encourage wellbeing experiences for our visitors in those particular areas.
So we talked about physical wellbeing, we talked about social wellbeing, we talked about personal wellbeing, and then today we're talking about intellectual wellbeing. And obviously there's so much to say on the subject of learning and intellectual work done in museums, but we're really gonna focus today only on this idea of optimal certainty and how we can encourage [00:12:00] that for our visitors when they're with us.
So in order to talk about my thoughts around optimal certainty, what I was thinking as I was reading this book, you, because this book was written by Dr. John Falk, it helps to understand some of his other work so that you can kind of better understand the sort of the language that he's using and the way he's talking about these ideas.
So I do need to back up and add another book to your reading list. If you have not already read or are not familiar with his earlier work, " Learning from Museums," that is, you know, a seminal work in museum education. And it probably ought to be on the bookshelf of every museum educator.
If it's not on yours, you should check it out. So if you aren't familiar with the, the contextual model of learning that he lays out in that book, let me recap it for you really quickly. So [00:13:00] basically he suggests that there are multiple contexts of a person's life that combine to create the learning that they have, right? So, a person's personal background, their sociocultural background and their physical background, all of those contexts, like where, where, where they grew up, what, what their background is, their micro culture, their macro culture, their physical environment around them, and their personal,
their personal environment, that that's like their, personality and their ability to learn and their, their motivations and all of those kinds of things, like all of that kind of combines personal, physical and social cultural. Those three contexts combine over time and across space. And those two additional,[00:14:00] elements are very important.
And you, when you combine all that together, what you end up with is, is how a person has learned something.
So essentially the argument is that learning is constructed over time and across space on a very individual level. So it's impacted by culture on the micro and the macro scale, but also it is driven by a person's individual nature
over time and across space. So this is what learning is. It's this sort of like layering of facts and experiences over time for a person.
When I explain this concept to new educators who maybe have never heard this before, I've always used the analogy of dressing a mannequin and, you do have to understand again, the context that I was working in was a historic house museum. We did have a mannequin that we dressed in historic costumes for education purposes. When you dress the mannequin, [00:15:00] there's all these like layers, right? So we would put all the layers of, of the costume on this mannequin. So you start with the undergarments, you add the corset, you add the petticoats, you add the outer skirts, you add the bodice, you add the jacket, you, you know, all the different parts of the wardrobe would be put on the mannequin one at a time.
So what I would say is, you know, you have this mannequin that is bare at first, and then you add, you know, you put the undergarments on, so now it, there's something on this mannequin. It's not complete, but you're further along than where you were when you started. Now you've got the corset on it, and now you're one step further along this journey.
And so that's kind of how I, it's the analogy that I would use. So learning is this, this process of adding one layer at a time, over time. So when you're young, you might be [00:16:00] learning this one concept, but you only learn part of it. You learn this, this element of this concept. And then when you get a little older, you add another element, and then you get a little older, you add another element and you just kind of keep layering on so that by the time you are an adult, you have a rather deep understanding of a particular topic.
I hope that makes sense. That's the analogy that I often use. So this idea of learning being layered over time. So it's important that we kind of understand that concept of learning as we talk about the idea of optimal certainty. Because the next point is this idea that people are more likely to learn more about something they already know something about.
So in his words, this is a quote from his book
" The topics they (meaning visitors) disproportionately actually learn the most about are those that they [00:17:00] already know at least a little something about before the experience began."
Essentially, if you already know something about topic X, you are primed to learn more about topic X because, because you already know something about it, you are ready to add the next layer onto your knowledge of that particular topic.
It's always easier to add the next layer on than it is to start from scratch. So this idea of layered learning and constructed learning helps us understand why people are more likely to learn more about something that they already know something about. So you probably see this in action in your museum.
It's kind of the idea that learning sort of compounds over time.
So this is particularly important for gallery museums and museums who offer more choice in learning experiences. But even for [00:18:00] guided tour programs, it's important for us to note that the nuggets of your tour that people will grab hold of are related to something they are already familiar with.
And this is connected also to the idea that people will learn more about something that is related to their experiences. So if maybe they don't know anything particularly about the topic that you're talking about, but it's related, or they can see a relation to this topic, to something that they have experienced in either their personal life or their sociocultural context, then they're more likely to grab hold of that. Again, if it feels familiar in any way at all, it's gonna be easier for people in general to grab hold of this information and really absorb it.[00:19:00]
This is why it is so important that as museum educators, we go the extra mile to help people find something, anything, relatable to the topic at hand in their personal experience. This goes back to what I was talking about in the episode on personal wellbeing and my son and the teddy bear and, and finding something, anything at all for a visitor to kind of hang onto as you draw them through this learning journey.
It's like, imagine if you have them like in the water and they're holding onto like a raft and you're pulling them through this water, like you're pulling them through this journey. They have to have something to hold onto as they go through your experience. And what they're gonna hold onto is something that both matters to them, but also is something that they already are familiar with, something they know about.
If you can help them find [00:20:00] that thing that they already know a little bit about, then you're going to be able to add more onto their knowledge. You're gonna be able to layer something new onto their knowledge mannequin they can then take home with them. So if you want people to learn something new, you have to start with what they already know.
It's essentially the point.
Now, this is where it gets super exciting because then once you've got people hooked, they are hanging on to what you are talking about. They recognize something familiar. They already know a little bit about this. They're primed for more. This is where you tap into their curiosity. Curiosity is the desire to learn, and it is a key component of the learning experience.
So museum visits by their very nature offer people an opportunity to engage in curiosity. But I think that sometimes [00:21:00] as museum professionals, we forget that our institutions, like our site, our information, our space, is primed for curiosity because it, we normally aren't curious about it anymore.
We work there every day. We see those same objects every single day. We talk about that narrative every single day. Those, the people in the story, the artists, the science, whatever it is you're interpreting, whatever it is you're talking about, you talk about it every single day, day in, day out, you live and breathe it.
I mean, sometimes you literally feel like you live there, right? So you know it. You are not that curious about it anymore. Now, I hope that you, I hope that you never really lose your curiosity even about the material that you talk about all of the time. There's always something more to learn, and I think when we are living our best museum life, we know that.
But when you get overwhelmed, [00:22:00] when you feel overworked and underappreciated and underpaid and under-resourced and all of those things that we as museum educators deal with on a very regular basis, we, we lose our sense of wonder about the topic that we deal with. It just, it becomes so normal and so routine and so rote that we forget that it's not routine for everyone.
And if you can remember that when people come to your site that they have a curiosity about this topic, it will inspire more wonder and curiosity and excitement on your part. So this is not really, I didn't really, even, this isn't in my notes, I didn't plan to say this, but if you are feeling, if you are feeling burnt out as a museum educator, I would encourage you to... there's so many things that we need systematically to talk about to fix [00:23:00] that.
But one thing that you can do right now today is just to remember, like tap into that curious nature. Maybe just go watch visitors, um, interact with your museum, and watch them in, engage in curious behavior. Maybe that will help inspire you a little bit to the work that you're doing.
So back to what I was actually planning on saying, which is that this idea of curious behavior on the part of museum visitors, it looks like it manifests a lot of times in this, what I like to call pinballing behavior. Especially if you work at a gallery museum, you've seen this. It's where someone walks into your gallery and they zoom to one artifact and they look at that, and then they bounce over here and they look at this, and then they bounce over here and they look at this, and then they bounce back over here and they look at this and they're, it looks like a pinball.
I actually, I, one time I heard a colleague, a colleague by the way, who did not work in education complain about this pinball [00:24:00] effect because, essentially they were, I mean, I'll be honest, they were complaining about kids in the gallery and they were frustrated because they were like, "these kids are not going in order.
Like there's a carefully orchestrated learning journey here set out for them. And all of the work that we did in curating and writing the, the panel copy and it's all designed intentionally for them to go in order and learn all of these things in this carefully designed structure." And they were frustrated because the kids were not experiencing that carefully designed structure because they were bouncing, like zooming around the gallery.
Now there is something to be said for that, but I would argue that we should actually be excited when we see people doing that, because what it means is they are engaging with the material on their own terms, which as we have talked about over several episodes, is the only thing that matters In the end.[00:25:00]
You want the visitors to engage with the material on their own terms. That's the only way it will make a difference for them. It's the only way they'll come away having actually learned, absorbed, and in, you know, embraced your information.
So in the book, "The Value of Museums," Dr. Falk compares this kind of, bouncing around your gallery behavior to foraging in nature. And this was what I, I love this idea. I love this visual. So he describes optimal foraging in nature as an experience where the value of what is gained is high, but the cost to obtain it is low and in between right there, that is your optimal foraging experience.
If you can get what you want for a low personal cost, but a high personal gain, then you have hit like the bullseye.
So for me, I love this idea of foraging [00:26:00] for information in a museum because it, it elevates both what we do as educators and even curators and exhibit designers. We are creating an environment that makes acquiring knowledge easy. And so it elevates our work, but it also elevates the work of the learner, and it elevates the learner as the driving force of their own personal learning journey.
So if we move away from this idea of curiosity as being a, an aimless, wandering around our museum, and instead think of it as someone foraging for information, we, as the information presenters have a very important role to play in curating an an [00:27:00] accessible environment. And then the learner themself has a very important role to play in terms of gathering the information that has a high value to them.
So they are gathering high value information. We are offering a low barrier environment. When you think about curiosity on the part of the visitor in terms of creating an optimal foraging experience, it elevates both our work and their personal driving motivation.
Now, at this point in Dr. Falk's book, it took a turn that I did not expect, which is ironic because the turn it took was all about expectations. It turns out that studies have demonstrated museum users find their experiences to be exactly what they anticipated them to be in the first place.
For the most part, [00:28:00] people experience museums according to what they expected to experience before they showed up. So you see, when people were interviewed, they expressed a desire, using language like they're looking for a once in a lifetime experience.
And then they were often thrilled because they got that once in a lifetime experience. And in Dr. Falk's words, he says,
"the wonder of it all is that despite these experiences being novel and out of the ordinary for individual users, they are collectively neither novel nor unusual.
These wonderous experiences are so predictable, in fact, that people can actually plan on having this once in a lifetime experience, plan for it and then fulfill it."
So how does this idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of a museum experience tie back into intellectual [00:29:00] wellbeing and learning? Well, it's all about choice and control. As Dr. Falk points out, Plato once said,
"knowledge which is acquired under compulsion, obtains, no hold on the mind."
In his own words, Dr. Falk says, "given ownership of learning, learning and enjoyment become intertwined."
And he goes on to say that "it's not that museums deliver a total certainty of experience, but rather that they deliver optimal certainty."
And so this goes back to what we talked about a moment ago in terms of finding the balance between what is familiar and what is novel.
So this is a continuation of that quote from him. He writes "a little bit of novelty and uncertainty are good. For most users, most of the time, museum experiences deliver just the right balance of certainty and uncertainty." So now when I read this, my first thought was, well, how does this [00:30:00] apply to neurodiverse visitors who might want more certainty in their experience?
And that's definitely something to explore. But given the caveat that for most visitors, most of the time, striking a balance with things they're familiar with and things they're unfamiliar with, something new and exciting, that's what makes an unforgettable experience. It's finding the balance between those two things.
So if we think back to the kids in my history class, they were so engaged in that lesson about the cultural history of China because we were talking about dragons.
Now, while most of them didn't really have an understanding of Chinese dragons, they did have an understanding of Western dragons. So we started there with what they recognized and then bounced them like a trampoline, bounced them into something new, this idea of dragons in a different culture. And they were able to feel really engaged because they were super curious, because we started from a place that they [00:31:00] recognized.
So I want to end today with three suggestions for creating optimal certainty for families who visit your museum. So my first suggestion is to use the phrase, "what if I told you..." This is a question that you can use as a follow-up once you've already introduced something. So for example, I've already mentioned on this podcast that I used to work for a museum that interpreted the history of horse racing. So in that museum, there was one room we bring visitors into and it was filled with, it had like a dozen portraits of thoroughbred horses on the walls. And after looking at them for a few minutes and, and talking, starting the discussion about, the thoroughbred industry, and particularly thoroughbred lineages and thoroughbred breeding, I would let visitors kind of look around for a minute.
And then I would say, "what if I told you that one of these horses was a female?" And that question would always startle the visitors.
Not like in a scary kind of way, but in a like, "oh really" kind of way. Because up until that [00:32:00] point, they almost always assumed that all of the horses displayed in the portraits there were male. So using this idea, this, "what if I told you" question is a great way to turn a conversation, shake up a sleepy audience, give them a mild shock without pushing so hard that their internal resistance takes over and they kind of shut down their learning experience.
So we don't wanna push them too far beyond what they already know. You gotta take it one little baby step at a time, right? You're just gonna slowly kind of push them through this learning journey. And "what if I told you" is a great
tool to use.
A second trick that you can use is to have touchable artifacts, touchable paintings or a basket of reproductions or anything of that nature. Because most of the time when people come into a museum space, they are anticipating not being allowed to touch things. And then when you say, "oh, here, touch this," you grab [00:33:00] ahold of their curiosity.
It takes them from what they did expect to what they didn't expect. And that's, that's how you get people along the learning journey. You take them from what they do expect to what they didn't expect. So when you can say, "here, touch this object," you are tapping into their curiosity, not just of "I wonder what this feels like," but also "I wonder why we can touch this" and "I wonder why I should touch this."
And it's gonna make them feel curious about what you're going to say next.
My third suggestion is to trace a through line between what you're talking about to something that's very familiar to them. So let me give you another example. From my experience, the museum where I worked at it did mostly focus on the late 1800s. So we talked a lot about changing technologies at that time. And one of the things that we talked a little bit about was the development of [00:34:00] telephones. And I always wanted to do more with that idea.
A few years ago, I had a, a, a coworker who, you know, is a hobby woodworker. And so I went to him and I said, "I have a favor to ask? Can you build me a telephone switchboard, like a model of a telephone switchboard?" And I had this vision that you would be able to plug in a cord and it would make lights like flash.
So it would give the impression of how telephone switchboards worked. And he built this incredible teaching tool. I, it was, honestly, it was one of the coolest things I've ever come up with there is this, this switchboard.
Now this switchboard did nothing other than light up. Like you, you literally just plugged in the cord into one, um, like [00:35:00] socket and the light would come on, and that's all it did. Like, that's all it did. But because it was related to telephones, which is something that we're all very familiar with, but so incredibly far away
from the way our telephones work today, it was so engaging. And kids and adults would sit at this switchboard and just plug it and unplug it over and over again just to watch the lights flash, because it was something that felt almost familiar, but not quite.
And that's when I knew I had struck the right balance with that particular element because it was familiar enough to pull their curiosity in, but it was still pretty far away from anything that they actually knew. So it felt very novel and very interesting, and it was so incredibly engaging. So that's just another example of how [00:36:00] you can strike a balance between something that is familiar and something that is unfamiliar.
So in that example, in the case of saying, "what if I told you," in the case of the dragon, in all of these examples, what you have is a learner, a visitor who doesn't know what to expect, but they know enough to be able to anticipate something more.
And in the end, that's what the learning journey is all about. It's going one step further. So when we can incorporate familiar elements, we are allowing people to feel safe and secure, not threatened, and they are therefore open to the pull of their own curiosity.
When they're led by their own curiosity, they're more likely to arrive not only at the place that we want them to be, but also where they were hoping to get to all along. So essentially everybody wins.
So that's it for today's episode. Thank you so much for spending some time with me. And of course, [00:37:00] as a reminder, please check out my website, ModernMuseumEducation.com to find out, number one, how you can get subscribed to my email list, so that you are the first to hear about my big, exciting launch that's happening in just a few weeks.
And number two, if you wanna be a guest on the podcast, you can find out how to do that as well.
Thank you so much for joining us. If this episode has been helpful to you or interesting, please take a minute to like subscribe and leave a review, which will help other museum educators find this resource. As always, if you would like to work with me more directly, have any questions or would like to be a guest on the podcast, you can find links to all that and more on my website, ModernMuseumEducation.com.
I'll see you back here next time. And in the meantime, please remember that your work is not childish, just because you work with children.