Zooming In & Zooming Out

Not every lesson lands. Not every unit is perfectly designed. Not every classroom activity nails the authenticity. Even with rich, timely, and relevant content, sometimes it isn’t about what we’re teaching but rather how close or far it feels to our students. Students’ perceived distance from the content can really affect how that content lands. Psychological distance gives us a bit of an explanation for understanding that distance, but also gives us a tool to manipulate that I sometimes call the Psychological Distance Zoom Lens, a heuristic that lets me think about how far a student is from the subject and how to zoom them in closer and out farther to achieve learning goals.

The Zoomer

Zoomed in: A juvenile Bald Eagle is trying to snack on some Seagull eggs.

In my last post I wrote a bit about the idea of psychological distance. Basically, psychological distance describes the perceived feeling of distance something feels to you in space, time, relevance, or likelihood. The way that we perceive distance also shapes how we think about the content. Construal-level theory, popularized by Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman, explains this beautifully:

Zoomed out: That same juvenile Bald Eagle is about to be bombarded by very mad Seagulls. We also see that this cliff face is an island in the waters of Alaska. You can see more of my pictures from Alaska here.

• When something feels far, we think about it in abstract, symbolic, and generalized way

• When something feels near, we think about it in concrete, detailed, and embodied way

The more zoomed in we are, the more specific the image and the more concretely you can understand very small parts of a larger picture. If you stay zoomed in, you miss the framing, you miss the context that adds to the understanding of the image over all.

Sometimes the content is too abstract and students feel disengaged, but other times it's too concrete and that can feel too narrow or, in cases like climate anxiety, too overwhelming.

Excellent educators already shift between abstract and concrete modes intuitively. What this heuristic gives us is a way to think about that intentionally, especially when diagnosing whether or not a lesson needs a shift in proximity. There is some pedagogical flexibility here that is worth exploring.

Zooming Examples

Here’s how this might play out:

Teaching climate change:

• Zoomed Out - Teaching the greenhouse effect with diagrams, global temperature trend data, IPCC forecasts, or NASA climate resources

• Zoomed In - Checking out your local heat maps, analyzing water samples from your closest watershed for pollutants and stream health, or interviewing nearby agricultural leaders to see how climate effects them

Teaching civil rights:

• Zoomed Out - Analyze landmark legislation, read Letters from Birmingham Jail, listen to important speeches

• Zoomed In - Visit local sites of resistance, track current protests and their demands, emphasize small and local elections

Teaching a novel:

• Zoomed Out - Discuss central themes, analyze symbolism or motifs, debate character arcs

• Zoomed In - Act out a key scene, have students write on a current aspect of their lives in the voice of the author or a character, compare the struggles of the novel to struggles in the school

Mirror Dewey

At some point in your teacher training, you may have read about Dewey’s concept of the double movement of reflection:

"There is thus a double movement in all reflection: A movement from the given partial and focused data to a suggested comprehension (or inclusive) entire situation; and back from this suggested whole - which as suggested is a meaning, and idea - to the particular facts, so as to connect these with one another and with additional facts to which suggestion has directed attention.”

Dewey is talking about a zoom here, from the specific to the comprehensive, or concrete to abstract, and then back again. I’d argue that well designed lessons mirror this idea by zooming in and out all the time, offering specific and concrete looks at content and then allowing for abstract thought and larger connection.

A final thought: Teach the distance, too.

One of the most powerful moves we can do as educators is to help students see and use the zoom lens themselves - to realize just how close or far something feels and how to move themselves closer or farther depending on what the situation calls for. This is the hidden curriculum of teaching with a zoom lens. When students can name the distance, they can start to move it themselves and I’d argue that that is true mastery of a subject.