The Lecture Comes Last
Students do not need a lecture when they walk into a classroom. First, says high school chemistry teacher Ramsey Musallam, they should be presented with a question, a problem, a challenge. They need to “poke around it, play with it, mess around with it.” After they’ve done that for a while, the students’ curiosity will have kicked in and they’ll have questions of their own. That’s the time, he emphasizes, for the lecture – when they need and want more information from a mentor.
A teacher for 14 years at Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory in San Francisco who has a doctorate in education and also teaches at the college level, Musallam says this is the first year he is teaching well – and this revelation comes from a popular and respected teacher who gives TED talks and gets adoring compliments from his students. He believes his better teaching is the result of a clearer understanding of how people learn.
School is the only place, he says, where learning is about sitting at a desk or in a lecture hall and being expected to passively take in information and then regurgitate it later. Such passivity does not spur students – especially students who are not particularly motivated – to reason and think critically. What creates real learners, he asserts, is giving them room to fill in the blank spaces. “The information gap is what motivates students to learn,” says Musallam. “If you have this information gap where you have some of the knowledge but not all of it, then you’re really curious because you know enough to want to know more.”
The explore-and-question approach has not been the traditional method of teaching. Lectures have been the heart and soul of pedagogy for eons. Musallam thinks the lecture approach may be a result of a misunderstanding: Direct instruction – or lecture – is important for student learning but when that direction is offered also is key. According to him, the timing has been backwards. The lecture should come at the end, not the beginning.
“You should try to delay the direct instruction,” he says. “I like the tension. I like saying, ‘For the next 40 minutes, you’re going to be in a situation where you have to figure this out. And I’m going to help you. And after that, we’re going to use that tension, and we’re going to lessen that tension as we learn more about it, and then you’re going to create something.’”
For a section on batteries, Musallam had his students take apart a battery in halogen tea lights. How does it work? Why does it work? Where is it getting its energy? he asked. “In delaying the direct instruction, all that’s happening is you are creating a want and a need for help. You’re upsetting them in a positive way . . . When they hit a wall, their brain is going to do anything it can to solve the problem . . . You’re not upsetting them because you’re not teaching well; you’re not upsetting them because they don’t get it; you’re upsetting them because they can’t figure it out on their own and they need you to help them figure it out.”
With the batteries, the students explored and fiddled around, asked questions and got some answers, and towards the end of the day, Musallam made a video lecture that addressed some of the questions
that came up and he went into more detail, including explanations of anodes, cathodes and separate cells that trap electrons. The video was the direct instruction, which, he emphasizes, he doesn’t prepackage. He tailors it to what he sees are the issues for the students. When they come back the next day, they have responded to that day’s exploration and the video. They have had time to chew on what they experienced and what they heard in the video lecture, and they are ready to move forward. He gives them more practice problems and then asks them to create their own battery.
No technology for technology’s sake
Technology plays a big part in Musallam’s classes, and it was technology that helped move him to rethink the purpose of a lecture. “Flipping,” having the students work in class and then giving them a
video to take home for the lecture part of the class, became very popular when videos suddenly became convenient and easy to do. But just because you can do it doesn’t make it right, he says. “I was trying to leverage technology, but in the wrong way . . . I never questioned whether (a lecture) was a good way for (students) to get the information.” When he thought about it, he realized that lectures right off the bat were doing the opposite of motivating students.
He also had surefire signs that the old way wasn’t working. The students were getting low scores on their Advanced Placement tests. They mentioned over and over again that they didn’t understand what was going on. So he created tension – cognitive dissonance, as MIT mathematician and computer scientist Seymour Papert, , has called it – and the glazed eyes of the young audience began to disappear because by the time the lecture was offered, the students typically had questions of their own they wanted answered. “Your brainpower’s not high when you have all the knowledge and it’s not high when you don’t have any of the knowledge,” Musallum says.
The best gift he can give students, he adds, is “to put them in a position where awareness builds about what they know and what they don’t know. Then you can give them exactly what they need.”
As for a gift to himself, he says he’s happy that, long as it took, he found a teaching approach that creates curious, critical and thoughtful students. “The satisfaction that I get is that I caught myself early enough so my career won’t be a waste.”
