3 rules to spark learning

It took a life-threatening condition to jolt chemistry teacher Ramsey Musallam out of ten years of “pseudo-teaching” to understand the true role of the educator: to cultivate curiosity. In a fun and personal talk, Musallam gives 3 rules to spark imagination and learning, and get students excited about how the world works.

I teach chemistry.

(Explosion)

All right, all right.

So more than just explosions,

chemistry is everywhere.

Have you ever found yourself at a restaurant spacing out

just doing this over and over?

Some people nodding yes.

Recently, I showed this to my students,

and I just asked them to try and explain why it happened.

The questions and conversations that followed

were fascinating.

Check out this video that Maddie

from my period three class sent me that evening.

(Clang) (Laughs)

Now obviously, as Maddie's chemistry teacher,

I love that she went home and continued to geek out

about this kind of ridiculous demonstration

that we did in class.

But what fascinated me more is that Maddie's curiosity

took her to a new level.

If you look inside that beaker,

you might see a candle.

Maddie's using temperature to extend this phenomenon

to a new scenario.

You know, questions and curiosity like Maddie's

are magnets that draw us towards our teachers,

and they transcend all technology

or buzzwords in education.

But if we place these technologies before student inquiry,

we can be robbing ourselves

of our greatest tool as teachers: our students' questions.

For example, flipping a boring lecture from the classroom

to the screen of a mobile device

might save instructional time,

but if it is the focus of our students' experience,

it's the same dehumanizing chatter

just wrapped up in fancy clothing.

But if instead we have the guts

to confuse our students, perplex them,

and evoke real questions,

through those questions, we as teachers have information

that we can use to tailor robust

and informed methods of blended instruction.

So, 21st-century lingo jargon mumbo jumbo aside,

the truth is, I've been teaching for 13 years now,

and it took a life-threatening situation

to snap me out of 10 years of pseudo-teaching

and help me realize that student questions

are the seeds of real learning,

not some scripted curriculum

that gave them tidbits of random information.

In May of 2010, at 35 years old,

with a two-year-old at home and my second child on the way,

I was diagnosed with a large aneurysm

at the base of my thoracic aorta.

This led to open-heart surgery. This is the actual real email

from my doctor right there.

Now, when I got this, I was -- press Caps Lock --

absolutely freaked out, okay?

But I found surprising moments of comfort

in the confidence that my surgeon embodied.

Where did this guy get this confidence, the audacity of it?

So when I asked him, he told me three things.

He said first, his curiosity drove him

to ask hard questions about the procedure,

about what worked and what didn't work.

Second, he embraced, and didn't fear,

the messy process of trial and error,

the inevitable process of trial and error.

And third, through intense reflection,

he gathered the information that he needed

to design and revise the procedure,

and then, with a steady hand, he saved my life.

Now I absorbed a lot from these words of wisdom,

and before I went back into the classroom that fall,

I wrote down three rules of my own

that I bring to my lesson planning still today.

Rule number one: Curiosity comes first.

Questions can be windows to great instruction,

but not the other way around.

Rule number two: Embrace the mess.

We're all teachers. We know learning is ugly.

And just because the scientific method is allocated

to page five of section 1.2 of chapter one

of the one that we all skip, okay,

trial and error can still be an informal part

of what we do every single day

at Sacred Heart Cathedral in room 206.

And rule number three: Practice reflection.

What we do is important. It deserves our care,

but it also deserves our revision.

Can we be the surgeons of our classrooms?

As if what we are doing one day will save lives.

Our students our worth it.

And each case is different.

(Explosion)

All right. Sorry.

The chemistry teacher in me just needed to get that

out of my system before we move on.

So these are my daughters.

On the right we have little Emmalou -- Southern family.

And, on the left, Riley.

Now Riley's going to be a big girl in a couple weeks here.

She's going to be four years old,

and anyone who knows a four-year-old

knows that they love to ask, "Why?"

Yeah. Why.

I could teach this kid anything

because she is curious about everything.

We all were at that age.

But the challenge is really for Riley's future teachers,

the ones she has yet to meet.

How will they grow this curiosity?

You see, I would argue that Riley is a metaphor for all kids,

and I think dropping out of school comes in many different forms --

to the senior who's checked out before the year's even begun

or that empty desk in the back of an urban middle school's classroom.

But if we as educators leave behind

this simple role as disseminators of content

and embrace a new paradigm

as cultivators of curiosity and inquiry,

we just might bring a little bit more meaning

to their school day, and spark their imagination.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)