By Stormi Gale, Cardiology Pharmacy Resident at the
University of Maryland School of Pharmacy
I recently listened to a TED talk by Ramsey Musallam on “the
3 rules to spark learning”.1
I found this lecture to be of particular interest because I
believe one of the most important things that we can do for our students is to
motivate them. Specifically, I mean creating a desire to learn that is
unrelated to a report card or a class rank. What I am referring to is inspiring
something that Ramsey Mussalam mentions throughout this short video – curiosity. Musallam, a chemistry teacher, begins with an
anecdote about a student that left his classroom and repeated one of his
experiments from home in a YouTube video. If every concept we taught were so
invigorating that students would reflect on them by choice afterwards, teaching
would be a much easier profession.
An unforeseen medical illness lead to Musallam’s realization
that he had spent the last 10 years of his life “pseudo-teaching”, a concept
that often plagues present-day classrooms. Pseudo-teaching heavily relies on
curriculums that have specific standards for education, without an emphasis on
the learner’s incentive for acquiring knowledge. Musallam mimics his three
rules after his physician’s journey from medical student to cardiothoracic surgeon.
Rule number one - Curiosity comes first. Questions can be
windows to instruction but not the other way around. Musallam describes
curiosity as “magnets that draw us towards our teachers” that “transcends all
technology or buzzwords in education”. He goes on to suggest that technology
may be detrimental to a student’s learning through the minimization of
student’s questions. The flipped classroom is specifically mentioned; Musallam
feels that bringing lectures to the computer screen is hardly an improvement
over the traditional classroom. He describes this method as “dehumanizing
chatter just wrapped up in fancy clothing.” He challenges teachers to confuse
our students in a way that triggers them to ask questions, referring to student
questions as “the seeds of real learning”. Through their natural
inquisitiveness, we can create an environment that yields greater learning
potential. This is to say that we as teachers can learn how to tailor our
lessons through culturing what our students want to know.
Rule number two - Embrace the mess. We know learning is
ugly. Musallam’s surgeon did not have perfect technique during his very
first procedure. His expertise is a culmination of thousands of procedures he
performed amateur hands. Mussalam challenges “not to fear the inevitable
process of trial and error”. We have to
be willing to take risks with our students. This may mean not following
specific layouts in textbooks or in the map of the curriculum. This often becomes
a point of contention for today’s educators. We often are trying to find a
balance between governmental or institutional standards and have difficulty
straying from these requirements. However, it is imperative that we keep the
best interest of our students in mind, always. Teachers must be open to
creating something innovative, and must be able to accept that new methods may
fail.
Rule number three - Practice reflection. What we do
deserves our revision. We must be able to recognize that current processes
are never perfect, and be able to devise improvements in our teaching. This is
by no means a foreign concept; we have long known the importance of devising
ways to improve our work. As teachers we are accustomed to receiving
evaluations from our students and mentors. However, equally important feedback
is self-addressed. The evaluations we receive from others lack utility if we do
not take the time to actively participate in our development. It is no
coincidence that this concept comes up repeatedly in various educational
theories - we cannot ask our students to grow without challenging ourselves to
do the same. If we are truly embracing our mess, as is discussed in rule number
two, then we must then be willing to clean it up.
Musallam closes his talk by describing his soon to be
four-year-old daughter’s vast ability to learn simply because of her innate
desire to learn. It is well-known that young children are rapidly absorbing
information from the world around them. I would argue that the hasty
acquisition of data is not solely attributable to neural plasticity, but rather
a combination of physiologic differences as well as innate curiosity. We as teachers must recognize that the
rate-limiting step to our students’ potential most often has nothing to do with
cognitive ability, but rather with a lack of interest. If we can spark learning
through these aforementioned three rules, we can overcome these barriers. As
educators we owe it to our learners to “leave behind the simple role of
disseminators of content and embrace a new paradigm as cultivators of curiosity
and inquiry”.
References:
Musallam, R. (2013, April). Ramsey Musallam: 3 rules to
spark learning [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/ramsey_musallam_3_rules_to_spark_learning
No comments:
Post a Comment