3 rules to spark learning - Ramsey Musallam

I teach Chemistry. More than just explosions, Chemistry is [1]___________. Have you ever found yourself at a restaurant spacing out just this doing this over and over? Some people nodding yes. Recently I showed this to my students and I just ask them to try and explain why it [2] _____________. The questions and conversations that followed were fascinating. And check out this video that Maddie from my period three class sent me that evening. Obviously as Maddies Chemistry Teacher, I loved that she went home to get a kick out at this kind of ridiculous demonstration that we did in class. But what [3] _____________ me more is that Maddies curiosity took her to a new level. If you look inside that beaker, you might see a [4] _________. Maddie's using temperature to extend this phenomena to a new scenario. Questions and curiosity like Maddie's are magnets that draw us towards our teachers and they transcend all technology or buzz words in education. But if we place these technologies before student inquiry, we can be robbing ourselves of our greatest [5] ________ as teachers: our students questions. For example, ipping a boring lecture from the classroom to the [6] ___________ of a mobile device my 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 [7] ___________ 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. Twenty-rst century lingo jargon mumbo jumbo aside. The truth is Ive been teaching for [8] ____________years now and it took a life threatening situation to snap me out of ten years of pseudo teaching and helped me realize that student questions are the [9] __________ of real learning. Not some scripted curriculum the given ten bits of random information. In May, of twenty ten, thirty ve years old with a two-year-old at home and my second child on the way, I was diagnosed with the large aneurysm at the base of my aort. This lead to open-heart surgery. This is actually real e-mail from my doctor right there. Now when I got this, I was (press caps lock) absolutely freaked out. But I found surprising moments of comfort in the condence that my surgeon embodied: Where did this guy get this condence, the audacity of it? So when I asked him, he told me [10] ________ things. He said rst his curiosity drove him to ask hard questions about the procedure, about what worked and what didn't work.
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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 reection he gathered the information that he needed to design and [11] ____________ the procedure and then with the steady hand, he saved my life. Now I absorbed a lot from these words of wisdom and before I went back into the class that fall, I wrote down three rules of my own that I bring to my lesson planning still today. Rule number one: [12] _____________ comes rst. Questions can be windows to great instruction but not the other way around. Rule number two: Embrace the mess. We are all teachers, we know learning is [13] __________. And just because the scientic method is allocated to page ve of section one point two, of chapter one, of the one that we all skip. Trial and error can still be an informal part of what we do every single day at Sacred Heart Cathedral at room two oh six. And Rule number three: Practice reection. 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? And our students are worth it. And each case is different. Chemistry teacher. Needed to get that out of my system before we move on. So these are my [14] _____________ on the right we have little Analu and on the left Raylie. Raylie is going to be a big girl in a couple weeks here. Shes gonna be four years old and anyone who knows a four-year-old knows that they love to ask [15] ____________. Yeah, why. I could teach this kid anything because she curious about everything. We all were at that age. But the challenge is really for Raylie's future teachers the ones she is yet to meet. How will they [16] __________ this curiosity? You see, I would argue that Raylie is a metaphor for all kids. 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 schools classroom. But if we as educators, leave [17] ____________the 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 [18] _____________ to their school day and spark the imagination! Thank you very much!
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ANSWER KEY: 1. everywhere 2. happened 3. fascinated 4. candle 5. tool 6. screen 7. confuse 8. thirteen 9. seeds 10.three 11.revise 12.Questions 13.ugly 14.daughters 15.why 16. grow 17.behind 18.meaning

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