by Adam Grant
Social scientists have called this phenomenon the awestruck effect, but I think it’s better described as the dumbstruck effect. The sage-on-the-stage often preaches new thoughts, but rarely teaches us how to think for ourselves. Thoughtful lecturers might prosecute inaccurate arguments and tell us what to think instead, but they don’t necessarily show us how to rethink moving forward. Charismatic speakers can put us under a political spell, under which we follow them to gain their approval or affiliate with their tribe. We should be persuaded by the substance of an argument, not the shiny package in which it’s wrapped.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting eliminating lectures altogether. I love watching TED talks and have even learned to enjoy giving them. It was attending brilliant lectures that first piqued my curiosity about becoming a teacher, and I’m not opposed to doing some lecturing in my own classes. I just think it’s a problem that lectures remain the dominant method of teaching in secondary and higher education. Expect a lecture on that soon.
In North American universities, more than half of STEM professors spend at least 80 percent of their time lecturing, just over a quarter incorporate bits of interactivity, and fewer than a fifth use truly student-centered methods that involve active learning. In high schools it seems that half of teachers lecture most or all of the time.* Lectures are not always the best method of learning, and they are not enough to develop students into lifelong learners. If you spend all of your school years being fed information and are never given the opportunity to question it, you won’t develop the tools for rethinking that you need in life.
Steve Macone/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank; © Condé Nast
THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF REPEATING
There’s only one class I regret missing in college. It was taught by a philosopher named Robert Nozick. One of his ideas became famous thanks to the movie The Matrix: in the 1970s, Nozick introduced a thought experiment about whether people would choose to enter an “experience machine” that could provide infinite pleasure but remove them from real life.* In his classroom, Nozick created his own version of an experience machine: he insisted on teaching a new class every year. “I do my thinking through the courses I give,” he said.
Nozick taught one course on truth; another on philosophy and neuroscience; a third on Socrates, Buddha, and Jesus; a fourth on thinking about thinking; and a fifth on the Russian Revolution. In four decades of teaching, he taught only one class a second time: it was on the good life. “Presenting a completely polished and worked-out view doesn’t give students a feel for what it’s like to do original work in philosophy and to see it happen, to catch on to doing it,” he explained. Sadly, before I could take one of his courses, he died of cancer.
What I found so inspiring about Nozick’s approach was that he wasn’t content for students to learn from him. He wanted them to learn with him. Every time he tackled a new topic, he would have the opportunity to rethink his existing views on it. He was a remarkable role model for changing up our familiar methods of teaching—and learning. When I started teaching, I wanted to adopt some of his principles. I wasn’t prepared to inflict an entire semester of half-baked ideas on my students, so I set a benchmark: every year I would aim to throw out 20 percent of my class and replace it with new material. If I was doing new thinking every year, we could all start rethinking together.
With the other 80 percent of the material, though, I found myself failing. I was teaching a semester-long class on organizational behavior for juniors and seniors. When I introduced evidence, I wasn’t giving them the space to rethink it. After years of wrestling with this problem, it dawned on me that I could create a new assignment to teach rethinking. I assigned students to work in small groups to record their own mini-podcasts or mini–TED talks. Their charge was to question a popular practice, to champion an idea that went against the grain of conventional wisdom, or to challenge principles covered in class.
As they started working on the project, I noticed a surprising pattern. The students who struggled the most were the straight-A students—the perfectionists. It turns out that although perfectionists are more likely than their peers to ace school, they don’t perform any better than their colleagues at work. This tracks with evidence that, across a wide range of industries, grades are not a strong predictor of job performance.
Achieving excellence in school often requires mastering old ways of thinking. Building an influential career demands new ways of thinking. In a classic study of highly accomplished architects, the most creative ones graduated with a B average. Their straight-A counterparts were so determined to be right that they often failed to take the risk of rethinking the orthodoxy. A similar pattern emerged in a study of students who graduated at the top of their class. “Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries,” education researcher Karen Arnold explains. “They typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”
That’s what I saw with my straight-A students: they were terrified of being wrong. To give them a strong incentive to take some risks, I made the assignment worth 20 percent of their final grade. I had changed the rules: now they were being rewarded for rethinking instead of regurgitating. I wasn’t sure if that incentive would work until I reviewed the work of a trio of straight-A students. They gave their mini–TED talk about the problems with TED talks, pointing out the risks of reinforcing short attention spans and privileging superficial polish over deep insight. Their presentation was so thoughtful and entertaining that I played it for the entire class. “If you have the courage to stand up to the trend towards glib, seamless answers,” they deadpanned as we laughed, “then stop watching this video right now, and do some real research, like we did.”
I made the assignment a staple of the course from then on. The following year I wanted to go further in rethinking the content and format of my class. In a typical three-hour class, I would spend no more than twenty to thirty minutes lecturing. The rest is active learning—students make decisions in simulations and negotiate in role-plays, and then we debrief, discuss, debate, and problem solve. My mistake was treating the syllabus as if it were a formal contract: once I finalized it in September, it was effectively set in stone. I decided it was time to change that and invite the students to rethink part of the structure of the class itself.
On my next syllabus, I deliberately left one class session completely blank. Halfway through the semester, I invited the students to work in small groups to develop and pitch an idea for how we should spend that open day. Then they voted.
One of the most popular ideas came from Lauren McCann, who suggested a creative step toward helping students recognize that rethinking was a useful skill—and one they had already been using in college. She invited her classmates to write letters to their freshmen selves covering what they wish they had known back then. The students encouraged their younger selves to stay open to different majors, instead of declaring the first one that erased their uncertainty. To be less obsessed with grades, and more focused on relationships. To explore different career possibilities, rather than committing too soon to the one that promised the most pay or prestige.
Lauren collected letters from dozens of students to launch a website, Dear Penn Freshmen. Within twenty-four hours, dearpennfresh.com had over ten thousand visits, and a half dozen schools were starting their own versions to help students rethink their academic, social, and professional choices.
This practice can extend far beyond the classroom. As we approach any life transition—whether it’s a first job, a second marriage, or a third child—we can pause to ask people what they wish they’d known before they went through that experience. Once we’re on the other side of it, we can share what we ourselves should have rethought.
It’s been demonstrated repeatedly that one of the best ways to learn is to teach. It wasn’t until I let my students design a day of class that I truly understood how much they had to teach one
another—and me. They were rethinking not just what they learned, but whom they could learn from.
The following year, the class’s favorite idea took that rethinking a step further: the students hosted a day of “passion talks” on which anyone could teach the class about something he or she loved. We learned how to beatbox and design buildings that mesh with nature and make the world more allergy safe. From that point on, sharing passions has been part of class participation. All the students give a passion talk as a way of introducing themselves to their peers. Year after year, they tell me that it injects a heightened level of curiosity into the room, leaving them eager to soak up insights from each of their classmates.
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JACK OF ROUGH DRAFTS, MASTER OF CRAFTS
When I asked a handful of education pioneers to name the best teacher of rethinking they’ve ever encountered, I kept hearing the same name: Ron Berger. If you invited Ron over for dinner, he’s the kind of person who would notice that one of your chairs was broken, ask if you had some tools handy, and fix it on the spot.
For most of his career, Ron was a public-elementary-school teacher in rural Massachusetts. His nurse, his plumber, and his local firefighters were all former students. During the summers and on weekends, he worked as a carpenter. Ron has devoted his life to teaching students an ethic of excellence. Mastering a craft, in his experience, is about constantly revising our thinking. Hands-on craftsmanship is the foundation for his classroom philosophy.
Ron wanted his students to experience the joy of discovery, so he didn’t start by teaching them established knowledge. He began the school year by presenting them with “grapples”—problems to work through in phases. The approach was think-pair-share: the kids started individually, updated their ideas in small groups, and then presented their thoughts to the rest of the class, arriving at solutions together. Instead of introducing existing taxonomies of animals, for example, Ron had them develop their own categories first. Some students classified animals by whether they walked on land, swam in water, or flew through the air; others arranged them according to color, size, or diet. The lesson was that scientists always have many options, and their frameworks are useful in some ways but arbitrary in others.
When students confront complex problems, they often feel confused. A teacher’s natural impulse is to rescue them as quickly as possible so they don’t feel lost or incompetent. Yet psychologists find that one of the hallmarks of an open mind is responding to confusion with curiosity and interest. One student put it eloquently: “I need time for my confusion.” Confusion can be a cue that there’s new territory to be explored or a fresh puzzle to be solved.
Ron wasn’t content to deliver lessons that erased confusion. He wanted students to embrace confusion. His vision was for them to become leaders of their own learning, much like they would in “do it yourself” (DIY) craft projects. He started encouraging students to think like young scientists: they would identify problems, develop hypotheses, and design their own experiments to test them. His sixth graders went around the community to test local homes for radon gas. His third graders created their own maps of amphibian habitats. His first graders got their own group of snails to take care of, and went on to test which of over 140 foods they liked—and whether they preferred hot or cold, dark or light, and wet or dry environments.
For architecture and engineering lessons, Ron had his students create blueprints for a house. When he required them to do at least four different drafts, other teachers warned him that younger students would become discouraged. Ron disagreed—he had already tested the concept with kindergarteners and first graders in art. Rather than asking them to simply draw a house, he announced, “We’ll be doing four different versions of a drawing of a house.”
Some students didn’t stop there; many wound up deciding to do eight or ten drafts. The students had a support network of classmates cheering them on in their efforts. “Quality means rethinking, reworking, and polishing,” Ron reflects. “They need to feel they will be celebrated, not ridiculed, for going back to the drawing board. . . . They soon began complaining if I didn’t allow them to do more than one version.”
Ron wanted to teach his students to revise their thinking based on input from others, so he turned the classroom into a challenge network. Every week—and sometimes every day—the entire class would do a critique session. One format was a gallery critique: Ron put everyone’s work on display, sent students around the room to observe, and then facilitated a discussion of what they saw as excellent and why. This method wasn’t used only for art and science projects; for a writing assignment, they would evaluate a sentence or a paragraph. The other format was an in-depth critique: for a single session, the class would focus on the work of one student or group. The authors would explain their goals and where they needed help, and Ron guided the class through a discussion of strengths and areas for development. He encouraged students to be specific and kind: to critique the work rather than the author. He taught them to avoid preaching and prosecuting: since they were sharing their subjective opinions, not objective assessments, they should say “I think” rather than “This isn’t good.” He invited them to show humility and curiosity, framing their suggestions in terms of questions like “I’d love to hear why . . .” and “Have you considered . . .”
The class didn’t just critique projects. Each day they would discuss what excellence looked like. With each new project they updated their criteria. Along with rethinking their own work, they were learning to continually rethink their standards. To help them further evolve those standards, Ron regularly brought in outside experts. Local architects and scientists would come in to offer their own critiques, and the class would incorporate their principles and vocabularies into future discussions. Long after they’d moved on to middle and high school, it was not uncommon for former students to visit Ron’s class and ask for a critique of their work.
As soon as I connected with Ron Berger, I couldn’t help but wish I had been able to take one of his classes. It wasn’t because I had suffered from a lack of exceptional teachers. It was because I had never had the privilege of being in a classroom with a culture like his, with a whole room of students dedicated to questioning themselves and one another.
Ron now spends his days speaking, writing, teaching a course for teachers at Harvard, and consulting with schools. He’s the chief academic officer of EL Education, an organization dedicated to reimagining how teaching and learning take place in schools. Ron and his colleagues work directly with 150 schools and develop curricula that have reached millions of students.
At one of their schools in Idaho, a student named Austin was assigned to make a scientifically accurate drawing of a butterfly. This is his first draft:
Austin’s classmates formed a critique group. They gave him two rounds of suggestions for changing the shape of the wings, and he produced his second and third drafts. The critique group pointed out that the wings were uneven and that they’d become round again. Austin wasn’t discouraged. On his next revision, the group encouraged him to fill in the pattern on the wings.
For the final draft, Austin was ready to color it in. When Ron showed the completed drawing to a roomful of elementary school students in Maine, they gasped in awe at his progress and his final product.
I gasped, too, because Austin made these drawings when he was in first grade.
Seeing a six-year-old undergo that kind of metamorphosis made me think again about how quickly children can become comfortable rethinking and revising. Ever since, I’ve encouraged our kids to do multiple drafts of their own drawings. As excited as they were to see their first draft hanging on the wall, they’re that much prouder of their fourth version.
Few of us will have the good fortune to learn to draw a butterfly with Ron Berger or rewrite a textbook with Erin McCarthy. Yet all of us have the opportunity to teach more like them. Whomever we’re educ
ating, we can express more humility, exude more curiosity, and introduce the children in our lives to the infectious joy of discovery.
I believe that good teachers introduce new thoughts, but great teachers introduce new ways of thinking. Collecting a teacher’s knowledge may help us solve the challenges of the day, but understanding how a teacher thinks can help us navigate the challenges of a lifetime. Ultimately, education is more than the information we accumulate in our heads. It’s the habits we develop as we keep revising our drafts and the skills we build to keep learning.
CHAPTER 10
That’s Not the Way We’ve Always Done It
Building Cultures of Learning at Work
If only it weren’t for the people . . . earth would be an engineer’s paradise.
—Kurt Vonnegut
As an avid scuba diver, Luca Parmitano was familiar with the risks of drowning. He just didn’t realize it could happen in outer space.
Luca had just become the youngest astronaut ever to take a long trip to the International Space Station. In July 2013, the thirty-six-year-old Italian astronaut completed his first spacewalk, spending six hours running experiments, moving equipment, and setting up power and data cables. Now, a week later, Luca and another astronaut, Chris Cassidy, were heading out for a second walk to continue their work and do some maintenance. As they prepared to leave the airlock, they could see the Earth 250 miles below.