Moments of transformational learning moments come in many different shapes and sizes. Sometimes they happen when a student works quietly with a teacher one-on-one; sometimes they arrive when a student leaps up in a lecture hall and says, “Oh my God! I get it!” And sometimes they happen when one student challenges another, and it goes something like this:

“Gabby, you can’t really be saying that you think it would be right for a person to let another country invade their own country, even if their own country was wrong.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“But imagine if you were alive in the 1800’s, when there was slavery, and France wanted to invade to free the slaves. You would fight against France to defend your country, wouldn’t you?”
“Absolutely not. I’d make a big banner that said ‘I love the French.’”
“No way.”
“Totally would.”
“But it’s your country!”
“But I have a duty to actual human beings when they’re being made slaves that’s more important than my feelings about something that’s not a person, like a county. I can’t let someone suffer and die just because my country wants me to.”
“Do you really mean that?”
“I do.”
“Wow. I have to think about this.”

The great teacher is lit up by this kind of exchange. The great teacher sees and feels the doors opening, the new-idea thinking taking place, and feels a happiness that no amount of money, no public applause, no private beauty could come close to equaling.

 

And this is very much the kind of exchange that I imagine seeing – and trying to make happen as often as possible – around a seminar table, like the one I have in my own seminar room at my school, where I teach middle-school and high-school students. More often than not, we sit around a big wooden table, face to face. The feeling is very different from when I stand in front of a class filled with chairs and tables facing m. It’s very different from the work I can do with students when we’re one-on-one. And it’s different from when they’re writing or building something and I wander around the room and look over their shoulders, asking a question now and then, or giving a little advice to a student here and there.

 

What I’ve just described here are the three main modes of education:
– Lecture (teacher in front, giving out information),
– Seminar (everyone around a table, sharing ideas), and
– Coaching (teacher helping a student one-on-one, often looking over the student’s shoulder to see the world from the student’s perspective).

 

Being able to choose which of the three suits a specific group at a specific moment, and moving fluidly from one to the other, turns out to be of supreme importance, a fact that I first began to think about because of the work of a teacher and writer named Mortimer Adler.

 
Adler was one of the great and amusing figures of twentieth-century American education. A high-school drop-out at the age of 14, he became a young newspaper man in the 1920’s, learning in the process how little he actually knew about the world. Hungry for knowledge, he began taking night courses at local colleges. Finding his way to Columbia University through his characteristic blend of charm and hectoring arrogance, Adler completed his undergraduate studies there (though without taking his bachelor’s degree, because he could not pass the required swimming test), as well as a doctorate in psychology.

 
He studied at Columbia with the founders of the Great Books movement – scholars including John Erskine, Mark van Doren, Whittaker Chambers and Jacques Barzun. When his friend Robert Maynard Hutchins was named president of the University of Chicago at the tender age of 29, Adler joined him as a faculty member and partner in the project of bringing Columbia-style Great Books education to the center of the rapidly growing Chicago campus.

 
Occasionally impressing his students while almost constantly infuriating his colleagues, Adler was denied a faculty position in the university’s psychology department even though the president of the university was his uncompromising sponsor. He served instead as a professor of law, though he did not have a law degree.

 
Adler eventually departed the faculty at Chicago in order to help run a number of projects and institutions less needing of compromise in their educational focus, including the Great Books Foundation, the Great Books of the Western World project at Encyclopedia Britannica, and the Aspen Institute.

 
At the Encyclopedia Britannica, backed by millions of dollars invested by supporters including the University of Chicago administration, Adler led the development of a 54-volume set of formal volumes – looking very much like a set of encyclopedias and derided by writer Dwight MacDonald at the time as “Books-as-Furniture” – that included a guide to 102 “Great Ideas” woven through the centuries of texts. Not 101, not 103, but exactly 102. This insistence was typical of Adler: certainly wrong to at least some degree, but still eye-opening and captivating to anyone who cares about (hard to find another word for it) ideas. In the 1980’s, as Adler was enjoying his own ninth decade, his ideas turned to K-12 schooling. As the co-founder of the Great Books Foundation, dedicated for its first few decades to bringing inexpensive editions of the classics to libraries and living rooms across the country accompanied by rigorous, inquiry-based discussion groups facilitated in every case by leaders chosen and trained by Chicago-based foundation staff, Adler had seen the organization’s foray into the classrooms of America begin in the 1970’s, and become a cash cow worth several million dollars a year by the time the reform of public education rose to the top of the national agenda with the publication of “A Nation at Risk,” the report of President Ronald Reagan’s highly-publicized National Commission on Excellence in Education in 1983.

 
Adler thought that the Great Books Foundation’s work in schools had been quickly watered down to suit the politics and bureaucratic habits of the public schools, and had in fact beaten President Reagan to the stage with a major proposal to retool the American school system. Adler’s model, captured in his book The Paideia Proposal, included a call for a national curriculum, and an emphasis on teaching skills in the classical modes of logic, rhetoric, and mathematics, and a focus on teaching students to be active and skillful learners on their own time, throughout their lives.

 
But most important for me – the part of his little book that gave me my own big aha! moment – was his simple description of the three basic modes of instruction: lecture, seminar and coaching. Know which mode suits which school activity, Adler advised, and you’ll do a better job than most schools do today.

 
When reading a thoughtful text, don’t spend too much time lecturing – seminar-style discussion is essential. When teaching mathematics, be sure to lean on coaching as the core mode; it’s perfectly suited to helping students learn challenging, active skills like addition, multiplication and factoring. And when teaching factual information about history or science, lecturing is important at least part of the time – don’t be afraid of it, even if it does not suit your ideal vision of student-centered schooling.

 
In the lecture, the teacher has important information and stands before the students to share it. In the seminar, all face each other around a table, and this is where teaching by asking questions is most valuable and powerful. And in the coaching moment, the teacher stands alongside the student, and both move forward together, the teacher helping the student to find the way and anticipate what each new step will bring.

 

 
This might seem like the most obvious of ways to talk about schooling, but it was particularly vital for me because when I first read Adler’s book I was working as the head of the Great Book Foundation, living in Chicago in the shadow of Hutchins and Adler and often dealing with critics who found fault in the seminar-style, inquiry-based teaching model we advocated. With Adler’s discussion in mind, I became more comfortable telling people that of course our approach wasn’t the right way to teach all subjects all of the time – there was also lecture and coaching, and both had their important roles.

 
And over time, as I observed more and more great teachers at work, it slowly became clear that often the key to what they were doing was not being particularly brilliant at any one of the three modes of teaching, or even at all three, but the key was knowing – or feeling – when to move from one mode to another, seamlessly. It’s the smooth motion among roles, knowing intuitively when the moment calls for one rather than another, that marks the extraordinary educator, in my experience.

 
Here’s what it looks like: A ninth-grade math teacher is talking about how to solve for x in an algebraic equation. She makes a list of three steps in the process. She writes the list on the board. She calls on individual students to repeat back the three steps, in sequence. They can do it. But she sees the puzzled faces – they’re hearing the three steps, but not feeling exactly how to do them. She puts up a sample problem on the board and solves it, step one, step two, step three. A couple of kids actually call out, “I get it.” But only a couple. Now she puts another, similar problem on the board, and asks students to solve it on their own, at their seats.

 
As they get to work, she begins to wander around the classroom, leaning over students shoulders, whispering to one, “Now you’re ready for step two,” and telling another, “Don’t jump over a step – see this?” – she point to the student’s note paper where the problem is laid out in pencil – “grab that x there, and move it to the other side of the equation. Do you remember how to do that by dividing by x on both sides?” She walks back to the board and puts up another two equations. “Bonus problems,” she says, “if you’re super speedy today. But what matters most is working carefully to solve that first problem.” She continues her rounds, talking with most of the students, guiding them in their work.

 
She began by lecturing – and she had some success getting her three-step process across. But she could see the need to shift into coaching mode, and then once she’d begun working one-on-one with a couple of students, even for a brief moment with each, she understood how valuable this coaching was for them at just this moment, so she bought herself more time for more coaching by putting those extra problems up on the board. On the whole, a terrific bit of teaching, measured most importantly by the successful learning going on in the room.
And here’s this lovely tale. I’d like to title it, “The Correct Answer is a SNOWBALL.”

I like to teach in a few different modes. But I’m not always sure which is the right one until I’m in the room and working with the students on a given day. I can have a discussion, I can lecture, I can ask the students to write or draw. The key for me is what seems to work.
I might start out talking about something in American history – the Boston Massacre, for example – and I can start lecturing about a particular topic. This event, it turns out, began when a kid threw a snowball at a British guard.
So we can say that the first weapon used in the American Revolution was a snowball. I can take this in a number of different directions. If the kids are attentive, and they’re in that mood of wanting to drink up knowledge, I might just tell them – “And you’ll never believe this, but the first weapon used in the Revolution was a Snowball. Here’s how it happened” – and that’ll get them to focus because they’re asking the reasonable question about how that could possibly be. But on a lot of days, they’re not focused. Maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s the shirt I’m wearing, but they’re just a little bit too scattered and won’t sit there, so I start maybe with a game show: “Ladies and gentlemen, the correct answer is A SNOWBALL. What is the question?”
I might get some silly answers, but I’ll tell them that we’re talking about early American history here, and they’ll focus. They’ll be into the gamey side of things, but they’ll hear it, they’ll remember it, and other details about the Boston Massacre will be bound up in what they remember. Or if they’re extra good, I might give them a writing task, to write an imagined story about the first weapon used in the Revolution.
They’ll think about the choice, some will go the obvious route, some will be creative, and when I tell them about the snowball, there will be extra resonance because they’ve spent so much time imagining what it might have been, and how it might have happened. Still, I have to roll with what they give me.
I’ll do a great job if they do a great job. I’m a great teacher if I ask the question that gets the great answer from one of my kids. That’s my bottom line, so I have to be listening hard all the time for that. It’s really much less a matter of skill, and much more a matter of being open to who these kids are and what they’re thinking and feeling.
The feeling piece is the most important of all. When they feel like I’m there with them, hearing them, in the same mood that they’re in, appreciating them, they’ll lower their anxieties, they’ll trust me and the group more, and they’ll take the big risk of sharing what they’re really thinking.
Things happen faster then, the thinking by the kids happens faster, because all the anxieties pull back a little and stop slowing down their thinking. Their answers to questions become a lot more interesting, and I start to feel less like the teacher making everything happen, and more like the lucky soul stuck in a room with these fascinating, engaging little creatures. I feel connected because they feel safe. The trust opens the doors for their thinking, and we fall away from the social roles of school, and into the heart-to-heart exchanges that really make me feel like I’m doing what I need to be doing with my life.
When I get my part of the job right, we’re all in that kind of connection. It won’t last long, in my experience, but a few minutes of being there in a day is more than any of us need for the glow to last, for the room to hold a feeling of that magic for a long, long time.”  – Middle School History Teacher, Birmingham Alabama.