For my first 19 years as a teacher I was a committed lecturer and probably spent 60% of my class time doing whole group “teaching.” I honed my craft. I had some standard jokes. I spiced it up with cool demonstrations in my chemistry class. Most of my students seemed to pay attention. They took notes, they asked questions, and they seemed engaged. But were they?  Did I really reach every student teaching that way?  In retrospect, I didn’t. 

Today, I don’t lecture in class anymore. In fact, I haven’t given a whole-class lecture since 2007. How did I do that?  What do I do instead?  

This article is one in a series where we will discuss how you can make mastery learning a reality. I will share how I, and thousands of other teachers, have transformed classrooms into a place where every student succeeds. In my previous article, we learned about what happens in mastery classrooms. This article will focus on No Whole-Class Direct Instruction.

The heart of a Flipped Mastery classroom is one simple question: “What is the best use of face-to-face class time?” I would argue that it is students working on complex things (whatever that…