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 looks like in your class) in the presence of their teacher. 

And the way that I answer the above question is with a negative — I know that the best use of my class time is NOT information transfer. Instead class time needs to be a time where students are engaging with the lesson. They need to be working together. I need to be free to work with small groups of students. Some groups are more remedial where others are challenging and helping students make deep connections. It looks like experiments; it looks like small group tutoring. It looks like exploration. It looks like relationship building. And I could never go back to teaching as that guy who stands up and lectures.

And in a mastery classroom where students will be at slightly different parts of the curriculum at different times, it is crucial that I time-shift direct instruction. If I had to do whole-group direct instruction, those students who are ahead would be bored, and those who are behind would be lost.

So in order to make mastery learning work, it is essential that any direct instruction is on a digital platform that students can access just when they…