I Was Teaching the Wrong Students

Two minutes. That’s how long it took for the discussion to die.

It was the fall of 2015, my first year teaching AP World History at a renowned international school in Shanghai, China, and the topic was the spread of Islam. I had developed what I thought was a solid lesson plan: a short writing warm-up to review the previous class, then a slideshow with key content points, some images, and a map or chart here and there. The centerpiece was a class discussion.

After a lecture that went a bit longer than expected, we arrived at the centerpiece. I asked a question. Solid answer. I asked the next one. Another correct answer, just as easy. I put one out for group discussion. In less than a minute they were ready to go on. After just two minutes, there was nothing more to say. Crickets. I was sweating as I grasped at where to go next. My students weren’t lost or confused; they were waiting for the lesson to start.

Where I’d Come From

Before that year, I spent five years in a Title I middle school in the U.S. where many of my students read well below grade level, followed by a year teaching high school in the U.S. to a class with a wide range of ability. In those classrooms, summarizing the chapter was a lifeline. Questions that asked basic understanding were exactly the daily start we needed. Later, the more complex questions of why something happened or what its impacts were, that was the payoff.

These students I found myself teaching were different. Many were headed to some of the most selective universities in the world. They had already done the reading before class. My slides repeated the textbook back to them, and my questions asked them to recall and speak what they already knew. That’s where the questions stopped. They were ready to argue, compare, and challenge the knowledge and sources. I never asked them to.

The Conversation

It wasn’t long after this disastrous lesson that I asked one of my students to stay after class for a moment. She’d been missing a lot of school, and I wanted to check whether everything was okay.

Everything was fine, she said. She just felt that she could learn more by studying on her own than by sitting in my class.

Her words hit me like an Acme anvil. My first reaction as I stood there listening to this was anger, which I kept to myself. My second reaction took longer to process, and it was far worse: she wasn’t wrong. I had built a safe class for me, the green AP teacher, but a class that a motivated student could skip without losing anything.

I was also forced to admit something else. I never took an AP course or anything like it. College challenged me, but these students wanted something beyond even what I’d experienced as an undergraduate. I wasn’t able to design that kind of thinking for them because I hadn’t practiced it much myself.

What I Changed

The following spring, I attended an AP conference in Shenzhen and began rebuilding how I taught.

First, I weaned myself off the slideshow. I had leaned on it heavily, and it had quietly allowed me to stay within the safety of the textbook and PPT. Without it, I would have to know more than the textbook did. So, I went looking for new sources, perspectives, and information that made each topic richer. Eventually, I read “Age of Anger” by Pankaj Mishra and “Civilization: The West and the Rest” by Niall Ferguson, two books that argue nearly opposite views of the West, which I later added to the students’ summer assignment. The slides that survived served the explicit purpose of analyzing images or text sources, providing visual links with maps, graphs, or charts, or anchoring key ideas to the unit’s bigger thematic questions.

Second, I replaced passive reviews with activities that made students stretch the bounds of their understanding and abilities. During the Enlightenment unit, students had a “rapid-fire exchange,” where each student researched a key Enlightenment thinker, then met classmates in quick rounds to debate whose ideas aligned and whose clashed. For the fall of empires (such as the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal), students performed an “Autopsy of an Empire,” where groups needed to research their empire and draw a poster-sized diagram of the empire’s body (often, what the sultan, emperor, or ruler would wear formally) with the areas that faltered or broke down. Finally, students would complete a formal “medical examiner’s report” and the empire’s obituary. The goal wasn’t novelty; it was to move students to argue, compare, and defend their ideas instead of being fed them.

Third, I rethought the structure of a standard class, specifically the first five minutes. That’s when you win or lose a class, so rather than using the time to ask for memory or recall from the last class, I now targeted specific historical thinking skills. Each warm-up also pulled in past content or previewed the day’s lesson. One example would be to give them a very brief excerpt from a source or textbook and give them a question like “What does this passage suggest about state-building strategies used by rulers in the early modern era (1450–1750)?”

Where it Led

I never wanted a student to feel my class was optional again. I was determined to become the best AP teacher those students would ever have. Honestly, I don’t know if I got there, but a few years later, the University of Chicago recognized me with its Educator of the Year award after two of my former students, who attended in the same year, each named me their most influential high school teacher.

When I reflect back, that after-class conversation from my first year teaching AP and the award are intimately linked. It was a student’s honesty, and a boldness I deeply respect, that led to my renaissance as a teacher.

What it Taught Me

Every teacher builds certain habits from the students in front of them. These habits are valuable, but they are also a trap because they quietly build assumptions about what the next group will look like. My lesson on the spread of Islam wasn’t necessarily a bad lesson. It may have been perfect for a different group of students. Therein lies the problem. Unknowingly, I planned for those I used to teach, not who I was teaching.

Knowing the content and the necessary skills is only half the job. Knowing who’s in the room is the other half, and I had to relearn it every time the room changed.