Episode #89: Spark Learning to Unlock and Harness the Power of Student Curiosity with Ramsey Musallam

Ramsey Musallam is a secondary science instructor at Sonoma Academy in Santa Rosa, California. He runs invention workshops for elementary and middle school students and delivers keynotes, webinars and facilitates workshops for teachers nationally and internationally with a focus on using technology as a strategic classroom partner in designing learning environments grounded in inquiry fueled by student curiosity. Ramsey is also the author of Spark Learning and a TedTalk speaker as part of the first TedTalks Education.<br /><br /> Your background (where you grew up)<br />I grew up in Sacramento, California. I wasn't much of a student. I was a competitive athlete. That's how I got into college with a basketball scholarship at Cal Poly and then transferred to UC Davis. That's where I fell in love with school and loved learning. My journey as a science teacher started there. I didn't get into medical school and I was left with a lot of science knowledge to that point. I got a job substitute teaching high school science at Sacred Heart Cathedral Prep in San Francisco. I fell in love with the vocation and went back to get my teaching credential, my masters, and my Ph.D. That's really how my journey as a teacher began.<br /> What it was like when you were a student<br />I’m a typical child of the Baby Boomers where my parents sent me to kindergarten just when I turned four so I could walk with our neighbor to school or out of some archaic reason. I fell drastically behind emotionally and mentally academically. By the time I got to the 6th grade, I was just a hot mess. I ended up going to 6th grade twice and had a chance to transfer schools to sort of reinvent myself. Even with that, I was behind academically and only I knew that basketball was what was going to get me into college. Academically, I always struggled as a slow reader and not a great test taker. What I figured out was how to translate some of those skills that I learned in sports to academic learning. I was a very hard worker around that. <br />Still to thi