The Professor Who Taught the First Row

A professor of economics, in the sixteenth year of a solid but unspectacular career at a large university, was assigned the introductory macroeconomics course. Three hundred students in a raked auditorium. Twice a week, ninety minutes, thirteen weeks. The course had been taught to some version of the same syllabus for forty years. Two thirds of the students were there because it was required for their degree. Roughly a third of those brought a laptop and, within about eight minutes, opened something that was not the lecture.

For his first two years teaching the course, the professor tried, in the manner of well-meaning senior faculty everywhere, to reach 'the room'. He varied his voice. He put jokes in his slides. He built in interactive polls. His course evaluations were unremarkable. His examination results were unremarkable. He noticed that he was, quietly, becoming demoralised by a class he had once looked forward to.

In the third year he did something small and, in the terms of academic teaching orthodoxy, slightly heretical. He stopped trying to reach the room. He began, instead, to teach the first two rows. There were, in every cohort, somewhere between twelve and twenty students who chose to sit in the first two rows. They had come to the lecture because they wanted to be there. They had done the reading. They asked questions. He decided, quite consciously, that these students were his class. The remaining two hundred and eighty were welcome to listen.

This changed several things. He raised the difficulty of the material slightly, because the first two rows could take it. He answered questions in more depth, because the first two rows asked real ones. He looked, mostly, at the first two rows while lecturing, which meant that his energy went to people who were sending energy back. His preparation time, which had previously been spent trying to package the material for an imaginary lowest-common-denominator freshman, was now spent trying to make the material genuinely interesting for the eighteen students who wanted it to be interesting.

The results, at the end of the third year, surprised him in a specific way. His course evaluations, from the entire class of three hundred, went up. Not by a little. By a lot. The back rows, whom he had stopped trying to reach, reported that the course had been unusually engaging. Some wrote, in comments he still keeps in his desk drawer, that they had 'started sitting closer' by the second month. The pool of committed students had, without his announcing it, grown from eighteen to about seventy. His examination results went up. Two students that year went on to graduate study in economics, which was, by his previous decade's baseline, a small miracle.

The lesson he took from it, and repeated to junior colleagues who came to him for teaching advice for the next twenty years, was almost inverted from what he had been told at every teaching workshop he had ever attended. Do not, he said, teach to the median. Teach to the person in the room who most wants to learn. The median will follow the person who most wants to learn far more reliably than they will follow a lecture designed to include them. In every room there is a first row. If you can find it, and teach it, the rest of the room will, over time, migrate towards it. Almost every other approach to teaching a large class is, quietly, an approach to teaching to the exit.