For 10 years, Ramsey Musallam was a highly popular and entertaining science teacher…but were his students actually learning and understanding the science or just enjoying watching him blow stuff up???

It took a life-threatening 6 centimeter aneurysm at the base of his aorta (along with some profound lessons from his surgeon) for Ramsey to have a total and complete paradigm shift about education and for him to ultimately completely transform his class. His 6 minute TED Talk (embedded below) has been viewed almost 2.5 million times and has captivated teachers with its profound message.

We are incredibly honored to announce the release of his book, Spark Learning: 3 Keys to Embracing the
Power of Curiosity, which greatly expands on his TED Talk message and shows teachers exactly how they can “be the surgeons of their classrooms” and cultivate curiosity in their students.

Spark Learning will not only challenge your thinking and force you to reconsider long-held beliefs about teaching, it is completely practical and filled with ideas you can use to design powerful lessons. Ramsey doesn’t just show you how these concepts work in his science class, he teaches you how to fish and find these ideas on your own, as well. I would be hard-pressed to believe there is a teacher who wouldn’t finish this book without a whole notepad filled with ways to implement his 3 core rules in all that they do no matter what the subject is that they teach.

In creativity workshops, I always emphasize the need to create a capture system for your new ideas. Ramsey shows you awesome tools you can use to do just that! I also love his insistence that the world around us is literally filled with amazing artifacts that we can modify to captivate kids. This matches the #tlap philosophy of always asking, “How can I use that?” and I think this element of his book that will strongly resonate with Pirate Nation.

After an in-depth exploration of the 3 keys for embracing curiosity, Ramsey has added a 10 Bonus Strategies section that will get your creative juices flowing and be a springboard for you to design even more outrageously powerful lessons. Let’s be serious, if Ramsey can make such powerful points in a 6 minute presentation at TED…just think what he can do in a full book. This is one you need to add to your professional development library…kids will be reaping the benefits as you learn to craft lessons that magnetically draw them in. As Ramsey says it, “Student questions are the seeds of real learning.” Curiosity may have killed the cat…but it captivated the class.

Pick up Spark Learning at Amazon or at Barnes & Noble. Discuss the book at #Spark3 on Twitter.

And enjoy the TED Talk!