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Diann Musial
Diann Musial

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News Release

Contact: Mark McGowan, NIU Office of Public Affairs
(815) 753-9472

September 27, 2005

Professor to encourage new theory:
teachers as playwrights, students as actors

DeKalb — Diann Musial realized early on in her four-year journey as a Northern Illinois University Presidential Teaching Professor that she wanted a challenge – more specifically, a self-examination.

Never comfortable with courses taught totally online, she decided to immerse herself in one as an adjunct instructor at a certified online graduate university.

“I studied, I read, I participated, and I hated it,” Musial said.

“My strengths as a teacher tend to come from the interaction face-to-face with students. I am a natural in terms of just noticing body language, reacting to tone of voice, listening carefully, both with my ears and my eyes, and then dynamically coming up with brilliant words – that's a joke, but I say things I find I didn't think I knew,” she added. “It's something that brings out a talent from me. Without that context, I'm dull and uninteresting.”

Thoughts of context “catapulted” her in another direction: What context works best to engage students in meaningful learning?

Well, Musial learned, the play's the thing.

Musial, a professor in the NIU College of Education's Department of Leadership, Educational Psychology and Foundations, will lead a seminar on her PTP experience from noon to 1 p.m. Monday, Oct. 3, in the Capitol Room of the Holmes Student Center.

Vice Provost Earl “Gip” Seaver also will offer a history of the Presidential Teaching Professorships. Refreshments are served at 11:30 a.m. All are invited. Call (815) 753-1085 for more information.

“Rather than try to just speak about my teaching philosophy and who and what I believe in,” she said, “I'm trying to reflect on these four years, on my own development and change, because that's a gift the university gives you with some extra funding and a semester off.”

Musial will focus on her notion – “the theme that captured my imagination” – that teachers should regard their roles in the classroom as playwrights tackle the empty page.

Each lesson is like a play, she said, with three acts: a hook in Act I, finding a means to an end in Act II and presenting a resolution in Act III. The students, of course, are the actors.

“I believe if you place students in a context that is meaningful to them and that has some stakes connected to it that they buy into – real stakes, that this has something to do with life, that maybe at the end of this experience they could actually make a change in the world, or in their profession or in their home – they learn in spite of the teaching,” she said. “It doesn't matter what their level is. It works on all levels of intellectual ability. Human beings are natural thinkers.”

Teachers who find compelling hooks for Act I will gain the attention of their audience, she said. Problems work well, she said, as do calls for dreaming up new inventions or products or imagining ways to do something better or to create something beautiful.

At this point, however, teachers need to rearrange their own thinking.

Educators typically examine mandated learning outcomes and create lesson plans to meet those goals, she said. Teachers in the “playwright” method spend Act II finding and using teaching devices that will advance the hooks.

Act III provides the performance assessment component for teachers as their students solve the problems unveiled in the opening scenes.

Musial, who won a grant to test her theories in Rockford and Elgin schools, discovered a perfect example during her time in the elementary and secondary classrooms: Basketball legend Michael Jordan raised the curtain and effectively yelled “Action!” when he sent letters to students seeking their help in making school cafeteria menus more nutritious.

“As a teacher, this is where you say, ‘In order to get a better nutritional menu, I've got to make sure they see the new food pyramid.' Suddenly, they're reading about nutrition, but now it's in the context of what will help them decide what nutritional changes to make,” she said. “Act II is what I think most teachers know how to do: reading, looking at videos, working in groups, answering problems. The difference is you now cluster these old-fashioned learning tasks for these kids in a way that relates back to the hook.”

Students then were allowed, with permission of the cafeteria staff, to add their more-nutritious selection to the menu for three months. Everyone in the school community then became the audience and the critics as the group's teacher was served a glowing opportunity for assessment.

“It connects all these good practices into a larger context. It's not dependent on brilliant lectures,” she said. “Students given context that really matters to them take it more seriously.”

Musial hopes her own audience at the Oct. 3 seminar will ponder whether her method will translate to their own lecture halls on campus.

“I will be enthusiastic about the process I went through and hope for honest, reflective response to it, pro or con,” she said. “If for some reason it doesn't fit for others, then I will learn from that, and they will, too.”

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