Gad Allon

Every semester, I get asked the same question by colleagues. How do you get them to come? I am not trying to brag, but attendance in my classes runs close to one hundred percent. I do take attendance, and the students know I take it. I do not grade it. The only thing I grade is class contribution. In principle, that means a student has to be in the room in order to contribute. In practice, most of the students who show up never contribute on any given day, and they show up anyway. 

I want to write down what I actually do, because the answer is less mysterious than people think, and because I suspect we have made the problem worse for ourselves by misunderstanding what a classroom is for.

Let me start with the obvious. The content is new. I do not teach from a textbook. I do post my slides, and the students can download them, and they are welcome to do so. The slides are deliberately thin, a chart here, a question there, a phrase to anchor the next move. They are not lecture notes, and they were never designed to be. On their own, they look like the cover art of an album with no songs. If a student misses class and tries to reconstruct the session from the deck, the student is left with headings and silences. This is on purpose. Most of the development happens on the board or in the discussion, and it cannot be reconstructed by reading anything later. Coming to class is the only place the material actually exists.

I tell the students on day one why I do this. What they will remember from this course, six months from now and six years from now, is what they wrote down themselves. In their own hand. With their own shorthand. With their own arrows and question marks in the margin. The act of writing it down is what does the etching. A polished slide sitting on a server etches nothing into anyone. So I keep the slides thin and I leave the work for the students to do in their notebooks. They usually nod. Some of them look mildly offended. By week three, they are taking notes like their life depends on it, and in a small way, it does.

The second thing is that the classroom is primarily for discussion. Even when I introduce something new, I introduce it through a sequence of questions. I put a problem on the board, ask what they would do, listen to three or four answers, push back, ask a follow-up, let someone else answer, and only then label the idea. By the time I write the term on the board, they have already met it twice. They feel like they discovered it, because in a real sense, they did. This is slower than lecturing. It is also stickier, and it is much harder to replicate by watching a recording at one and a half speed.

I share lived experience. This is the part that gets undersold among faculty. Our students have access to every textbook in the field. They have access to LLMs that will explain anything at any level of depth they want. What they cannot find anywhere else is wisdom from people who actually did the work. I worked in industry, I consult, I sit on boards. When I tell them what I saw at a company last month, or what a CEO told me on a call, or what went wrong in a real supply chain in 2021, I am giving them something that does not exist in any book or model. They lean in. You can see them lean in. Faculty who have something similar, including their own experience navigating the world, whether it is doing research or any practical work, should use it without apology. Increasingly this is the comparative advantage of a human teacher.

I am strict on time and on technology. Class starts at the minute, and once I close the door, no one else comes in. The only exception is a student who emailed me in advance with a real reason. In that case, I write the name on the board before class begins, and when the student walks in, I cross it out, slowly and with a small ceremony, so the rest of the room understands that there is a system and that the system has a memory. Anyone who tries to slip in without the prior email gets asked, politely, to leave at the door. You have to do this two or three times in front of a hundred students. After that, you do not have to do it again. 

No laptops. I only allow for a tablet for note-taking, and I check. Phones are away. If a phone comes out, I will stop the entire class and look at the student until it goes back in the bag, and I will do it every single time. Students who are physically present should be mentally present. Anything less, and I am pretending, and they are pretending, and we are wasting each other’s afternoon. The interesting thing is that students do not resent these rules. They are mostly relieved by them. Many of them have lost the muscle of sitting through ninety minutes without checking their pocket, and they appreciate a room where someone else holds the line for them.

The umbrella idea behind all of this is that the classroom is a sacred place. I mean it almost literally. For three hours, once a week, we are doing something together. So I treat it that way. I plan the session as a run of show. I know what the opening question is, what the first transition is, where the turn in the second half lands, and where the rabbit holes are allowed to wander. I keep the energy high. I bring in something from the news that morning. I tell stories about my kids, about a stupid mistake I made on a project ten years ago, about an argument I had with a colleague last week. These bits are the connective tissue that turns a ninety-minute session into one experience rather than a stack of slides.

A note for colleagues who try this and find it does not work right away. It will not. The first semester I taught this way, I went home convinced I was a disaster. The students were quiet, the discussions were thin, I was filling the silence with my own voice, and arriving home with a headache. It takes a year or two for your reputation to do the work for you, and for the first cohort to tell the next cohort what kind of class this is. After that, the room arrives ready, and your job is simply to deserve them.

A final point. None of what I described requires charisma. I know plenty of charismatic teachers whose students still skip. What it requires is a decision about what the classroom is for, and the willingness to enforce that decision with small, boring, repeated acts. Start on time. Keep the slides thin. Make them write the notes themselves. Ask a question before you give an answer. Put the phone away. Tell a real story. Do this for a few years, and the students will come, because at some point, they will figure out that this is the only place they can get what you are giving them.

Gad Allon is the professor of operations, information, and decisions at the Wharton School.

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This essay continues the series that began in the fall of 1994 as the joint creation of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Lindback Society for Distinguished Teaching. 

See https://almanac.upenn.edu/talk-about-teaching-and-learning-archive for previous essays.