A popular YouTube channel, Vsauce, continues to gain followers and fans in classrooms across the nation. 

English, Latin, and writing teacher Jessica Lahey looks at YouTube sensation Michael Stevens and he explains why students enjoy watching his educational videos in an article on TheAtlantic.com. 

With videos including, "What If The Earth Stopped Spinning?", "What If The Moon Was a Disco Ball?", and "Why Are Things Creepy?", "Stevens understands that the best teachers don’t just hurl vast shovelfuls of wisdom at their students, hoping some of it sticks as it whizzes by," Lahey said.

"Great teachers know that education is a long game, and much of the time, the lesson at hand is not the final destination but an opportunity to contextualize and support future learning," she said. "Stevens does hurl a lot of information at his viewers, but he also creates a massive net for his audience so they will be able to catch and hold on to his teaching."

Lahey said, viewers don’t learn from a Vsauce video "because you put out a lot of effort to do so; you learn because Stevens makes the information matter."

"This, Stevens explained to me, is his cardinal rule: “to teach so that people don’t even know that they are learning,” she said. Stevens also shared some "trade secrets" with Lahey. The first tip was to "know your subject well enough to explain it to someone else."

"You have to be able to explain the topic, so that other people can understand it," he said. "If you can’t do that, then you don’t really know it. What I’ve found is that even the most common things are things that we think we know, until we are really asked to explain it to other people or to say exactly what it is...I think you really have to step back and force yourself to really explain something such that no one can have a problem with the explanation. That’s when you really get into full understanding, when you are really ready to teach something to someone else."

Here is one of Vsauce's videos, "What If The Moon Was a Disco Ball?":

Read the full story. 

Article by Kassondra Granata, EducationWorld Contributor