Anyone who walked unawares into the Hart Auditorium just after two o’clock on February 24 would have wondered what was happening. The scene was typical of a University-wide gathering, with thousands of students seated and attentive. But the sound didn’t fit the scene. If you closed your eyes, you felt sure it was a classroom discussion among perhaps 50 students—maybe 80, tops.

The discussion leader was President Clark. Opening your eyes, you could see his face on the two large monitors at the south end, the ones used for devotional. But, looking away from the screens, it was hard to find him. He wasn’t on the stage, or even on a low, ad hoc rostrum on the playing floor. It took a full sweep—or two—of the auditorium to spot him, as he roamed the four corners of the floor and even climbed up among the seats of the lower concourse.

His roaming was purposeful, driven by the search for students who had raised their hands to answer questions. Those students were likewise hard to find, especially the ones standing in the sloping sections of the auditorium, where standing up didn’t make them much more visible. President Clark had help, though: a small troop of ushers with colored flags, who spotted the standing students and ran to mark the locations like officials in a shot put competition.

Wide aisles and a broad stride allowed President Clark get to the designated spot quickly. The ensuing discussion was typical of what can be heard in the world’s best classrooms. The students commented confidently, as though speaking from solid preparation. Many used personal experiences to illustrate points pertinent to the discussion; a few even built on the comments of others. President Clark’s assistants at the south end of the auditorium captured each comment on whiteboards, which were displayed on the large screens via closed-circuit TV cameras. The discussion was taut—as soon one person had finished speaking there was another with a complementary comment. The hour flew, and President Clark had to wrap things up before anyone seemed to want him to.

There were at least two learning achievements that day in the Hart. One was deepened understanding about the mission and operating model of BYU-Idaho. As students articulated that mission—or at least heard their peers do so—they learned more deeply than would have been possible in an ordinary discourse from the pulpit.

The other learning outcome was more personal: the students enjoyed a unique experience with their university president. As one of them said, “I felt like I was in a classroom with him.”

How It Was Done

The curious observer couldn’t help wonder how it was done, how President Clark made thousands—roughly one-fifth of the student body—feel as though they been with him in a classroom. In fact, the apparent miracle was really only a matter of imaginative innovation, and of building on strengths.

For instance, President Clark was able to roam casually through the throng thanks to a nearly invisible traveling microphone, one mounted with clear tubes around his head and neck. (It’s the kind that singers use on stage, a reminder—no doubt unintended—of the President’s brief stint in a teenage rock band.)

There were also five closed-circuit TV cameras, rather than the usual three used for devotional. The five cameras were strategically placed and artfully operated so that, at any given time, one camera could display his face on the large screen regardless of where he was in the auditorium. In fact, the cameras’ views were so comprehensive that one of them caught a completely unanticipated shot. As President Clark walked an aisle on the main floor, he stopped and said, “Hey, that’s cute: there’s a baby here.” Sure enough, one of the students in attendance was a young mother who had brought her infant in a baby carrier. As President Clark stopped to compliment the mother, a camera with just the right angle captured the baby carrier at her feet.

The pedagogical innovation wasn’t all “high-tech.” For instance, the assistants who delivered traveling microphones to the students were working with the ordinary, hand-held kind. The colored flags they carried looked as though they might have been hand-crafted from wood dowels and construction paper.

Probably the most important keys to success weren’t “innovative” at all. One was preparation, the kind that every BYU-Idaho should do before coming to class. President Clark worked from only a handful of slides, conceptual diagrams of the University’s strategy and the way that it is advancing with time. These slides were made available on-line, just as devotional scriptures are.

Many of the students also had a natural leg up in terms of preparation for the day’s discussion. At one point, for example, President Clark asked for a show of hands from all who have enjoyed leadership experiences at the University; nearly everyone put a hand up. Many of these students have encountered elements of the University’s mission and strategy as volunteers in sponsored activities such as athletics and academic societies. And nearly everyone present had the benefit of past devotionals in which the same principles of mission have been taught.

Another key to success was President Clark’s building on his personal teaching strengths. The Harvard Business School, where he taught for 30 years, has all but perfected the art of involving students in classroom discussion. As President Clark paced the Hart, drawing insights from the students and leading a collaborative learning process, he was doing one of the things he does best.

What We Can Learn

What we can learn from that experience in the Hart? At first glance, potential applications to the typical classroom seem limited. For instance, class sizes, even for our largest Foundations courses, will be limited to 85; the University’s target for average class size is 30. From that perspective, techniques for teaching 2,400 aren’t obviously useful. And even if they were, few of us can draw from a heritage of discussion management as rich as President Clark’s.

Yet his approach to Thursday’s throng is full of lessons for all would-be learners. One lesson is the power adaptation. President Clark had to adopt his usual teaching approach in many ways. For one thing, he was working without a “case,” the foundation of the Harvard Business School classroom discussion. Rather than receiving a detailed statement of a hypothetical and being asked, “What would you do?”, the students had to be helped to see their lives as “the case.” The questions posed encouraged them to apply the University’s mission and strategy to themselves. Generating those questions required President Clark to adapt his style, as the Learning Model may often require us to do. The particular adaptation—asking students to “liken” principles to their own lives—can be applied to almost all subjects.

The other thing that President Clark had to do was to take the adaptation a step at a time. He didn’t go directly from a traditional classroom. There was an intermediate step, namely an all-employee meeting in which he led a discussion among “just” 1,000 people. In that instance, he had the benefit not only of a smaller group than the 2,400 gathered in the Hart, but also of more careful preparation; the employees had been challenged not only to read a detailed set of materials, but also to prepare for the large meeting via small-group discussion.

That intermediate meeting also didn’t require as much calisthenics—rather than running among the throng as he would in the Hart, President Clark stayed on the rostrum of the Taylor Chapel. He did, though, pilot a new approach to capturing the discussion. An assistant transcribed comments, which were displayed via computer on the chapel’s screen; temporarily, it became the world’s largest whiteboard.

Ironically, that innovation, which worked well in the Taylor Chapel, wasn’t an option in the Hart; the technology there wouldn’t support it. So President Clark had to improvise yet again, with assistants writing on standard whiteboards and those images being projected by the cameras. That worked well, except for one thing: as he raced around the auditorium, President Clark forgot that the white boards were there. As he later confided, “I blew it; I didn’t use them.” Using the white boards would have helped everyone see how their comments related and built a sum greater than the whole of its parts. But even in this mistake, there’s another lesson: no class is perfect; continuous improvement is part of the game.

Perhaps the most important lesson is the one already noted—that the Learning Model enhances what we already do well. You could see that day in the Hart the old President Clark Clark of the Harvard Business School, walking and talking and listening reflectively. There was no sense that he had, in the course of applying the Learning Model, given up the things he has always done so well. But he was clearly better than before. Pedagogical innovation, driven by a desire to better serve the students, had brought with it something else—the power of the Spirit. He was, in the end, playing not just to his personal strengths, but to the divine source of strength, the one available to us all.