[piano intro] - Hello, I'm Nido Qubein, welcome to "Side By Side."

My guest today grew up in a family of professional magicians yet he always saw himself as an educator.

He became an elementary school teacher and made science fun and he did it in a big way.

He holds the Guinness World Record for the largest physics lesson.

His videos on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have more than one billion views and his 27 appearances on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" made him one of her most favorite guests.

Today, you and I will get to meet Mr. Steve Spangler.

- [Presenter] Funding for "Side By Side With Nido Qubein" is made possible by - [Announcer] Here's to those that rise and shine, to friendly faces doing more than their part, and to those who still enjoy the little things.

You make it feel like home.

Ashley HomeStore, this is home.

- [Announcer] For over 60 years, the everyday leaders at the Budd Group have been committed to providing smart, customized facility solutions to our clients and caring for the communities we serve.

[dramatic music] - [Announcer] Coca-Cola Consolidated is honored to make and serve 300 brands and flavors locally, thanks to our teammates.

We are Coca-Cola Consolidated, your local bottle.

[lively music] ♪ - Steve, welcome to "Side By Side."

- Thank you.

- You're known across the country and the world as the guy who makes science cool.

- Cool and fun and all the other things.

One of the things that you have to do early on is you have to have like- - Oh my goodness.

- I know, you have to have the Fire Department close by.

And so as long as the Fire Department is close, that's what happens- - So you have money in one side and a fire in the other?

- It is.

So I wake up in the morning, Nido, like this, I put the lighter fluid over here and then I put the allowance over here.

You never know who you're gonna meet that day, you know what I mean?

And it's in there.

I love checking in at the hotel and saying, "Do you have a place by the fire exit?"

And they usually go, "Ah!"

It's called engagement.

Is that the secret for a teacher is it's called engagement and that's what we're teaching kids how to do.

- And it's important to teach, especially kids as they are growing up, about science, right?

I mean the whole world rotates around our capacity now, technology, all of that, is related to STEM.

- Yeah and it's not so much what they know.

What's so amazing is that my boys used to sit at the dinner table and they'd ask a question and I'd get to answer.

And the day that they start to ask the question, they'd go, "Wait, hold on."

and they reach for the phone and they go, "It's okay, Dad."

All of a sudden that phone has replaced me as the conduit through which information flows, right?

And I'm not that anymore.

I'm the human being and what we do with teachers is try to share with them that you are building those connections.

It's not so much the content, right?

It's asking the question why you're interested in that in the first place?

And only that inspired human being can build those amazing connections to create experiences.

- What got you interested in this in the first place?

- As you said, I grew up in a family of magicians.

So what does that mean?

The difference between a magician and a pizza is that a pizza can feed a family of five.

So I knew that it wasn't gonna be a career, Dr. Qubein.

- Yes, magician doesn't make any money.

Is that what you're saying?

- Not a lot, not a lot along the way.

- They do in Las Vegas.

- Well, that's a whole different thing.

But here is what's fascinating, I know that you'll love this, growing up in a family of magicians, it means that we were surrounded by, I was surrounded as a kid by some pretty big names in magic.

Back in the day, Mark Wilson, Doug Henning, this young kid by the name of David Copperfield would come to the house.

Dad was a consultant.

And so when a group of magicians get together, it's like a group of educators or anybody else, they start with a problem and a solution, right?

And so the problem might be, I got a gig and I need to make the cheerleaders disappear and the elephant appear.

- [Nido] I see.

- And they never say, "Well, that's impossible."

They all look at each other and go, "Oh okay, let's work on that."

And they work backwards.

And so they always solve the problem back- - The outcome first, then the- - Absolutely, huge life lesson.

So I learned the art of engagement by learning how to be a professional magician.

To be classically trained, I learned that engagement.

If you're gonna walk up to a table and possibly do a trick for somebody, you have to learn how, when, why, what the outcome is, how you're gonna make them feel at the end of the trick.

That's the secret of education.

- Yeah.

And you have literally spoken to tens of thousands of teachers, maybe more than that, and by extension, heaven knows how many millions of students have benefited from your leadership in the field.

You actually have seminars where you go by sea and to other countries and take groups of teachers with you.

- Yeah, most of my work now is in professional development because as a teacher, you start in the classroom and the classroom kind of broadened a little bit to television, and so I was working for NBC Television in the early '90s, had a show called "News For Kids".

And so the walls of my classroom got a little bit bigger, correct?

And then there's this thing called the internet and that opened things up and another television show opened things up.

And what I found was that one person speaking and trying to inspire a child, not a bad model, but it's much more rewarding and it's a much better model to teach teachers some of those engagement strategies that they might have heard.

- It's the multiplier effect, for sure.

- Absolutely, but make them the rock star.

After 4,500 school programs, Nido, Nido, all over the country, 4,500 of them, I came home to my wife, Renee, and I said, "I think I'm done with that."

Because a lady- - But you do a lot of large conventions and associations of teachers with thousands of people in the audience.

- Oh, absolutely and there's purpose for all of those.

And I was speaking at a school program and you know that look that your mom gives you when you were bad at church, you know that look like, I got that look from a teacher who was watching the program.

In all those programs, I had never gotten anything like that before.

So at the very end of the program, when the principal was saying goodbye to the couple hundred kids who were in the audience, I went around to ask her a question.

I said, "Ma'am, I'm sorry, I think I offended you."

And she said, "You know, you come rolling in here with your little bag of tricks and the kids gave you a standing ovation."

She said, "I've been here for 22 years, I've never gotten a standing ovation."

She goes, "This is hard work, it's not a game."

And it set me back.

It caused me to reflect for a second to think, you know what?

I didn't come in with anything that was special.

I had soda bottles and things you would find in a maker space, right?

What if I could teach her some of the things that I had learned to engage with children?

Could she be a better teacher and could I be a better teacher of teachers?

And so that's when all my work changed to professional development for teachers and those seminars that you're talking about.

- So really you're an interpreter of science.

- Absolutely, a science communicator.

When I started in this business, there was no such thing.

Now there are university degrees in Science Communication, as somebody who can bridge that gap between the scientist and the public, and to be able to communicate in a way that it increases awareness, respects what the scientist is doing, and engages that viewer so that they'll be interested, ultimately possibly fund what they're doing as well.

- Do you believe that you can actually take someone who does not have a leaning towards science and somehow inspire them to become more interested in science and get engaged in science, is that a possibility?

- Absolutely.

Because I think our traditional way of thinking of science was it's always a discipline, I like chemistry, I like physics.

You know, STEM today, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, as I teach teachers, that's not what it means at all.

That's what the public might say it is, that's the label we've put on it.

But if you ask any business leader who has put millions of dollars into STEM or STEAM, the best ones will tell you, "You know what it means?

It means to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers."

That's what STEM means.

STEM is all about communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity.

And who doesn't like that?

So really what we're doing is teaching teachers to allow children to find their passion, to fall in love with wonder and discovery and exploration.

That's science, right?

- I see.

- And that's not a difficult thing to do.

It's hard to just find the way that each child resonates.

A masterful teacher can do that.

- Why don't more teachers do that?

Is it because they didn't learn that in the School of Education, they don't have access to these kind of resources?

- Maybe they were most afraid of it.

You ask an elementary teacher, what do you not want to teach and science is at the top of the list.

You ask early childhood educators, what's difficult and science.

However, almost all my work today with early childhood and elementary education starts with getting them to relive that childhood.

If you would come to a seminar of mine, you would see, Nido, you've seen some of the things that I do, that they play immediately, they're involved.

- It's fun, it's exciting.

- Bags appear, the color changes, they get to rekindle that child-like enthusiasm.

And once they rediscover that without somebody feeding it to them, that self-awareness, they realize they can do that for somebody else.

That's what makes it so exciting.

- When does a child have to get tuned into the discovery of the joy of science?

- Before they're seven.

- [Nido] Before they're seven?

- All the research indicates that they have made a decision even subconsciously before the age of seven years old.

So that's why early childhood education and all the work that's being done in early childhood education and science museums and children's museums around the country, so STEM, STEAM focused right now.

We need to get them to fall in love with it at that age.

They don't have to show us mastery in anything, they just have to have a positive experience.

And they say, the research, the National Science Foundation came out and said that children before the age of seven who have a positive experience in the sciences are 70% more likely to take a science course later on in their K through 12 education, I mean as an elective, you can be fed something.

But that's startling to me and so that's why it's so important to engage those early childhood teachers.

- How much credence do you go to the notion that we're born with a certain leaning to this subject or that subject?

- I think there's some but really, you're a product of the people that you're around.

- I mean, Steve, I never did well in science just as- - But you're such a critical thinker.

- Well, I am but- - You think like a scientist.

- I struggled in science.

In college, my first course, now English was one of the detriment for me in the sense that I couldn't speak it and so it was difficult to understand what they were saying.

But Mrs. Martin was my teacher and at the end of the semester, she gave me a C and I thanked God for that C. And later I realized, she didn't give me a C for competence, that was just a C for compassion, just get the boy out of my class.

- And what did she teach?

She taught science?

- Biology.

- Biology, okay.

- My wife on the other hand, as you know, is science all the way through, all her life, she graduated science degree, she loved science.

We're different in the way we approach these subjects.

So I wonder how much influence, that's the question I'm asking, how much influence does the teacher have?

How much influence does watching you do what you do so beautifully in front of an audience have on creating that tendency to want to know more, learn more, become more?

- Influence, as you would say it, I've learned from you so much over the years, but the impact and influence that people have in the non-education setting is just as important as a teacher who is inspiring.

For example, to see mom and dad take an interest in something that they saw online, something on television.

Our Saturday morning television show, don't tell them, but it's really for parents, not for kids, because I want to show parents how to turn their kitchen and do something amazing in their kitchen or their garage into the STEM lab.

Imagine a mom or a dad who goes out and in an afternoon, makes a hovercraft in the garage or is able to do something amazing in the kitchen using common household materials.

When they get hooked, the child gets hooked, they can hardly wait to share it.

That's viral learning.

That's viral teaching.

You know I tell teachers often, if it gets to the dinner table, you win.

If what you did in class was not an activity, because as you've taught me, activities are transactional, I can buy an activity, but if what you create is an experience, as you've said, that's transformational.

And those words rang true to me so many years ago when I heard you say that and I thought, how does that apply in my life?

And I've used that as a guiding principle for educators all over the world.

- Where do you get all your ideas from?

I mean to appear on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show", for example, 27 times?

- [Steve] Yeah.

[laughing] - You have to come up with new ideas.

- You got to do new material, right?

- New material.

- Yeah.

- You just go into sleep and you think of something?

You have a lab, you mess around with stuff?

Are you Thomas Edison at work?

- A little of all of that.

So my wife will tell you there are burn marks on the ceiling.

And that just means that you're practicing a little bit, of course, a little bit, but you're always searching, you're always looking.

I got that wonderful opportunity as a science speaker to be invited into schools all over the country.

You don't go to 4,500 schools and do those programs without meeting some exceptional teachers.

You also find some teachers who might be struggling and you learn that way as well, but people are so willing to share.

And that's that thing, professionals, sometimes in education, you hear somebody say, well I just steal ideas.

Educators, they're not paid a lot, we just have to steal ideas.

Well, that's not what professionals do.

So I try to instill in educators, we share, we don't steal.

I'd hate to go to a doctor.

- You collaborate.

- We collaborate.

I'd hate to have a doctor say, I'm gonna work on your knee, Steve.

I stole an idea from the guy down the way, no, we're not gonna do that.

So to your point, it's so important that teachers share.

And so when we do these seminars and workshops and these kind of hands on learning institutes, new ideas come of that and you can hardly wait to scribble down more ideas, and one begets the next that begins the next.

Imagine this, I took a group of teachers who were learning to present to other teachers and they were gonna do programs on the road, they were gonna speak at some teacher conferences.

And on the very last day of the conference, they showed up and there was a van waiting for 'em and we took 'em to a local Walmart and I met 'em in the parking lot and I said, "Your luggage didn't appear, the box of tricks are gone, but you do have $50 in your pocket and there's a Walmart right there.

I'll see you back in the hotel in two hours, it's showtime."

It's amazing to see the creativity that comes out.

What's so amazing about that is it's all using household materials.

When a child or another, a human being in general gets to see you do something amazing with household materials, well, that's viral, you can hardly wait to share it with somebody else.

That's why the Mentos and Diet Coke trick that we did for the very first time on YouTube in 2005, YouTube was only three months old, that was YouTube's first viral science video.

Why?

Because everybody could get a roll of Mentos and a bottle of Diet Coke and entertain their friends in the neighborhood.

It's wonderful.

- But Steve, I've known you for many years.

You are a business person, too.

You took a lot of these experiments and demonstrations and you've developed all kinds of kits that people could buy as gifts for their children and use them in schools.

What made you think that I could duplicate it in this way?

And are you still doing that?

- My grandfather was an educator, a teacher in the Denver public schools.

I remember as a young kid, grandpa saying, "Teachers make so much money that sometimes we get a second job."

And so grandpa had an antique store and it kind of resonated with me.

And so second or third year into teaching, I was being invited to present some teacher workshops.

And so my wife, Renee and I would go to the store and buy a couple things and put 'em in Ziploc bags and we'd make 'em that night and then give them to the teachers.

And a teacher said, I wish I had been so smart, "You know instead of telling us to go to the store and buy that stuff, you should probably put it in a bag and sell it to us for $5 or $10."

And I thought, well, maybe that could work.

And so Steve Spangler Science was born in 1993 and we put together almost 350 products and so those were sold around the world.

And the joy of doing that was to be able to create it and to watch a teacher use it in his or her classroom, make it better, and we could make it better.

We sold that company to Excelligence Learning Corporation in 2018 and that's like giving away a child.

So those items are still out there and it's great to see that they still live and I get a chance to be able to still create.

So it's wonderful.

- Must give you a great feeling of satisfaction to know that you have multiplied what you do in such a way that so many other people were influenced by it, families, students, schools, teachers, et cetera.

You ever get someone who says, "I saw you 20 years ago and now I am running this department, I'm owning this business, I invented this product."?

- When you teach long enough, it's one of those amazing privileges that you get as an educator.

I love being able to speak to young teachers, teachers who are fresh out of college, to be able to look at 'em and say, "there's a wonderful thing that's gonna happen to you down the road is when you're a great teacher and you'll all become great teachers that somebody will tap you on your shoulder sometime and look into your eyes and say, "Do you remember me?"

And you have to always go, "Mmm, I think I remember."

And when they say that, they're honoring you.

At that point, it's honor, acknowledgement, respect, all those things that come together.

It's hard as a teacher of that many years to not well up a little bit and cry just a little bit because you realize that somebody comes back.

How rewarding can a career be to have somebody come back and say you planted the seed and somebody actually took care of it and watered it and it came to fruition.

- Yeah, you've worked with a lot of teachers.

What makes a good teacher?

- The ability to be vulnerable, to always want to learn, to never have the, to almost play a character I think, to be able to make sure that the students think that they own the discovery.

Love music and a great jazz musician told me one time, we were coming out of Preservation Hall in New Orleans, that wonderful place, and a guy who was playing the trumpet said, he said, "thank you for the wonderful show tonight."

I said, "What keeps you going?"

And he said, "Jazz is wonderful because", he says, "I know where I'm gonna start and I know where I'm gonna finish every night", he says, "I just don't know what's in between."

And he says, "That's what keeps bringing me back every day."

And I thought, again, I always do that, well how does that apply to my life?

And that's a teacher.

I know where I'm gonna start the lesson and I know where I have to finish, it's just the beauty and the joy of discovery and the joy of learning is all the ups and downs in between.

- 'Cause that's dependent on who's there, the interaction with them, the responses.

- It's like playing an instrument.

It's changing it up a little bit.

Jazz is a beautiful example of what that looks like.

So a great teacher is able to do that, but you can't do that straight out of the shoots.

I taught in the classroom for 11 years and my principal told me after a couple years, she goes, "you still aren't very good."

She honestly said, "You're still not very good, but I believe that great teachers are made by the teacher next door.

And these 27 people are gonna help you become a great teacher."

I didn't get a classroom needle for 11 years.

When I say I was a traditional teacher, I was on an AV cart.

Remember those?

You used to put it in film projector.

She was brilliant though, She had me put my demonstrations, my materials, to be of service to the people that were at that school.

- You were a nomadic teacher?

- Yeah, an itinerant professor.

And I would roll from room to room to room.

And she was so brilliant, every year, I never got a classroom.

And after 11 years she retired, and at her retirement, I remember hugging her and saying, "Dr. Charlton, I'm sorry I didn't make it into a classroom, but you sure taught me a lot."

And she looked right at me and she said, "Steve Spangler, you're never gonna get a classroom."

And I said, "But you said every year I'd be a teacher."

And she goes, "You were a teacher.

You just needed these 27 teachers to make you a great teacher."

- [Nido] Oh wow.

- Because she said, "Great teachers are made by the teacher next door."

And doesn't that just speak volumes to these new teachers coming out of college.

- That's applicable to anything, right?

Great business people, great leaders, et cetera.

Tell me this, Steve, There's a lot of chatter in America today about the importance of education on the one hand and the, what some would characterize as the lack of excellence in education on the other hand, especially in the early years.

What is in your mind, and I'm not suggesting every school is that way, I'm simply suggesting this is a topic that people discuss a lot, businesses today acknowledge that, education plays a major role in the development and evolution of a human being who then becomes a business person or an employee in that corporation.

First of all, do you agree with my premise that there is such chatter?

And second, what are we gonna do about it?

- I think it's a tough question to answer because there's so many variables that are there.

What you're actually describing is an experiment.

And we know that a failure for an experiment is multiple variables.

You've got to focus on one variable, see if we can change that outcome.

So we're looking at so many different things there.

I think it starts on one hand in treating teachers like professionals and asking them to behave like professionals.

And so when they get to share those experiences that business people would share, that they're not fudging the records a little bit to sneak out for professional development.

I hate to tell you that but there are teachers in this world- - It's a question of resources and compensation?

- Well, not as much compensation as just the internal way that they start to think of themselves as an educator.

I think that many years, we've always said, well, I'm just a teacher.

The word just doesn't fit in there anywhere, I am a teacher.

And the important role that they play, the significance that they have in those lives, part of my job is, well I teach science of course, but part of my job around the country is to sometimes look at a teacher in the eyes and give 'em a hug, either physically or just to look at them and say, "You're doing the right thing.

You're on the right track.

I know you've been doing it for 23 years, it's beautiful right now."

and sometimes they need that.

Children need to see excellence as well.

Our community needs to see teachers who are making a profound impact in the lives of the children that they serve.

And those companies who are providing hundreds of millions of dollars in education dollars to schools are looking for teachers who are inspired themselves and will inspire that next generation of scientists and engineers.

That's really what STEM is all about.

- So Steve, I have, I have chosen not to use the word teacher.

I've chosen in my world to choose the words enabler of learning.

And the reason I do that is because, and I want you to tell me where I'm wrong, the interpretation of language is important for me.

So teachers deliver, they say things, they are the communicators of the material.

An enabler of learning is one who looks at you, your needs, your fears, your goals, your aspirations, and adapts what they want to say in a manner that you understand it, you comprehend it, and therefore you act upon it.

So there is a different mindset to enabling versus, enabling in a good way in terms of leading and inspiring.

- Absolutely, it's that character that I was talking about.

You say it more eloquently than I do, but I love that idea of an enabler of learning, somebody who can help children make it their discovery, right?

Again, the old way of teaching was I am the conduit through which information flows and the child needs to learn.

But a masterful teacher in the classroom, somebody who was just masterful at his or her craft, it's almost as if they'd done it the very first time, the child had no idea that this is what we were doing today.

- That's true of a speaker, that's true of a performer, yes.

- But when they own that discovery, that child becomes inspired.

And when you enable them to, they forget what we teach 'em, but they'll never forget how we made them feel.

- They want to learn more and grow because of it.

- Every single time.

- Fascinating, what you do is fascinating, the impact that you do it with is amazing.

I thank you for being with me today on "Side by Side", Steve Spangler.

- Thank you.

- [Presenter] Funding for "Side by Side" with Nido Qubein is made possible by - [Announcer] Here's to those that rise and shine, to friendly faces doing more than their part, and to those who still enjoy the little things.

You make it feel like home.

Ashley HomeStore, this is home.

- [Announcer] For over 60 years, the everyday leaders at the Budd Group have been committed to providing smart, customized facility solutions to our clients and caring for the communities we serve.

- [Announcer] Coca-Cola Consolidated is honored to make and serve 300 brands and flavors locally, thanks to our teammates.

We are Coca-Cola Consolidated, your local bottler.