Lots of Ink: A Nobelist (further) undermines the big-shot lecturer as essential to teaching er
A number of outlets ran with the main news from an unsurprising, but remarkable anyway, report on how to teach college physics. In Science on Friday a physics Nobelist, Carl Wieman best known for his role in confining Bose-Einstein condensates in the laboratory, reported that people like him giving lecture is an okay way to teach college students. A better way, his study concludes, is to let teaching assistants ride herd and interact with students as they wrestle and collaborate over focussed challenges that compel them to embrace new information. In a one-week competition between traditional teaching and collaborative, interactive supervised learning without a professor in sight, students in the latter group crushed those in the former when they all took a standard quiz.
(By the way, Wieman is not only merely a Nobel-Prize winning physicist working for the White House who is not named Chu, interesting as that is. Now on leave from U. of Colorado and U. of British Columbia , he has a distinctive, fascinating early background. Check his Nobel Foundation autobiography and its passages on the backwoods of Oregon.)
While this topic is, strictly, one that might fit the education beat, many of the bylines with the stories are those of science reporters.
Stories (mostly filed Thur May 12):
- AP – Seth Borenstein: Study: It’s not teacher, but method that matters ; His first outside source notes this study is not the first to have this general message – but coming from a Nobelist, and in the nation’s leading scientific journal – its splash may be biggest.
- PostMedia News via Montreal Gazette – Margaret Munro: New teaching techniques earn top marks for boosting scores ;
- NYTimes – Benedict Carey: Improving the Science of Teaching Science ; Good for Carey – he finds an educational psychologist and another authority who see holes in this study’s set-up that take the edge of its lessons.
- ScienceNow – Jeffrey Mervis: A Better Way to Teach? ;
- Canadian Press – Anne-Marie Tobin: Involve students in big university classes instead of lecturing Nobel laureate ; Tobin finds another professor in Canada who finds a reason to discount – but not dismiss entirely – the results. That is, the novelty of the new method of teaching may have been a small thrill, hence more engaging, an effect that would fade if it were the norm.
- Voice of America – Rosanne Skirble: College Lecture Classes Need Overhaul ;
Grist for the Mill:
Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative, UBC ; UBC Press Release ; U. Colorado Press Release ;
The gist of his teaching results are not new. Old fashioned problem sets seldom seem like fun puzzles for teams to solve. But done right, that’s how learning can occur – make them more like real life job assignments. What will be new is when the education establishment, not to mention students, embraces the idea that formal, pedagogic teaching is not as effective as letting students, with guidance of course, and maybe broken into little interacting teams, try to solve multi-faceted problems. The process is messy – in fact the environment is a little bit like a bunch of kids messing around trying to adapt a lawnmower engine to propel a race car. But I bet there are lots of electrical and mechanical engineers who could say they didn’t quite get the interactions of motors and actuators and rheostats and transformers and such stuff until they joined a team in college building a solar powered car for a competition, or something like that.
I was on a NSF-sponsored review group a dozen years ago that assessed progress of a chemistry curriculum reform, called the ModularChem Consortium. The preliminary results were that those who spent time in small teams trying to understand acid rain or design better computer chips knew more about chemistry at the end of the year than those listening in lecture halls, plodding through textbooks, and running prescribed experiments at the lab bench. But it was not an easy sell. Many and especially the best students under the old system still said they preferred a regular class – because that seemed like school, not like just messing around. Plus, one imagines, they got into good colleges by excelling at formal and rote learning, so they intuitively stuck with what they knew got them the best grades. I waited to see team-learning reforms sweep college chemistry classrooms. If it is happening, let me know.
The main lesson of the paper published Friday got handled well by many outlets. Several reporters to their credit took the time to round up a few reactions with a skeptical side.
One additional angle that went unexploited concerns how teaching of this kind would go over at public universities and colleges, and with the taxpayers and lawmakers who help fund such schools. Professors have reasonably handsome incomes compared to the average Joe. But at least they have to teach – a chore anybody can understand. Doing research sounds to many ears like getting paid for a hobby. If it turns out that smart if grubby grad students can shepherd students toward knowledge just as well as those fancy tenured ladies and gentlemen, what happens next? The teaching assistants get big raises and get to eat lunch first at the faculty club with its linen napkins? The professors have to form unions to get a living wage? They’d have to live entirely on grants and other soft money, while the junior members of their research groups get to be the ones that future Nobelists remember as the inspirations of their undergrad years? This could mean a pecking-order revolution in the academy of learning!
OK, that’s mostly silly – to be tediously more serious, professors presumably would ramrod the overall system and take part in the interactive rigamarole, and one would still need the old guard to run the lab groups where the TAs spend most of their time gaining the chops to do big time science. Nonetheless, the caste systems at universities might evolve dramatically.
- Charlie Petit
