At Harvard, teachers get a lesson

February 06, 2012|Mary Carmichael, Globe Staff

CAMBRIDGE - Pop quiz question one: You have a metal plate with a hole in it. You microwave the plate. Does the hole grow, shrink, or stay the same?

Question two: If Harvard University physicist Eric Mazur lectures a class of highly intelligent students on how atoms move away from each other in response to heat, then asks them question one, how many give the wrong answer?

Most of them, it turns out, because one of the least effective ways to teach is to stand in an auditorium and deliver a monologue on facts, as Mazur did in explaining the motion of atoms. In other words: Lectures, the dominant mode of instruction in classrooms, just do not work, no matter how smart your students are.

On Friday, Mazur posed question one to a group of Harvard professors who indeed mostly got the answer wrong. Then he proceeded to show the group exactly why his lecture had been so ineffective, by teaching in a different way. (More on what he did - and on the correct answer to question one - in a bit.)

The group had convened in Harvard’s Northwest Science Building for a one-day symposium on learning and teaching, the first salvo in a $40 million attempt by Harvard to rethink education.

The initiative’s proximate goal is to make Harvard’s teachers better, but the ultimate goal is much more ambitious: to improve education beyond Harvard Yard, perhaps in ways that cannot yet be foreseen.

“We’re going to experiment with lots of things. Some of them will work, and some of them won’t work,’’ Harvard president Drew Faust said in a phone interview yesterday. “But students are inventing new ways of doing things that will change classrooms, no matter what we do.’’

At the symposium, many professors argued for making classes more interactive and moving them online.

Michael Sandel, a Harvard political philosopher, showed off a video-chat format linking his Cambridge classroom with counterparts in Shanghai and Tokyo.

Cathy Davidson, visiting from Duke University, said every professor who can be replaced by a computer screen should be - a comment several audience members immediately tweeted.

There are analog ways of improving education, too, as speakers on the science of learning reminded the audience.

Physicist and Nobel laureate Carl Wieman told the group to stop teaching by instinct and start paying attention to the evidence of what works.

Henry Roediger, from Washington University in St. Louis, offered some of that evidence. He showed a series of experiments from his psychology lab, demonstrating that the best way to ensure learning is to give lots of tests, in every class meeting if necessary.

Bad news for Harvard undergraduates or good news, depending on how one looks at it: several professors at the symposium said they were taking that particular message to heart.