'The lecture is dead'
The problem with college, mused Harvard's Eric Mazur, is the architecture of the classroom. All those desks facing the front encourage a medieval approach to teaching.
The problem with college, mused Harvard's Eric Mazur, is the architecture of the classroom. All those desks facing the front encourage a medieval approach to teaching.
"I think there are a lot of professors who are hesitant to abandon their position as 'sage on the stage,' " said Mazur, a pioneer of combining peer instruction and student feedback in class.
"I really think the lecture is dead," he said.
Twenty years ago, he thought he was doing a fine job lecturing medical students in physics from the front of the room. They did well on complicated tests, and his student evaluation scores were high.
"I thought, 'Eric, you are a great teacher,' " he said.
But then Mazur, now the dean of applied physics, read somewhere that students weren't getting much out of introductory physics classes. He decided to verbally quiz them on Newtonian physics.
They couldn't do it. They could regurgitate formulas, but they couldn't talk about the forces a heavy truck and a light car would have on each other when they collided.
"Nothing was internalized. Zero. Or next to zero," he recalled. "I almost fell out of my ivory tower."
So he began to develop a new approach, drawing upon experiments in the 1960s at Cornell, where three analog buttons were placed on armrests so physics students could answer questions in class.
By the late '90s, those buttons had turned into clickers, the small, battery-operated touchpads students use to answer multiple-choice and polling questions in class.
After posing a question to the class, he instructed, " 'Turn to your neighbor and try to convince your neighbor of your answer.' And I saw something I have never seen in my life: They all started talking."
It is not teaching by telling, Mazur says. It is teaching by questioning. - Trish Wilson
