Sid Katz, Executive Director of Community Affairs at UBC, talked to Dr. Carl Wieman a few weeks ago during Celebrate Research Week about the art of teaching, and the art of learning. The event was Podcast by UBC Public Affairs, and we found the exchange quite fascinating.
As most of our readers know, Dr. Wieman came to UBC to find ways to improve science education.
Here’s a snippet of the conversation, about an hour into the discussion, when Dr. Wieman took questions from the audience at UBC Robson Square last March 9th…

Q: When you were a young student in Oregon, you said you had a good teacher named Mr. Tobias. When you were asked about this teacher, you were quite clear who it was, and why you liked him. What was it you like about Mr. Tobias as compared to other teachers?

A: This was a lot of years ago! You know, I don’t remember anything in particular about him that I liked. What I do remember is that he sort of opened my eyes to the idea that you could understand the way atoms stick together and make chemical compounds and so on. He showed us that there was a way of thinking about things, and you could understand things at a completely new level to explain nature.

Q: When you ask most people all around the world that question, they often give an answer like that. But they usually add on the fact that the teacher was passionate and professional…and you said “young and energetic” when you talked about him before. Could I suggest to you that there are a few contradictions in what you’re saying? One of them is that people like Mr. Tobias have to be subject to scientific analysis. I think that you and everyone else who knows the difference between a good and a bad teacher doesn’t need to discuss this any further. These are interpersonal qualities and it deals with professionalism and the sort of person they are.

Secondly, you seem to be quite obsessed with this idea of learning in the classroom with these clickers and so on…Could I suggest to you that the most important things we learn in life don’t occur in the classroom, they occur outside. And the world we live in today has been primarily shaped by people like Larry Ellison and Bill Gates and many others who are high performing. They’re what I call ‘farm gate intellectuals’ who have not secured the so-called benefits of higher education.

Thirdly can I suggest to you that the outcomes are much more important than the process, that an educator today is under a duty to ensure that learning is a lifelong process, and their task is to motivate people to continue learning throughout life. And that actually, clicking the clicker and passing the test while learning to think in this non-novice way, is actually less important than being a continuous and passionate learner throughout life. Okay, Mr. Nobel Prize Winner, what’s your answer?

A: Let me start with the things I agree with you on. First, just a misunderstanding on the idea of using the clickers in the discussion. In fact, that is teaching the students to learn. I mean, what you’re really doing is transforming the classroom from just concentrating on just information pouring out, to the student figuring things out for themselves, and teaching them how to figure them out for themselves, and basically seeing that that’s an exciting, interesting thing to do.

So I would completely agree with you that what’s important is learning how to learn, and inspiring them to learn.

We also on what’s important outside the classroom being important for people’s education, but given that our formal education system is based around the classroom, I want to put a lot more of that intellectually challenging activity into the classroom, than it is right now. So I think on all those things we agree.

Where we disagree is when you’re talking about the personal characteristics of a teacher and that’s really what counts. And it doesn’t. This isn’t something we can argue about. I’ve got data on my side, so you can say you either don’t believe in evidence, or that I’m right. (Crowd laughs)

This in fact is the most compelling piece of research that’s come out in the past decade, which has shaped how I and a lot of other science educators think about that. Having put a lot of effort and thought into developing this conceptual understanding of introductory physics…understanding and thinking about these essential physics concepts…thinking about them like an expert physicist does…there’s this really good test called the Force Concept Inventory. Years of effort went into developing it; it’s very hard to argue with. Every teacher looks at it and says: ‘Yes, my students ought to be able to answer these questions.’

This test has now been given to hundreds and hundreds of classrooms, and what it shows it that – quite independent of the teacher’s personality and whether they’re popular or unpopular with students – if it’s a standard lecture course with the students sitting passively listening to the lecturer up there…whether it’s a wonderful entertaining lecturer that they love, or whether it’s a boring tedious lecture, they make very little progress towards mastering these essential concepts. For the average student, no more than 30% of these concepts are mastered.

Now, when we take these transformed approaches, where we have the students actively thinking about the problems in class and using the clickers as a facilitation device to make sure the students are thinking hard about things, discussing things with each other and so on, then the learning gains, that conceptual mastery, goes up by typically a factor of two, over what is achieved by the so-called superb lecturer. That’s really very solid data that’s been repeated hundreds of times.

I’m not saying it’s intuitively obvious at all. But it’s very possible that you can have teachers who are very popular and considered wonderful teachers, but when you measure what students are learning, if it’s a passive lecture environment, they don’t learn much.

Listen to the entire Podcast: http://ubcpodcasts.blogspot.com/2007/03/evening-with-nobel-laureate.html

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 8:25 am and is filed under Q & A. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Email this article to someone you know.