Physicists Seek to Lose the Lecture as Teaching Tool
2nd January 2012
The lecture is one of the oldest forms of education there is.
“Before printing someone would read the books to everybody who would copy them down,” says Joe Redish, a physics professor at the University of Maryland.
But lecturing has never been an effective teaching technique and now that information is everywhere, some say it’s a waste of time. Indeed, physicists have the data to prove it.
It’s time and past time to get away from the medieval education model that was as good as they could do with the available technology. We can do better now.
Mazur’s physics class is now different. Rather than lecturing, he makes his students do most of the talking.
One value of this approach is that it can be done with hundreds of students. You don’t need small classes to get students active and engaged. Mazur says the key is to get them to do the assigned reading — what he calls the “information-gathering” part of education — before they come to class.
This would appear to be similar to the ‘flip the day around’ method used by schools adopting the Khan Academy videos.
“In class, we work on trying to make sense of the information,” Mazur says. “Because if you stop to think about it, that second part is actually the hardest part. And the information transfer, especially now that we live in an information age, is the easiest part.”
Indeed. Getting information is no longer the hard part. Let’s focus on working it into people’s brains.
“It used to be just be the ‘sage on the stage,’ the source of knowledge and information,” he says. “We now know that it’s not good enough to have a source of information.”
Mazur sees himself now as the “guide on the side” – a kind of coach, working to help students understand all the knowledge and information that they have at their fingertips. Mazur says this new role is a more important one.
January 2nd, 2012 at 08:49
This approach is great for subjects like math and science, where people apply the information initially gained for solving problems of a defined nature.
I find it more difficult to see the application in areas such as history or creative writing.
But it’s a start.
January 3rd, 2012 at 12:55
In my experience, most of the science profs spent 99% of their time focused on their own projects (“publish or perish”) and the other 1% on eating, sleeping, reading the mail, paying taxes, and (occasionally) giving a crap about teaching students. If they can successfully do away with lecturing, they can avoid students altogether. In fact, most of them used TAs for any task the university would allow.
Students need effective teachers, not pompous, tenured windbags. It’s a wonderful idea for a school to allow the most effective means of getting information into the heads of it’s students, as long as that’s a structured program and not just a means of placating profs.