In this short video Harvard physicist Eric Mazur illustrates how he teaches with very few lectures (a much longer one is also available; it overlaps with the following article and in some ways goes beyond it).
Here Mazur describes his transition to largely lecture-free teaching in this 2-page commentary (many other physicists use this method as well; such changes have been something of a discipline-wide endeavour). A major turning point in his teaching occurred when he gave the "Force Concept Inventory" to one of his Harvard classes in which he lectured. Rather than calculations, it asks conceptual questions about everyday phenomena, such as the outcome of a car-truck collision. He felt his students would have no difficulty with it, but soon after he passed it out, a student asked, "How should I answer these questions? According to what you taught me or according to the way I usually think about these things?" As Mazur put it, "That was when it began to dawn on me that something was amiss." Indeed, his students did poorly on this conceptual assessment. Cognitive science describes why this happened and how the methods Mazur and others have developed lead to greater learning (details are in Wieman below). Finally, as in the video, he orients his classes around peer instruction with conceptual questions; the latter are termed "conceptests." A quick Google search leads you to them in many fields.
These methods of instruction also lead to deeper learning among junior college students — they aren't just suitable for Harvard students.
"Interactive-Engagement Versus Traditional Methods:
A Six-Thousand-Student Survey of Mechanics Test," Richard R. Hake, American Journal of Physics, January 1998,
vol. 66, no. 1, pp. 64-74.
This is the standard reference in physics education research that finds that "interactive engagement," which Mazur uses, leads to deeper learning. Google Scholar reports 850+ cites to this paper, giving one a sense of how dynamic this research is. This graph is the most important part of the paper. The horizontal axis shows the percentage gain on the Force Concept Inventory. Thus, a course more to the right shows more conceptual learning. Colors denote the two teaching methods used in this study: traditional lecture (red) and interactive engagement (green). The vertical axis lists the fraction of the courses with the different gains. Thus, all the traditional courses sum vertically to one, as do the interactive engagement courses. The lecture-based courses show a modest improvement in conceptual understanding, while the interactive engagement courses show much more.
This paper is similar to Mazur's, but is more detailed. In fact, it has many points in common with Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do. Perhaps my favorite part is this passage, where Wieman describes his approach to teaching early in his career: "First I thought very hard about the topic and got it clear in my own mind. Then I explained it to my students so that they would understand it with the same clarity I had. ... And whenever I made any serious attempt to determine what my students were learning, it was clear that this approach just didn't work. ... the vast majority of students weren't getting them [the explanations] at all." He then describes how this is very consistent with the latest findings from cognitive science. He also calls for a scientific approach to science education; one of the implications is that we should use "Practices and conclusions based on objective data rather than — as is frequently the case in education — anecdote or tradition. This includes using the results of prior research, such as work on how people learn." He devotes some pages to this last point. He wraps up the article with methods that surmount these problems, which includes Mazur's approach. Fortunately, only a few are specific to physics. It is worth noting that Wieman received a Nobel Prize in 2001 but now devotes all his research time to improving instruction.
This is a more formal introduction to research in physics education.
The above articles are all from physics as that discipline has done the most work in this area. Fortunately, the vast majority of what they have learned can be applied to other fields. In this paper, the historian Lendol Calder describes how he has restructured an introductory American history course using many similar ideas.
This approach to teaching has many elements in common with the above. It doesn't have the research behind it as does physics, but given the many strong similarities, I suspect that it can also generate improved learning. I've used it the last two semesters and I have been pleased with the results. I must admit, however, that it is an adjustment to teach in such a different way. The above link is to the main web site, while this is a useful short introduction.
