Debate over Active Learning in College Physics

The "debate" is confusing several differnt styles of teaching

I "love" this kind of education blog entry because of its seems to seek to stir the pot (and drive up notice of the blog - think MSNBC or Fox News here) and uses anecdotal evidence as justification ("in my physics class at my local community college the instructor....and I was fine")...

Fortunately, the Internet is powerful enough and MIT is geeky enough to allow us to judge for ourselves the merit of the argument.

The blog entry tries to link two teaching strategies: active learning and clickers used to support lectures.  If you don't know about clickers, these devices allow students to answer multiple choice questions and the instructor see the results in real time.  Certainly an interesting formative assessment tool, but you should ask yourself whether this wil meet the goals implied by active learning.

Fortunately, we can watch different styles of teaching in introductory physics courses at MIT because those folks are that geeky.  As you watch, you may ask yourself whether student outcomes would be the same or different using the two styles.

The first up is the traditional lecture.

Professor Lewin is a famous lecturer for the first semester physics course at MIT.  This is pretty amazing, though I certainly took notice that he says he spends 25 hours to develop each lecture. Youtube promo video of his class.

New York Times article on an outstanding lecturer. 

"Professor Lewin revels in his fan mail and in the idea that he is spreading the love of physics. “Teaching is my life,” he said.  The professor, who is from the Netherlands, said that teaching a required course in introductory physics to M.I.T. students made him realize “that what really counts is to make them love physics, to make them love science.”

He said he spent 25 hours preparing each new lecture, choreographing every detail and stripping out every extra sentence. “Clarity is the word,” he said. Fun also matters. In another lecture on pendulums, he stands back against the wall, holding a steel ball at the end of a pendulum just beneath his chin. He has just demonstrated how potential energy turns into kinetic energy by sending the ball flying across the stage, shattering a pane of glass he had bolted to the wall"

Next is active learning in MIT's studio classrooms

Using support from Microsoft and others, faculty teaching (what I assume to be) the second semester of Physics have created a style of teaching called Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL). 

The videos are at the bottom of this page.

From the project's web site:

Problem. Large lecture halls do not engage students sufficiently to master Introductory Physics. Students can learn more if they work directly with their Physics instructors and fellow students by doing hands-on experiments, rather than passively listening to lectures.

Goal: Replace MIT's large freshman Physics lectures with a studio format, in which one can engage students more fully by incorporating active learning methods into the Introductory Physics classroom, enabled by technology.