Came across this really nice piece of article in The New York Times (Jan 12, 2009) about a new way of teaching at MIT. Here are some interesting excerpts from the article:
Dr. Wieman noted that the human brain “can hold a maximum of about seven different items in its short-term working memory and can process no more than about four ideas at once.” “But the number of new items that students are expected to remember and process in the typical hourlong science lecture is vastly greater,” he continued. “So we should not be surprised to find that students are able to take away only a small fraction of what is presented to them in that format.”
Lecturing in 26-100, she said, she [Professor Sciolla] could only look out at the sea of faces and hope the students were getting it. “They might be looking intently at you, understanding everything,” Professor Sciolla said. “Or they might be thinking, ‘What am I going to do when I get out of this bloody class?’ ”
Old school:
“There was a long tradition that what it meant to teach was to give a really well-prepared lecture,” said Peter Dourmashkin, a senior lecturer in physics at M.I.T. and a strong proponent of the new method. “It was the students’ job to figure it out.”
The problem, say Dr. Dourmashkin and others in the department, is that a lot of students had trouble doing that. The failure rate for those lecture courses, even those taught by the most mesmerizing teachers, was typically 10 percent to 12 percent.
New way of teaching:
At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required — classical mechanics and electromagnetism — but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers.
Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants, the professor makes brief presentations of general principles and engages the students as they work out related concepts in small groups.
Teachers and students conduct experiments together. The room buzzes. Conferring with tablemates, calling out questions and jumping up to write formulas on the white boards are all encouraged.
The question is if this is really the way to go in terms of how classrooms of the future should be structured. The two state-of-the-art TEAL classrooms at MIT cost $2.5 million!! At this cost, how many schools/colleges can adopt this model? Can there be a low-cost model/implementation of this concept? The concept of hands-on learning is definitely fool-proof and is the way to go, but we need to come up with more viable means of implementing it. The technology involved in setting up an environment that facilitates such a hands-on interaction needs to become more affordable. Till that happens, do we have any alternatives or should we simply sit and wait for that day when technology can be bought cheap? If we fail the students of today, then we can only dream of cheaper technology because they are the ones who will be developing the technology of tomorrow.
Read the full article:-
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/us/13physics.html?_r=3&hp=&pagewanted=all
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