Forum: Make teaching more like research

Viewed from Nobelist Carl Wieman’s perch, the way science is taught in the undergraduate classroom is at a historical crossroads. Like 16th century science, when the tradition of Aristotle was traded in for the newfound ability to measure and quantify nature, science education today is poised to capitalize on new ways of teaching, learning and, critically, measuring results in the classroom.

“We’re at a very exciting time in science education,” Wieman told an audience of about 400 people Nov. 5 at the Wisconsin Union Theater where he spoke as part of the first annual forum for the UW–Madison-based Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL). “It’s very much like science at the time of Galileo,” when the modern scientific method began to take shape, spurring an explosion of knowledge and progress.

Science did great, post-Galileo, noted Wieman. Unfortunately, science education got left behind and the medieval model of “lecturing down to students” held sway for another 300 years. Only now is it undergoing the kind of rigorous questioning that helped usher in the era of modern science.

Wieman, a University of Colorado professor — whose exploration of atoms cooled to near absolute zero and the resulting creation of a new form of matter helped to earn him a share of the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics — argued that our economic and social well-being, now more than ever, are grounded in science and technology. The implications of that, he said, are breathtaking, and require a new way of educating people about science and how it works.

“The best hope we have is to use the tools of science to teach science,” he said. “You can do research on how people learn. It’s not just that there are good teachers and bad teachers, as many people think.”

In many respects, Wieman’s talk was reflective of the two-day CIRTL Forum, which drew about 240 attendees from more than 67 of the nation’s research universities. Forum participants focused largely on a theme of providing future science, technology, engineering and mathematics faculty with good skills in both research and teaching. Talks, panel discussions and poster presentations illustrated numerous examples of successful strategies employed nationwide.

Sharing effective models for preparing future faculty was the primary outcome of the forum, says Robert Mathieu, a UW–Madison professor of astronomy and CIRTL’s director. Faculty interested in developing new strategies for preparing their graduate students for future roles as both researchers and teachers – and in refining ways they teach their own undergraduate courses – can learn much from ongoing activities of their colleagues elsewhere, he says.

Featured speakers at the forum included Joseph Bordogna of the National Science Foundation, which funds CIRTL, and Lee Shulman of the Carnegie Foundation.