Hi I'm dr Tae and this is a talk similar to the one I recently gave to my last group of students
At northwestern university. On the last day of class.
A lot of my students wanted me to post the video of the original lecture online.
But instead of doing that I'm doing this,
I'm re-reccording this presentation.
Just for you!
So here it is: Building a new culture of teaching and learning
But why do we need to build something new?
what's wrong with our current current culture of teaching and learning?
I can summarize the problem in two words:
School Sucks!
kids say this all the time and nobody listen, but now I'm saying it.
And its an idea that we need to start taking very seriously.
Because its true school does sucks, especially when it comes to math and science education,
which is going to be the main focus of my talk.
So before we get to the part about building a new culture of teaching and learning,
we need to take a carefull look at what's wrong with our education now.
Let's start at the top with universities:
the environnement I've been in for the past sixteen years.
Universities are ideal places to teach and learn,
and we can certainly turn to them for educationnal leadership.
Actually no!
"Universities are not doing a good job."
And I'm not the only one whose noticed.
this quote is actually from Leon Lederman,
and he thinks there is a problem we should at least here him out.
Dr. Lederman is a former director of Fermilab he won the nobel price in physics,
and he also know something about education:
he started his own school the "illinois mathematics and science academy".
Here is Leon Lederman in an interview with the science network.
Right now my biggest anger is with the universities,
because universities are not doing a good job.
They do not continue the insperation that kids getting out of high schools have about science.
there's teachers, and their students that are getting out of high school who say:
I'm a science major I love chemistry I love biologie,
and then they go to college and 50% of those kids change feels into none science feels.
That's the statictical data.
Why!
Because they go onto a class of 200 kids they see a small professor somewhere down there.
You know, or maybe a teaching assistant whose english is not so good.
The blame is on the universities, depersonalized.
You know, Kids in high school ok at least there is 20 or 40 kids in a class,
and these lecture rooms for physics one or chemestry one they are hudge.
I think it's UCLA at least at one point had an auditorial with 400 kids.
All just sitting there listening to this one professor.
You could hardly, you know, see him, or with binoculars.
Oh! there he is, he's down there...
Doctor Lederman use the word depersonalized,
and it captures a lot of what's wrong in our universities.
Here is a picture I took of a lecture class at NorthWestern.
It's just one of many examples of "depersonalizition 1 0 1".
First this snapshoot illustrate a gigantic failure in leadership:
people at universitie approve this ridiculous format has an ok way to teach.
Second the professor at the podium made no attempt to engage the students
that were right in front of him.
The final and most disturbing thing
is what the students are doing:
they're falling asleep, checking facebook or they're email,
or paradoxically regestering for next term classes
right in the midlle of class they're completely tuning out.
Maybe they want to make sure they get a spot in "depersonalization 1 0 2".
Just try and put yourself in this room.
Would you pay to tuitions to sit in this room?
Does this environement suit how you learn?
Universities are supposed to be places where students and faculty I've a lively exchange of ideas.
And that isn't happening because the culture is become so depersonalized.
And university leaders faculty and students collectivly let that happenned.
We should think twice before we refered to a prestigious university has a good school.
Sadly universities arn't exempt from school sucks.
Now I need to explain why secondary school suck.
and I'll start by citing american finest news source: the onion.
"Increasing number of educators found to be suffering from teaching disabilities"
Here is my favourite part of the article:
It's funny cause its true!
And here is some comments from Lawrence Krauss that might explain why its true.
Dr Krauss is director of the Origins initiative at Arizona state,
and he does a lot of work to promote good science education.
Here is a scary statistic:
So we compared american students to their counterparts in other 20, 25 other industrialization,
and there were recent study that came out.
So we look at kids in grad three and grade five
and then fifteen year old.
and what's amazing is grade three and grrade five american students
on the whole do better in science and mathematics
than their counterparts.
but by the time they're fifteen they do subsentially worse
So we've be doing something very effective to de-educate them or disinterest them in science
and one of the reason is another equally scary fact which is that.
over ninety percent of middle school science teachers in this country
have never taken a science course outside of highschool.
and..
what..what percentage was that?
over ninety percent.
ninety!
ninety, yea.
not nine!
no, ninety ...
I had the same reaction than richards dawkings:
what! How did this happened? How did we let so many unqualified teachers into our schools?
I think one reason is hiring practices.
School sucks because the people who run them don't hire great teachers.
Once again lets start at the top:
At universities professors aren't really hired to teach.
they hired and promoted based on the research they do.
As a result teaching its rarely a priority for professors and it shows.
Last year I was on a faculty pannel for advising graduate students
about getting academic jobs and, the other professors on the pannel admited
that teaching wasn't that important in getting a faculty position
One of the professor on the pannel was a department chair.
And she actually reffered to her department school offerings
as a teaching burden
that the kind of leadership we have at our universities.
At the secondary level the problem is hiring teachers
who just don't know what they are talking about,
especially in the sciences.
Here I want to point out the difference between: certification and qualifications.
For example: I have a Phd in physics, I've been teaching for fireteen years,
but I'd probably have a hard time getting job teaching at a public school.
why? Because I never wasted time in a programm to get certified
to teach in a public school.
That's backwards!
If its true that our public schools are already full of certified teachers
who don't know what they're doing
then that means the certification process we have right now doesn't work!
if we want to start getting truly qualified teachers
we need to get ride of this fraudulent certification system.
And start hiring people based on real competency.
The lesson here is that schools have hiring practices that are barriers to getting great teachers.
And the immediate consequence is that schools at every level
are full of teachers who can't teach or don't want to teach.
Now if math and science education
is really in shambles,
how did someone like me get into science?
Well its not because I was immerse in a nationnal culture dedicated to math and science education:
I was just lucky!
This is Dean Goldgar the person who got me interested in calculus.
His high shcool calculus class was better than all the math classes into college.
Mister Goldar have even work with me outside of class
so I can study more advanced topic in mathematics.
He was a real mentor.
This is Kurt Wiesenfeld.
My undergraduate mentor.
Dr wiesenfeld taught the very first college physic class I took,
and he inspired me to major in physics.
But that first class was special.
It was an honor section that only eight students bother sign up for.
How lucky was that!
why hundreds of other kids were sitting in lecture halls.
Eight of us hit the jackpot and had this professor all to ourselves,
five days a week.
It was personalized. And it had a huge impact on me.
Noticed I'm not telling you stories about shiny new building or computer labs or
interactive whiter boards that really had an influence on me.
I'm talking about great teachers,
and unfortunately great teachers are rare.
David Griffiths understand this important point
He said:
That exactly right,
but schools aren't doing enough of that.
Now I want to shift years and talk more specifically about sciences classes.
Dean Zollman had this great story about giving its eight year old daughter
a tour of the physics building at his university.
Enventually they came across a lecture hall full of students.
His daughter asked:
"What do all those people doing?"
And Zollmen gave what seems like a reasonable answer:
"They're learning physics."
And its daughter responded with the exactly the right question:
"DO they just sit there?"
YEA, they do just sit there!
And an eight year old can see right away
that there is something horribly wrong with that.
A lot of science classes are set up to be completely unscientific.
The first problem is that students just sit there.
But if you're going to learn science you can just sit there!
You have to think, and better yet, you have to do experiments: that's what labs are for.
Unfortunately many labs exercices aren't any fun,
and sometimes they don't even demonstrate phenomena in a convincing way.
But teachers don't have to be convincing: because they have authority on their side.
And they can use grades to enforce that authority.
Who needs evidence!
Science its true because the teacher said so and I have to know it for the test otherwise I'll get a bad grade!
That's the message that comes across when science teachers doesn't really understand science.
And its the exact opposite of what science is about.
Here is an example.
Lets assume you've never seen this thing before.
Boy it sure does look like sciency!
I want you to memorize the content of this slide all of it:
the names of the compounds, the sequence of the reactions were are the arrows
you even have to learn how to prounonce "phosphorylation".
You must reproduce this drawing from memory next week on a test.
Lets say you manage to pull this off and get an hundred percent on the test.
Congratulations! You haven't learn a damn thing about science.
Whay I just describe was my experience in highschool biology.
I had to memorize a lot of stuff that wasn't justified with any evidence.
I didn't get to do a single expirement to convince myself that anything in that diagram is true.
And if I didn't memorize all that stuff. I was gonna get a bad grade.
Actually, it was worse than that:
if I did a really good job at memorizing the material without thinking or understanding,
I'd get a good grade!
That is NOT the lesson we want to teach in our science classes.
There has to be a better way.
Where can we fing a good role model for science classes?
How about these guys?
"Myth Busters" is the most scientific show on television.
Because as they say:
"They don't just tell the myths they put them to the test!"
The idea at the core of Myth Busters is the same as the core of science.
If you want to figure out if something is true, you have to do the experiment.
So in Myth Busters if the claims of a myth agree with experiments the myth is confirmed.
If the claims of the myth disagree with the experiments its busted.
That's just how science work.
And that's the lessons that kids need to learn.
Science classes should be Myth Busters projects that kids can do.
But there is one itch.
Addam and Jammy always give this warning at the beginning of every show:
Please don't try anything that you are about to see us do at home.
Ever!
Maybe lawers are getting in the way of science education.
Of course we don't want kids injuring themselves by filling their lunchboxes with thermite.
But we do want kids to copy the spirit of Myth Busters.
We should encourage kids to try experiments at home, and try to figure things out for themselves.
That's way more scientific than just telling kids to memorize stuff in science books.
Our last stop in school sucks, has to do with learning.
If schools and school reforms are going to be effective.
They have to be design to help people learn.
Here's how school are typically structured:
there's a school year divided into terms, and in each term there is specific courses avalaible and a fixed amount of time to learn the material in each course and the instructor evaluates the students somehow and gives our grades...
NONE of these features are necessary for learning.
And I think they actually interfere with the learning process.
Why would I say that?
Because I have a better model of learning.
Skatboarding!
So what can skatboarding tell us about the learning process?
Lets find out.
This next section also happens to be the motivation from my physics of skateboarding project.
Which you can check out at: physicsofskateboarding.com
What I'm going to show you is a video of me trying to learn a new skateboarding trick.
This is a trick I had never even tried before:
a pop shove it nose manual shove it out.
I want you to focus on this video, really watch it carefully.
Because its a vivid example of what the learning process is really like.
So here the ingredients of the trick.
A pop shove it were I pop the board up and it turns an hundred and eighty degrees.
A nose manual were I balance over the front wheels.
And, a little shove it off the nose another hundred and eighty degrees.
But now I have to learn how to put those tricks together into something new.
Shiiit !
Woua. Why am I almost dying every time I try this?!
Doing the trick is impossible!
Holly shit!
Noticed that I didn't get it first try or second try.
I didn't show you all of the attemps, but I had to try this trick fifty eight times!
That means in the process of learning this trick:
I failed fifty seven times!
Interesting...
Skatboarding had helped us discover the secret to learning.
Here it is:
Work your ass off until you figure it out.
If that seems overly simplistic to you, let me some more examples.
Learning how to walk.
That's a picture of me and my sister.
We don't need to send toddlers to walking schools
so that can get bad grades if they don't learn how to walk in exactly one semester.
We just let toddlers keep trying to walk untill they do.
Learning an instrument.
There was a time when I was actually pretty good at playing the guitarre
But its not something I learned in school.
I just practiced as much as I could because I wanted to play better.
And I don't know of many people who take guitarre lessons
that's involve hundreds of students in a lecture hall.
Music instruction is almost always personalized.
Learning Mathematics.
Not that he needs one but I have to give Malcolm Gladwell applaud here.
Because he has new book out called "Outliers".
And there is a great story in there, from Allan Schoenfeld,
a professor at Berkeley who studies how people learn mathematics.
Shoenfeld tells us the story of a nurse named Renee,
who is using computer program to understand the slope of a vertical line.
Here is the important passage:
"Twenty-two minutes pass from the moment Renee begins playing with the computer program to the moment she says:
'Ahhhh, that means something to me now.' That's a long time."
Renee had to wrestle with a mathematical concept for a long time,
before it started making any sense.
That's what learning mathematics and science is really like!
Our schools arn't set up to handle that.
Scientific Research.
This is an entry of one of my notbooks from grade school,
when I finally figured out how to solve a problem I've been working on for months.
But before that day I had already filled a bunch of other note books with tons with other ideas
that didn't work at all.
I had lots and lots of failures before I finally figured it out.
Sound familiar?
So here is the head to head comparison:
Schools vs Skateboarding.
and when I say skatboarding I really mean the process of learning anything properly.
I can't go into details with all of these points,
but just look how different these two cultures are.
Schools have rigid time-tables, fixed amount of time for learning material.
That's incredibly stupid!
All that does is stop us from develloping the kind of persistents we need,
for real learning and real understanding.
If you're learning something new, it doesn't make the least bit of sense to decide ahead of time
exactly how long its supposed to take you to learn it.
That's like saying I'm gonna get an 'F' if I don't land my skateboarding trick in ten tries,
or I'm never going to understand the fundamental theorem of calculus if I can't do it in a week.
No.
If there's something you really have to learn,
you keep working your ass off untill you figured it out.
And that crucial for math and science education.
Just like skateboarders struggling with new tricks,
students need to learn how to struggle with new ideas without getting cut off.
Next its surprising how many schools plays authority and coercion at the fundation of the learning environment.
Instead of giving good reasons for learning teachers give threats in the form of bad grades.
That just pits teacher and students against each other,
and most experienced teachers know that you can't really force someone to learn something,
if they don't want to learn it.
But that's exactly what our schools try to do.
Real learning is largely self motivated.
If students have good reasons to learn they'll want to learn,
and a self-motivated student, paired with the right mentor can learn a lot.
In schools grades gives also students a sense of false certification.
It's disturbing how many students think they mastered something,
just because a teacher gave them an A in a class.
In real learning student have to be honest and evaluating themselves.
They can't kid about themselves about they learned.
For example the skateboarding trick I did in the video.
Here is an honnest assesment: "I only landed that trick once, and I can pretend I mastered it".
With skateboarding and calculus and physics, nobody ever gets it at first try,
and we can let students think they mastered something just because they've seen it once.
Mastery takes practice.
Schools also have to worry about preventing cheating and other forms of academic dishonnesty.
It would be way easier to have a culture that just didn't give incentives to cheat: like grades!
If you're goal is to learn something properly there isn't much point in faking it.
And in skatboarding I'm not even sure what it means to cheat.
I don't know how to cheat in skateboarding it doesn't really exists, it's not applicable.
So there you have it:
if we want to improve education especially math and science education.
We should make it more like skateboarding.
But if you ever want to ruin anything...
Make it more like school!
Now we can get back to the original optimistic purpose of this talk:
Building a new culture of teaching and learning.
Were do we start?
Well we need to fix our schools,
But when I say that, it means that we have to change the fundamental culture in schools,
to support how people actually learn.
On top of that, we need to get leaders, who hire great teachers.
I want to emphasize that changing the cultures is the priority.
If get better teachers, they need to teach the right things, in the right environment.
If all they do is re-enforce the existing culture,
and just do better job of teaching to the test,
well, I don't think that's progress.
That's why I'm weary of teacher recruiment programs like "Teach For America".
Because changing the structure of schools isn't an explicit goal in those kind of programs.
Anyway, making all of these changes might seem like trying to polish a turd.
But here is the case for optimism, and if you've seen that episode of Myth Busters,
you know what's coming up...
as it turns out: you CAN polish a turd!
Here is how I polished a turd called physics 330-2: advanced classical mechanics.
The typical way to teach classes like this is to get a professor to lecture,
and have the students sit there, screw that! I did something different.
First of all I didn't give a single lecture. I didn't want my students just sitting there,
I turn the classes into workshops.
My students came to class, worked together and really wrestle with difficult physics problems.
And of course they got a lot of stuff wrong.
And I would help them through that. But in that process the big advantage from me,
was that I could see how my students were thinking into real time,
and I could give them meaningfull feedback on the spot.
You know the students and the professor were actually having a:
"Lively exchange of ideas".
The whole point at being at the university!
So it really is possible to change the culture in the classroom.
We just need teachers who are willing to take a chance on making those changes.
But we also need to work outside the world of our classroom.
And this where I think the biggest changes in our culture of teaching and learning can happen.
I thought I invented the term distributed teaching.
There doesn't seems to be a Wikipedia page for it,
but, google says that other peolpe have used the phrase.
So I should probably explain my version.
The name distributing teaching was inspired by distributing computing.
If you're not familiar with distributed computing,
you should look out the SETI@home project as an example.
But the basic idea is that using a lot of relatively slow computers part time,
might be just as usefull as a single super-computer running full throttle.
So what I mean by distributing teaching,
is that, if everybody did some kind of teaching in they spare time,
that might be just as effective as having a group of full time teachers.
So how do we start doing distributing teaching?
Well, we're already doing it.
The main tool using for distrubuting computing, is also usefull for distributing teaching:
The Internet.
I'm putting this talk online, that's one form of distributed teaching.
Wikipidea is another kind of distributed teaching.
Lots of people can share what they know in varying amounts,
and contribute when they can.
And it works just as well as traditionnaly encyclopedia
offer by a limited number of people.
Of course the idea of distributed teaching
isn't just for the Internet, you can also do it in person.
This summer I'm going to film a documentary about a group of scientist and engineers,
who are going to be teaching at a space camp in south Korea.
None of these people are professional teachers.
They're just spending a little of their time, to share what they know with some kids.
If all of us started things like this it would start adding up pretty quickly.
But distributed teaching is only going to work, if you start contributed.
But, why should you bother spending time sharing what you know?
Well because if you don't, you're being unreasonably selfish!
"Knowledge isn't like a cheesburger."
I wish I could remember where I got this, its great really simple point:
if I have a cheesburger, and I want to share it with someone.
That means I going to end up with less for myself.
Knowledge doesn't work that way.
You can share what you know as much as you want and you won't lose any of it.
There is no reason to be selfish with knowledge.
And that's exactly why everybody should be teaching in some capacity.
Maybe the most usefull thing distributed teaching can do,
is drag people away from this weird notion that teaching and learning only happens in schools.
Building a new educationnal culture isn't just about fixing schools.
It's really about making teaching and learning cultural habit.
Things that all of us do all the time.
And building that new culture isn't hard.
We just have to follow just one simple rule:
Share What You Know.
Thank you very much for listening.
If you want to keep track of my projects:
please visit: drtae.org physicsofskateboarding.com and universitae.com
Thanks again.
Nobody is gonna watch this!