Harvard conference aims to revolutionize university teaching

Chronicle of Higher Education : Despite greater insights into how people learn, old habits still govern a great deal of college and university instruction. Part of the problem, according to Carl Wieman, a Nobel physicist and associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is that PhD students receive very little training in how other students learn. When they become faculty members, they know what content they want their students to learn, but they don’t know what cognitive abilities they want students to develop. Only a few future faculty members develop a deeper understanding of pedagogy. Wieman suggests that those who have developed that expertise could show their colleagues how to apply new approaches to teaching in their discipline. Those approaches would be more demanding of both students and faculty, with students being made to grapple actively with the material and spending less time passively listening to lectures. Wieman spoke along with several others at a Harvard University conference dedicated to teaching and learning, the first event in the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching.