Don't Lecture Me

The big, boring lecture hall could be a thing of the past. A growing number of educators are changing their classrooms – and their style of teaching.

By David Hunt

Donny Lofland remembers taking calculus at a big Texas university a few years ago.

"A graduate student wheeled in a cart and popped in a video of the professor lecturing," he says. "The grad student took notes of all the students' questions and at the beginning of the next class he read us answers from the professor, then popped in the next video."

Fast forward a few years and 180 degrees.

"I signed up for an introductory physics course at North Carolina State University," Lofland says. "I showed up the first day of class and was blown away by the classroom and the different style of teaching."

What a difference innovation makes.

In Dr. Bob Beichner's physics class, students work in teams of three around small round conference tables. There are laptop computers on every table and white boards on every wall. The professor is there in the middle of the action. As he walks between the tables, Beichner throws out real-world problems and "ponderables" for the students to solve.

"Figure out the number of atoms in the little aluminum name block in front of you," he commands.

The SCALE UP classroom is organized so students work together in teams.

As the students huddle together around the shiny cubes, testing ideas and comparing notes, Beichner works the room, questioning hypotheses, offering clues, and fueling arguments. He introduces the students to a problem-solving protocol he developed that uses the acronym GOAL (for Gather information, Organize and plan, perform an Analysis and Learn from your activities). Then he assigns roles for each member of the group – manager, skeptic, and recorder – to promote better team interactions and group decision-making.

It's a dynamic, unpredictable and thoroughly engaging experience for students and teacher.

"Instead of a lecture and a lab, now it's one class," says Beichner. "There's no distinction."

The innovative teaching techniques developed by Beichner and his colleagues at NC State have been fine tuned over the past decade into a system called SCALE UP – Student Centered Activities for Large Enrollment Undergraduate Programs. They've been replicated in one form or another at more than 50 universities across the U.S., including Clemson University, the University of Alabama and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The reason is simple. The SCALE UP way of teaching works better than traditional teaching methods. Student comprehension, problem solving, attitudes and attendance improve, while failure rates plummet – typically by 50 percent. Women and minority students do particularly well in SCALE UP classes, Beichner has found, probably because they are more likely to ask questions.

"In a lecture hall, people are isolated from each other," he says. "Underrepresented students may just sit there if they don't understand something."

But in a SCALE UP classroom, students work together, drawing on each other's knowledge, ideas and experiences to solve problems. Lofland found the collaboration energizing.

"A lecture hall is very passive, but in SCALE UP, you're forced to work with the material - it's not a passive experience," he says. "There's no hiding in the back of the classroom."

Today Lofland works as an adjunct professor at UNC Chapel Hill, where he is putting SCALE UP principles to work in computer programming courses. Even though he's working with classes of 20, not 100, he's found that the system makes a difference.

"I took every thing I could from SCALE UP and brought it into the classroom," he says. "I have the students work in teams of three to solve problems; I present them with real-world problems and let them come up with the code collectively. The approach is wonderful. SCALE UP is the way to teach; there's no question about it."

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