Talk Amongst Yourselves

There is little doubt that technology is changing the nature of classroom lectures. Many instructors embrace new technologies to enhance their lectures—they might incorporate slideware presentations, offer audio or video clips, or use a computer to run a statistical analysis during class. But one professor suggests that the best use of technology might be to eliminate classroom lectures—that is, to provide lectures online in order to free up class time for other kinds of teaching.

Eric Mazur, a Harvard physics professor, believes that the old lecture format, in which teachers speak and students listen and take notes, is not the most effective method for teaching or the most efficient use of classroom time. After research by a colleague showed that thousands of students who had completed the introductory physics course at universities around the country still did not have an accurate understanding of the nature of force (a fundamental concept for the discipline), Mazur was astounded. He administrated the test to his own students and found that they were no different. He began to try different methods for teaching the concept, shook up his lectures, trying different methods for teaching. Then, he explains, “I did something I had never done in my teaching career. . . . I said, ‘Why don’t you discuss it with each other?’” He was shocked when, after a scant three minutes of classroom chaos, all the students had figured it out. Those who understood the concept were quickly able to defend their explanations of the concept, while those who had it wrong could not and, thus, students taught each other. Why were students so much more effective at conveying a concept that he understood so much more thoroughly? Mazur hypothesizes that it’s precisely because they were not experts. “You’re a student and you’ve only recently learned this,” he says, “so you still know where you got hung up, because it’s not that long ago that you were hung up on that very same thing” (Mazur, quoted in Lambert, 2012, para. 7).

Seeing the value in this kind of peer instruction, Mazur began to rethink the need for classroom lectures. Now he presents his lectures online, before class, and saves his valuable class time for working with students. He has them submit their questions online and then addresses them in class. He also has them work together in class—completing problems, discussing questions, and explaining concepts to one another—to clarify what they learned from the lectures. “Think of education as a whole—what is it? Is it just the transfer of information?” Mazur doesn’t think so. “Ultimately, learning is a social experience. Harvard is Harvard not because of the buildings, not because of the professors, but because of the students interacting with one another” (Mazur, quoted in Lambert, 2012, para. 28).