Transferring Knowledge and Experience in Innovative Educational Transformation

John Belcher, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his colleagues in the Department of Physics, successfully transformed a large introductory physics course from a traditional lecture hall format to a student-centered active learning space. This course transformation resulted in substantial increases in student conceptual understanding and decreases in failure rates. While transforming an ineffective course into an effective one over time is a complex and daunting task, sharing the knowledge and experience of this effort in a transferable form is even more challenging.

Transforming Introductory Physics Courses:
From a Large Lecture Classroom to a
Student-Centered Active Learning Space




Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL):
Studio Physics at MIT

The first snapshot created by John and his colleagues provides a succinct and easy-to-comprehend overview of this transformation effort. Though this innovative effort has been widely recognized by the MIT community and beyond through various articles and publications, as Belcher noted, "Changing institutional teaching practices is enormously hard, especially in research universities. Even though scientific studies repeatedly show that the 'transmission of knowledge' model is not particularly effective, there is a real inertia in moving away from this model, because it has been common practice for centuries. The way to facilitate even tentative moves toward scientific teaching is to hold up best practices for faculty to see, and to publicize them widely using tools like the KEEP Toolkit."

The second snapshot was created using a set of framing questions developed in collaboration with MIT's Teaching and Learning Laboratory. The goal of this snapshot is to create a compelling model for sharing pedagogical knowledge and associated resources that could be used to advance two major MIT initiatives around innovative teaching and learning—OpenCourseWare (OCW) and the D'Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in MIT Education. For example, the faculty members and students who try to use Belcher's course materials on the OCW website could benefit from this kind of knowledge and resources to better understand the pedagogical design and use of these materials. In addition, an initiative like the D'Arbeloff Fund that encourages innovative teaching by faculty and funds transformation efforts could take advantage of this kind of representation to help faculty learn from and build on each other's work as a community of practice and reflection.