Confessions of a Converted Lecturer: Eric Mazur

Eric Mazur: "I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material. Who was to blame? The students? The material? I will explain how I came to the agonizing conclusion that the culprit was neither of these. It was my teaching that caused students to fail! I will show how I have adjusted my approach to teaching and how it has improved my students' performance significantly." Eric Mazur is the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University. An internationally recognized scientist and researcher, he leads a vigorous research program in optical physics and supervises one of the largest research groups in the Physics Department at Harvard University.

An 18-minute version of this presentation is available here: http://youtu.be/rvw68sLlfF8

• Category

  Education

[Dennis Gorelik]

Great presentation!

- Encouraging students to immediately apply new knowledge in discussion and short quiz.

- Reduce amount of content in order to free up some time for digging deeper and improving understanding.

- Rigorous testing of teaching techniques.

[colinkmedia]

This makes me want to start learning physics. Or perhaps advanced maths. Or just anything really.

[WebF0x]

My physics teacher tried this exact method on our class and it worked wonderfully well. I highly recommend it. As a student who never got anything from conventional teaching, this was a breath of fresh air. Teachers, do it!

[Billy Kangas]

Thanks, very good stuff here

[nisserot]

It depends on the course and its difficulty. But in general I'd say that aiming for 95% understanding is a good idea. For the more difficult courses (mostly math) I've found it extremely hard to learn such a large amount of material in such a short period of time. There is no time to think about the material or to properly "digest" it. My mistake was believing that I could skip certain topics because they seemed too hard and still pass the exam. Now I know better.

[internetloser4321]

That's terrible advice, you think that if someone doesn't know 95% of the material, they should purposely fail the class? There's no middle ground between being perfect and failing?

[Donna A. Dietz]

I would love to hear this. Does anybody else has this issue? I can hear him being introduced, then there is no sound from him as he speaks.

[SundanceVacations]

What a great lecture. I could watch this lecture several times and not be bored

[Masteroftrancegirl]

Asking the right questions is actually more difficult than answering them, imo. Socratic method can be useful, but I do believe it has its limitations in learning and understanding.

[Masteroftrancegirl]

I laughed and laughed starting at 33:30. It's actually scary that these future doctors couldn't even solve a simple DC circuit problem.

[Kevin Stevenson]

These are not new ideas and without shame I can claim to already do this. However, it is great to see it presented so clearly and with supporting data. What a great job.