 So, what I want to talk a little bit about today, I guess my motivation as Vice Chancellor, of course I want you to understand my motivation not just as Brian Schmidt Professor, but Brian Schmidt Vice Chancellor, and I think the importance of education is going to elevate over the next five years. I've already tried to elevate it and it's become more and more important. If you're taking education seriously, that is a good thing because it is absolutely at the foundations of this university to do it and to do it well. It has not been the foundations I would say as much in the past in terms of what people would say they put resources and effort in. People I think did education, especially 30 or 40 years ago, they did it very, very well sort of by accident. It wasn't really thought about, they did it because they were used to, they were put in environments where it was important to them. Alright, so why do I love to teach? When I come to work each day it is the students that pride, that vibrancy, that willingness to do new things. I know they're the people who are going to be changing the future. Being able to go through and teach someone who is enthusiastic, is not jaded. That gives me more joy than anything else I do. I also see it as being probably the most important thing that I can do as an individual is to help empower, not one, but dozens or even hundreds of people and empower them to go out. Because I'm wonderful, but 100 people are more wonderful than me. Being able, even if it's a bit, it's a place where I personally feel I have the most impact, certainly the most impact within my control. I like it because it's a conversation, you get to learn what other people are thinking. You get to meet people from an incredibly diverse set of backgrounds with new ideas based on their culture, their heritage, which will surprise me and make me think differently. So it is a place where I learn. When I teach, I learn my subject better than I was ever taught it. And that is also why I love to teach, is because it actually helps me be better across my subject, having to think about it in details so that I can provide a journey, a description that is going to be meaningful for people in a way that many of my teachers failed to do for me and I just sort of had to figure it out over my own life. So I find in that way incredibly rewarding. My backstory, I think it's always important to understand people's way they got here to sort of understand some context. So I was, as they say in the United States, a sophomore surprise for my parents. My parents were 19 at the University of Montana and I appeared on the scene during their second year of university. This was rather scandalous in 1967 when it occurred. It was an interesting time in the United States to think of the summer of love. Well I was the year before the summer of love, at least in conception but not in delivery. And I grew up with my parents while they were doing university and I remember my parents being at university. I remember being embedded in that notion of people asking questions of thinking about things. So I benefited, I guess, from an immersion in an expectation that I will always be somehow connected to a university. I didn't necessarily know I was going to work in one for their entire life but I was always very sure at a very young age that I was going to go to university. I was, as said, was in Montana. My father was a biologist. My mother worked in speech communications and things such as that. We eventually moved up to Alaska and Alaska, USA, might be a place you would say, okay, middle of the sticks, what would be there? Well, Alaska struck oil in the 70s. So Alaska had more money than any other part of the United States in the 70s. And one of the things they did was to build high schools and bring in some of the best teachers they could find. So my high school up in Alaska, about half my teachers had PhDs in high school, public school. So I got a remarkably good education. It was a very diverse cohort of students, 15% of the population would have been Native Alaskan in some way, shape, or form, 25% were Afro-American and the rest were a smattering of people from around the world, certainly around the United States. Incredibly diverse group, incredibly strong education background. So it's always been something I guess I could see, I've been immersed in a very quality education. I went off to the University of Arizona and when I was there, I would say it wasn't my favorite time of my life, but in my senior year, my fourth year, I was kind of bored and I volunteered to teach an astronomy class. That was unusual to have an undergraduate teach. It was a lab class, it's a one-unit, it's a one-hour-a-week class, but I importantly had half the football team and almost the entirety of the basketball team on there and if you fail someone there, let me tell you, it gets people's attention because they're not allowed to play and that was the first time I had to start thinking about teaching and I would say the philosophy I had when I was 20, when I was doing that, was quite similar to the way I am today. I went off to Harvard and I, when you go to a U.S. institution to do your Ph.D., part of the deal is you teach, not optional, it's part of the funding package, no questions asked, everyone does it. It's part of what it means to do a Ph.D. That is something that we haven't quite figured out here. Part of it is due to history, part of it is due to our enterprise-bargony agreement. It is a complex thing that I think we need to think about in a sensible way, but that was a great experience for me. Now normally I got a bunch of scholarships so I did not have to teach except for one semester. I taught all eight semesters as I was at Harvard because I enjoyed it. It was something I loved to do. I had one interesting issue my last year when I was finishing up my Ph.D. I was teaching third year astrophysics which is not an easy course. It was hard and it was taught by this guy who was trained at Cambridge and he did not get tenure in week three of the course and so he quit showing up. I took over the course and it nearly killed me because I was trying to write up at the same time. That was definitely not my best teaching because I was in over my head. I didn't have enough time to prepare and I had a bunch of cranky students who were wondering why the TA was teaching them and where the professor was. The guiding principles I take for teaching is really empowerment of the student. If I'm empowering the student I'm probably doing the right thing. You can break it down into lots of other sub bits but this is the highest level principle for me. What am I doing for the student? So it can be knowledge in the form of facts, techniques and insights. I think that's what we especially get in K through 12 but the techniques and insights get more sophisticated in what we do here at university. I really do believe one of the most important things I can do is to help students think about how to solve problems or how just to think through things they don't know much about and to ask interesting questions. That's hard. You have to really sit back and say, how do I do that? How do I do things? And I think for me it is getting them to solve and do things that are really, really hard that they have no clue how to do. But the individual bits are actually not too hard. So I will talk a little bit about one of the ways that I taught my cosmology class here, trying to do exactly that. One of the things that we also knew that comes into that is just teaching people to have the focus and discipline to solve complex problems. Because that takes practice. You can't just sit down and say, spend a week to solve something hard. You need to practice it. Most people get fidgety after five minutes. And you know, especially people when they come in their first year here, but I can't do it in 15 minutes and they're going nuts. Because they've never had to do something that was longer than a 15-minute chunk. And trying to give people the opportunity, especially in their later years here, that opportunity to slow building up so that they can have that focus and discipline necessary to do complex problems, I think is an important part of what we do here. People have to have confidence to do anything in life, including to succeed at their classwork. So in the end, you do want people to emerge confident. That does not mean telling them you're wonderful when you're terrible. But it's trying to build up the notion of confidence in people as they go along. So that has to be a central theme. Because I'm just telling you that I've never met anyone who can actually perform anywhere near their peak unless they have some level of confidence. Meet you. When I lose my confidence, I might as well just go home and take a couple of days off until I get it. Because I'm pretty much an equivalent bowl of jelly without it. Learning how to work with others, that is becoming essential. Now, I would say that's maybe where things have changed a little bit. We didn't think too much about it. Do we want our students working away in their own little place, not talking to anyone or do we want to have them learn how to work constructively in teams to build on others? Well, I would say that's an essential life skill and one that as a university and myself, I want people to emphasize. I want people to succeed by working with others. And that also is going to influence how we teach. And finally, I think wonderment is important. That people have to be motivated and be really excited when they can do something or see something or understand and go, wow, that's why I came to university. And we have to remember that. People are motivated by emotion. And that can be the form of a mathematician who just sees, you know, logically a set of equations in a way that maybe most of us wouldn't identify with. But it can be wonderment within that area. Or it can be some complex social problem of how things interact and getting a new perspective that you just hadn't ever been exposed to. But wonderment, I think, is an important part that we tend to undersell. It has to be embedded in there, but it's not sufficient. So teaching must be engaging if you're going to get that wonderment. It is necessary, but as I said, it is not sufficient. You can go out and give a really great set of lectures, get everyone excited, and they won't learn anything. They'll be excited, but you haven't done the other half, which is to build in and get that knowledge and these skills. And so teaching must be effective at imparting knowledge. The challenge is evidence. There's very little evidence out there to actually see what's effective and not. And it's really depressing for me when I teach that I realize most of the stuff I do actually ends up not being that effective. And I have learned this. I've team taught a lot with Paul Francis, who would go through and tell me, well, here's ways of measuring your effectiveness, so I'll try. And I'm always like, oh my god. Everyone says they really loved the lecture and they learned absolutely nothing. And that happens. And it's depressing when you realize it happens. So make sure you're in a good space of mind before you measure how your students are learning, because you're going to be depressed afterwards in most instances. That being said, we really do need to focus on that evidence basis for what works. And I think it's going to depend a lot on the subject matter and even indeed the lecture. So I don't think there's one way to do it. I think there's a bazillion ways to do it, but it needs to be a focus. In 2017, the primary question I asked myself when I lecture is, what do I offer that Wikipedia, Khan Academy, or a MOOC doesn't? I want people to show up to my class, not because you're going to fail, because I'm going to take attendance. But I want them to show up because they actually want to show up to the class. They think it's an interesting good thing to show up. That's the goal. Why should people come to my class on their own volition? So that's always at the center of what I do. All right. First question, practice, I usually use. And if you haven't voted, start getting into vote. I want to see what people are doing and be honest. This is anonymous, so we can be honest. That's why I don't want to shake your hands. I want to see what people are really doing. This is going to be a basis of some conversations later on. Just kind of mesmerize. You can vote on more than one thing if you do multiple things. All right, I think we can keep voting and we'll watch this bounce around. But what you're seeing is about what I was expecting. Most of us use a lecture either just straight out or with some interactive sessions. So what am I doing right now? I'm doing B, which that's my intent. But 58% of us are doing that. And I like B because it works pretty well, especially at more advanced classes. It's not clear it's the best thing to do, but it's typically, for many things, more effective than A. And I'm going to go back to A where I think A is effective because I think an underdulterated lecture has its place. I'm not convinced that's a dead end. I think it has its place. B, a few of us do flipped lectures. Physics is largely going there, but most of the university hasn't gone there. Partially, it doesn't have even the technical backup to do it, quite frankly. It is interesting. I have experimented around a bit with it. Interactive group activity of some sort. I want to come and find out what people are doing there. That is something I've played around with, with mixed success. And I think it's worthwhile understanding what people are doing that. And other, of course, I'd be interested to find out what people are doing there as well. OK, so you can see where you fit in there, but that is largely, we haven't moved clearly to a flipped lecture format here by and large. So that's a useful thing to think. So here are some of the things that I have done through my career. When I started at University of Arizona, people were hated assessment. So assessment is one of these things which I struggle with at universities, because the assessment we do at universities, by and large, looks nothing like what people ever do with the knowledge they have after this. There are some exceptions to that. But by and large, I find assessment completely disconnected from, at some level, what I'm learning. So I have always been, as a student, quite disenchanted with assessment. So what I did back in this first year, this was astronomy for poets class, is I used to write mysteries, murder mysteries, which contained things that, if you understood astronomy and the lessons you were taught, you could solve. And there were red herrings. I mean, I played, I had the Agatha Christie playbook, and these took me a lot of time. And I found one a couple of weeks ago. I was like, I was pretty damn good as a 20-year-old doing that. I was pretty impressed with myself. And the interesting thing is the students of the day had never seen anything like this, and they all did them. And they kind of had a good time. But it was assessment that they enjoyed. And they had to actually go through the whole range of curriculum to figure out what was going on. Because, again, remember, there was red herrings. You couldn't just, you know, they were done in a way where you really did have to understand what was going on. So it got them to go and explore the material to try to solve these things. So that immediately appealed. And it shows you sort of one of my philosophies. Try to make assessment part of the class in some way. So that assessment isn't this horrible, awful thing you hate. But rather, that's something part of the class that's actually part of the learning process and enjoyable. That's always been something I like to do. It's not always possible. But whenever possible, I try to do that. Harvard, I used to play Astro Jeopardy, where Jeopardy is a game where they give the answers to the questions and you have to ask the questions. And this is a way to get people to interact and try to get the most number of dollars. And there'd be bottles of wine or whatever at the end of it, whoever won. Actually, I think Astro Mysteries work better. I do a form of problem-based learning and assessment in my cosmology class. So cosmology, third year, quite hard. So I would go through and put modern astronomy problems, ones that have been in the journals in the last couple of years. They're hard, but they're built up of a bunch of relatively straightforward pieces, but like 15 of them. And it's a journey of about three to four weeks involving tutorials, asking questions where they have to figure out how to take all the bits and pieces that I teach them in class and put them together to solve these very hard problems. If you don't go to tutorial, evidence is you cannot do these. People always think that that's not true and they always fail. But it is a way where people want to go and try to figure it out. And they learn a bunch of skills along the way and they're real world problems. And that's the assessment. But they learn during the assessment. Now, some people were quite critical and they said, but it's not exactly what the lectures are about. You taught us this. I'm like, well, but you had to know that to solve this. Yeah, but it's not exactly the same. And I always try to at the beginning of the class explain that the assessment is also learning. And 75% of the kids like it, 25% hated it. But I find it a very effective way in third year. I would never do it in first year because I don't think they're ready to do it. But in third year for cosmology, rather than just giving them quite hard, distinct little mathematical problems, which then never look like anything they're ever gonna do later in life, I find this a much more satisfying way of doing things. A real bugger to grade is the only problem because people can solve things in all sorts of ways. And I had one kid solve a problem. And I always said, if anyone can solve this without using a computer analytically, good luck. And some kid did it and I had to go to the math department and say, okay guys, I don't know what this kid did, but tell me if it's okay. And they said, actually that was, I don't know who this kid is, but that kid's smart. And I was like, good, excellent, A plus. I think personal touch matters. If you're teaching, you know, act one with a thousand, okay. You can even get it in that way sometimes. But I am a more effective teacher when I do or help do the tutorials. So if you have a big class, be one of the tutors. You know what's going on. It also means you can help the tutors and figure out, oh God, you can interfere. It's just allows you to clean things up. And my last two years since winning the Nobel Prize, I didn't do the tutorials and I didn't have as good a time and I don't think the class worked nearly as well. Not because my tutor wasn't wonderful, she is, but I lost connection and it was a big negative. I also think it's important to help do the hard homework grading. Partially, again, so you can see what people are doing and thinking. Otherwise, you need to see what's going on and who you're teaching. So I think that personal touch matters. It motivates the people who are working with you if you're teaching a large course. If you're teaching a small course, you probably don't have anyone, so you're just gonna do it yourself anyway. But it also makes you understand how people are learning. The other problem that we all have is everything takes time and a lot more time than you think. And so, reality, despite my best intentions, unless I really dedicate time and I mean, say, I'm gonna take a week off and do nothing but teaching, you run out of time and so you end up reverting back to the lecture because that's what you've been doing the last 30 years. So it takes discipline and we all do that. So, is the lecture dead? Well, my view is lectures can be incredibly emotive and inspiring and provide the presence and the history that underpin a subject. So, I guess I figured this out at the University of Arizona. There was no such thing of what I would call the emotive lecture. At Harvard, though, they would underpin their subjects with these amazing lectures bringing together amazing people. We have access to amazing people at this university. So, I got to meet three people in a discussion who were part of the Manhattan Project. Well, they were still alive. And this is a class I was tutoring and I'm like sitting there going, this is so amazing. But we can do things like that here. It gives people a sense of something they're never gonna get anywhere else. We have that ability to bring those types of people in this university and I think we should. You don't do it every class, every lecture, but I think having a few major lectures where you bring out the people who have made history or you do demonstrations in a way that are really spectacular and interesting to get the wonderment. I think that's a really important part of making a truly memorable course, especially in the first couple years. And it's something I think we can and should do more of. We should be bringing people across the lake and you'll be surprised. If you ask people, would you like to talk to our undergraduates? They're like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Doesn't matter who they are, they love it. So it's something I think we can and do more of. I'm a reasonably charismatic lecture but and people enjoy my lectures when I just get up and Mr. Charisma. But as I said, they don't learn much. So you can do a little bit but you need to then underpin it with other things. And I said group discussions, mixed lectures certainly do better. Clickers, those types of things get people going. But in the end, we need to think and start developing practice specific to the disciplines if that really does work. So I do think lectures should be used as part of the journey but they're not sufficient anymore in my opinion in any subject in the straight unadulterated form to be a cutting-edge class. Now I'm not insulting you the 32% said that's what you do because I typically fall back to that as well. But my sense is you do need to have some mixed things to be truly successful now. So I wanna ask you a question and then we'll finish up on this. If you wanna change the way you teach and some of you will and some of you won't, why, what's holding you back right now or are you actually happy how you teach it? And it's okay to be happy about how you teach. Some of us are absolutely superb teachers and we should be happy. Okay, I think we've got the basic idea, keep voting and we'll record this for posterity. So if I had to put my thing down here, it's A, first and B, second for me. Because I'll be honest, I'm not actually sure what to do to really get that gain in, especially at higher, I know how to do it in first year classes but I teach third year cosmology, right? It's hard to figure out how to do an advanced course and really get that education gain. So that's my own view and that sort of goes in pedagogical help which I sort of feel like I need. So on the basis of that, I want to now open up the discussion, I want to ask some questions of you. So my first question to people here is what are people doing that I didn't cover in that first slide when we talked about, do you just do the under-debted lecture? What are people doing here with their groups? How are they working that? And is anyone doing group things, for example, in greater than 40 or 50 where you have to start thinking through the logistics? So I'm kind of curious to find out what people are doing and then I want to find out what the university should be doing to help you if you do want to change.