“Active learning is very much related to hands-on design education,” said Walsh. “If you only have problem-set based learning, you get the idea that you can tackle your problems by just pulling an all-nighter. Instead, we challenge the students—and ask them to use everything that we’ve taught—to solve it.”
As Walsh explained, students grow intellectually by troubleshooting and correcting their own mistakes, experiences which help them become better project managers and designers.
Some classes, such as the advanced laboratory course Physics 191r, have eliminated their lecture component completely. In the class, students work together to conduct and analyze famous experiments.
“It’s very individualized and personal. A class like this shows you what it’s like to be a real researcher doing experimental physics in a lab,” said David A. Rosengarten ’12, a student taking the course.
Several students expressed enthusiasm for creative teaching methods.
“I definitely like the teaching model in which a substantial portion of the learning occurs beyond lecture,” Collin A. Rees ’12 wrote in an email. Rees is an Engineering Sciences 51 teaching fellow and took the course last fall.
“You always walk out of lab having accomplished something. Being a Mechanical Engineering concentrator, it made me fall in love with my concentration again and again,” said Nancy E. De Haro ’13, who took ES51 last spring.
But other students voiced concerns about the practicality of such methods.
Carina R. Fish ’13, who took Mazur’s Physics 11b class last spring, said that Mazur’s unconventional structure did not always lead to a better understanding of the material. “If the whole class was lost, real learning would never happen,” she said.
“The problem with this class was it took a very ‘perfectionistic’ approach to learning,” Ariana M. Saxby ’13, who also took Physics 11b, wrote in an email. “If you didn’t get a chance to do all the reading, however, class time felt useless.”
—Staff writer Akua F. Abu can be reached at aabu@college.harvard.edu.