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[betterslac]

http://chronicle.com/article/Harvard-Seeks-to-Jolt/130683/

Reaction #1: Harvard really needed someone to donate a pot of money to do this? It couldn't have used some of its own billions?

Reaction #2: It was actually a series of "no sh!t"s and "duhs" to the conference's main contributions: grad students generally aren't mentored well in teaching; lectures aren't particularly efficient ways of facilitating learning and at the least must be augmented; if structured well, tests are excellent opportunities for student learning; students should learn to think as do experts in their field, but without the jargon.

Either the reporter missed what was really important and groundbreaking during the proceedings, or this conference was a colossal dud.

And curious minds want to know: were the conference presentations in the form of lectures???

[nonntt]

Harvard is in no position to solve the nation's problems with college teaching because Harvard doesn't have the problems that 90% of the rest of us have: Unprepared students, lack of resources, declining state support, retention imperatives, an annual budget lower than the amount that was donated to this one teaching initiative, etc., etc. If Harvard wanted to help undergraduate education, maybe they could double the size of their freshman class?

Everything mentioned in the article trickled down years ago from cognitive psych/instructional design research to the front lines of teaching, even at nowhere schools. Bemoaning the ineffectiveness of lectures is news because Harvard just discovered it? It's at least a decade too late.

[jackofallchem]

These is the same moaning and complaining I have heard for decades.  Put down the lecture, praise the flavor-of-the-semester educational fad.  The lecture is still around for a reason.  It is a good way to convey a lot of information quickly. It is not perfect, and it definitely has known flaws, but it works.  It has worked for hundreds of years, while its competitors come and go in fractions of a percent of that time.  I think one of the reasons the [insert last failed educational fad] failed is because people think they can turn teaching into a science.  They can't. 

This article bemoaned that faculty taught based on hunches and what they thought was going on, but they have to.  Every class is different.  Every year is different.  I go into class as well prepared as I can, but what worked spectacularly well last year can fail equally as spectacularly this year.  Teaching is an art.  It requires intuition, hunches, and educated guesses.  I like reading teaching evaluations, especially those from the same class, taught by the same professor, in the same semester.  If you didn't know any better, you would never guess the sections were taught by the same faculty member.  One section uniformly thinks the professor is bright, caring, funny, is easy to follow, has clear and reasonable expectations on assignments, and is the best professor they ever had.  The other section thinks the same professor is the devil incarnate.  He is arbitrary, bitter, routinely belittles students, doesn't return assignments, and doesn't give them a clue what they should be doing.