Bleary eyed, I turned to look over at my alarm clock. It was 6:32 am. As the rest of the world around the illuminated numbers slowly came into focus, I started to regret the decision I had made the day before. I felt sick to my stomach. My muscles were tense. My mouth was dry. I put my palm against my forehead and let out a long sigh.

I wasn’t hung over. I had simply agreed to teach elementary school kids. And, it was going to start in just over an hour and a half.

I’ll go ahead and put this out there. I’m not good at interacting with young children. I always feel a bit awkward around them. I generally don’t know what to talk to them about. Now, here I was about to speak to them about physiology. My mind had conjured a child’s voice and I could hear it say, “Fizzy all oh gee?”

In truth, I was terrified.

I had a similar feeling when I defended my dissertation. At least there, if a question came up, I could fall back on a repository of concepts and jargon that my committee and peers would probably understand. But, 8… 9… 10-year-olds? What were the thoughts and ideas they understood? I couldn’t remember what I was thinking at their age, much less what might be in their realm of consciousness nowadays. Pokémon? That’s still a thing, right?

My brain was trying to anticipate the questions they were going to have about the muscles, the heart, the lungs, and/or the nervous system. As my biological computer was processing the endless possibilities and “why?” questions, it locked up and stopped responding. I decided to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del on my brain and “End Task” with a shower before I drove out.

As I pulled up to the parking lot of Senita Valley Elementary, I was reminded of the charm that these schools have. There’s a certain buzz and energy that’s in the air as buses and parents drop off their kids curbside. They file in through the various gates and head (skipping sometimes) towards their classrooms.

I entered the main office and was met by two cheerful ladies. They asked me to sign in and directed me to room 210, the science enrichment center. As I walked into the classroom, I was greeted by Steve (Mr. Gordon), the science teacher and some of the other volunteers from the AZPS.

I looked around and saw that most of the activity stations were all set up — split between various organ systems. There was a host of plastic models: hearts, colorful brains, a dramatically posed man with the superficial muscles visible, and see-through lungs that showed the branching network of bronchioles and blood vessels. There were also dissected frogs, sheep hearts, and sheep brains. These were the same materials we routinely use to teach undergraduates about anatomy and physiology in our intro courses.

A renewed sense of dread washed over me. I was used to identifying things on these models and samples that sound like arcane incantations. Trabeculae carneae. Arbor vitae. Corpus callosum. Parietal pleura. Fibularis brevis. Atrioventricular septum. All I needed was a wand.

“Keep it simple,” I repeated in my mind. Abundantly so.

I primed myself with a few questions. What are the anatomical essentials that help lead to understanding what these tissues and organs do? How does the fundamental structure relate to the function? What words would you substitute to describe these things in a way that is so simple a child could understand?

I sat in one of the low plastic chairs that surrounded each station and spent the next 15 minutes formulating my plan. Before I knew it, I looked out the window and saw the first group of children walking single file towards the classroom. Third graders. Game time.

Mr. Gordon got the children organized and divided between the tables before giving a short introduction to the day’s event. Justin Hoffman (one of our AZPS members that coordinated the entire outreach) led off with a description of who we were, what we were going to be talking about, and solicited any questions before we got started.

Immediately, a hand was thrust into the air. It was a boy sitting in front of a microscope. A question already?

“Why does this look like bacon?” he asked.

I laughed. Then, I started to smile as I considered his question.

I had just focused that microscope before the kids entered the class. It was a slide with a longitudinal section of skeletal muscle. He was absolutely right. It did look like bacon.

The insight of his question struck me. Bacon is simply a thick slice of skeletal muscle. But, did this child know that meat is mostly muscle? Did he connect that idea with the process of preparing a histological section? That it was essentially done by taking a very, very, very thin slice of bacon and putting it on the glass?

Probably not. But if I had jumped in with that explanation, I bet he would have understood it. It would have built upon a concept he could relate to, and he likely would have made a connection that many of my undergraduates seem to miss. Heck, I hadn’t even thought of it like that.

This third grader had just given me a great analogy to help explain histology.

Little did I know, it was the first of several things I’d learn from these kids that day.

“Can you tell me what the heart does?”

Around the table, several hands eagerly reached for the sky. I nodded towards an adorable little girl who had a big, friendly smile on her face. She was bubbling with excitement.

“It pumps blood to the body!”

Kate Smith, another AZPS member and my teaching partner that day added, “And, why is blood important?”

“It carries oxygen and nutrients to keep us alive,” the girl replied.

Oxygen. Nutrients. I tilted my head to the side, my face holding what must have seemed a quizzical expression to her. Positive reinforcement would be appropriate right about now I reminded myself. “That’s right. Very good! Ok, someone else… how about the heart itself? How many chambers does it have?”

I called on another child. “Four!” she exclaimed.

“Do you know the names of those chambers?”

“Atrium and vertical!” responded another.

I cracked a smile. “Almost — ventricle. Great job!”

“I keep forgetting that one,” she said, admonishing herself. She opened up her science notebook and started looking back at her notes.

We turned the kids’ attention to the plastic, cutaway heart models on the table.

“Can you point to where the ventricles are?” I asked.

Immediately, their hands darted out as they all pointed to the area where the chambers were. Impressive. Most impressive.

Would this level of engagement hold with the sheep heart specimens we had? I grabbed the dissected organ from the tray on the table.

“Here’s a real heart — from a sheep. If you want to hold it, you’re gonna have to put on gloves.”

No hesitation. All of them were ready to don gloves and handle the preserved heart.

At that point, I felt a bit disappointed in myself. I had expected them to be reticent and uncooperative, with blank stares and twisted faces of disgust. Sadly, I had expected them to behave similarly to many unenthused undergraduates. I had severely underestimated these kids.

With two decades removed from childhood and my deliberate attempts to minimize my interactions with children in general, turns out I had forgotten something important… what pure, unbridled curiosity looked and felt like. Seeing it in front of me, embodied in those kids, partially dispelled the hazy veil that shrouded my memory.

Where had *my* raw curiosity gone? In that moment, I felt a longing for it. Certainly, I’m a curious person. It’s a prerequisite to being a scientist. But, what these kids had was something qualitatively different. Compared to theirs, my curiosity seemed wounded or crippled somehow. Had time done this to me? Or, something else?

The children’s excitement for learning was contagious. I felt invigorated. They caught me off guard with what they already knew (major props to Mr. Gordon). But, it was my turn to surprise them with some really cool tidbits about the blood vessels.

“Blood gets pumped from the heart through blood vessels-“

“Veins and arteries!” interjected one of the girls.

“That’s right,” I said then shifted their attention to the model depicting the vessels throughout the body. “How many do you think there are in the body?”

There was a slight pause as they gauged the model. “27!” one of them said, clearly trying to count them out.

I stuck out my thumb and raised it towards the ceiling. “Higher. And, I’ll give you a hint. A lot more than are shown on that model.”

“100!” another chimed in.

My thumb went up again.

“1000!” “10,000…?” “A million…?”

I could see the surprise building up with each guess based on their facial expressions. I kept motioning upward. “Over a billion vessels.”

“Wow…” one of the boys dragged out, his eyes widening.

Whenever I hear “wow”, it’s usually accompanied with an inflection of sarcasm. This time it was a genuine expression of wonder. Success. Now for the second part of this one-two punch. “If you took out all the vessels in the body and lined ’em up, how long do you think they would be?”

“From here to the other side of the school?” one of them guessed.

I shook my head, “Longer.”

“From here to my house?” offered another.

I smiled. I had no way of knowing where he lived, but he certainly didn’t live in orbit above Earth. I shook my head again.

“From here to China!” exclaimed another, thinking she had finally gotten it.

I was expecting that one. I remember, as a kid, China was the default farthest place in the world from me (incidentally, it’s 7,092 miles if you ask Google the distance between Arizona to China). I shook my head and raised my thumb into the air, much to her surprise. “They could go from here, around the entire planet, and back… two times! Over 60,000 miles.”

Audible gasps.

“Whaaat?!” exclaimed one of the boys. “That’s in one person? Even in me?” He was clearly shocked, his mind trying to grapple with the idea.

Mission accomplished. They were hooked.

As so it went. The students would rotate through the stations that we had set up, and I saw a fresh group of 5–6 kids every 8 minutes or so. Time and again, I was impressed with how much they already knew. We talked about heart structure, valves, vessel function, and some comparative anatomy/physiology. Their engagement with the material was through the roof.

As we interacted with the models and specimens, some of them shared a bit about themselves and their parents. One girl proudly told me that her mom was a nurse, and she wanted to be one, too. Another girl commented to me that she had seen heart surgeries. That really surprised me, and I asked her where.

“You can find anything on the internet now,” she replied nonchalantly.

So true. And, scary at the same time.

I asked one of the kids how they knew so much about the heart already. He must’ve heard “why” instead of “how”. Lucky for me.

“I want to be a scientist. And, you have to know this stuff. Do you like being a scientist?”

I proceeded to pick up my jaw from the floor. I want to be a scientist. There were a lot of things I wanted to be as a kid. Astronaut. Race car driver. Movie star. Famous musician. Many different “professionals”. Scientist didn’t make my list at the time. It dawned on me, then, what my primary purpose was in that classroom.

Our society members weren’t the only scientists among those children. We were helping to cultivate a future generation of scientists, far removed from our own. We weren’t there to simply disseminate knowledge about physiology. We were there to give it a voice. A voice that could speak to the inherent curiosity of these children. To direct their inquisitive nature to the wonder of biology. To reveal how cool science is.

I am vulnerable to impostor syndrome. Based on what I’ve read, many in the academic field are. But, when that child asked if I liked being a scientist… in that moment, I really felt like a professional scientist. A trade that ranked among the glamorous careers that children considered. And, it was nice. I felt like what I was doing really mattered.

I had the privilege of teaching those kids some interesting aspects of physiology. But, really, I came out ahead. They taught me more about myself and how to talk about science than I ever would have imagined.

This article was originally published on the Arizona Physiological Society website (www.azps.life) as a two part outreach perspective.

A Scientist Among Children was originally published in Scholarly Sojourn on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A common thread I’ve seen in articles about higher education focuses on the classic lecture. Some authors have taken the position that the lecture is next to useless and should be ditched completely, some defend it as a time-honored and effective teaching technique, and others fall somewhere in between.

A recent article has spurred me to consider where I stand in regards to the college lecture and teacher training. It’s a conversation with Nobel laureate Carl Wieman where he explains that lectures are rather ineffective teaching methods. He likens them to the ancient medical practice of bloodletting, drawing upon the idea that the fact that the patient got better afterwards was purely correlative.

From NPR’s chat with Carl Wieman:

“It’s a very good analogy,” the Stanford professor says. “You let some blood out and go away and they get well. Was it bloodletting that did it, or something else?”

The large college lecture — the cornerstone of undergraduate education in America and much of the world today — is similar, Wieman argues. “You give people lectures, and [some students] go away and learn the stuff. But it wasn’t that they learned it from lecture — they learned it from homework, from assignments. When we measure how little people learn from an actual lecture, it’s just really small.”

I agree with Wieman that the traditional lecture is often not the most effective for student learning. However, there are some important points that aren’t frequently acknowledged in these articles denouncing the lecture and calling for the adoption of active learning techniques.

Lecturing is a tool.

Like any tool, it can be used very well or very poorly. Take several people and put a brush in their hands. Give them paint. If you ask them to create a picture of a house, you’ll likely get very different products in terms of both quality and interpretation from each person.

In much the same way, ask different professors to teach about a given topic using the lecture method and you’ll get a similar variety of “products”. The outcome will depend on the person’s creativity and skill with the tool.

In fact, there have been lectures that I’ve learned quite a deal from. An example from recent memory is a series of biology lectures given by Eric Lander at MIT. I attended them through digital space, watching his chalk talk from the seat in front of my computer.

For me, what is it about Lander’s lecture method that I think is so effective?

It’s not just a pile of facts that he’s disseminating — he’s telling stories. The stories are about the people and the struggles they went through to generate the knowledge that he’s sharing with us. The stories inherently involve the problems and the process that went into figuring out how to solve them. They are stories that give us a way to connect the information to something we can relate to on a personal level — conflict and growth.

We learn from stories. We’re attuned to them. Using the lecture as a means to tell a good story, in my opinion, is a masterful way to use the tool.

And, according to NPR, Wieman hasn’t abandoned the lecture. It seems he has simply tweaked how he uses it:

“We’ve talked about how to get even one wave packet like that if we just have a single value momentum,” Wieman says, offering up a kind of mini-lecture.

But Wieman quickly switches to giving these undergraduate physics majors a problem to discuss and think about in small groups of four or five.

He breaks the lecture up into smaller chunks. Then he uses a different tool. The “brush” this time? Practice problems.

Discipline matters.

The content should be considered when choosing the approach to teach it.

Trying to get students to learn writing or math with a purely lecture-based approach probably isn’t going to go over well.

To get better results, you’d likely want to incorporate different tools. Tools like homework and assignments — the things that Wieman says students actually learn from.

So, for Wieman’s class, he gives the students problems to work on during class. And, presumably these are the style of problems/questions that show up on the exams.

Is it such a surprise then that test scores improve?

If you dedicate in-class time to give students the opportunity to practice solving problems relevant to your course objectives, I would fully expect them to do better on assessments.

If this kind of strategy sounds familiar, it’s because you likely remember it from K-12 education. The idea itself isn’t revolutionary. Its use in “higher” education is sadly considered revolutionary.

Why, then, is a more “active” approach to teaching not being widely used in higher ed? Really digging into the various possible reasons would fill a tome, but I think some of the issues relate to time, expectation, and training.

It costs time to implement these activities in a class.

One aspect of this time cost is actually coming up with good problems or activities for students to work on. This is a creatively demanding task that varies from topic to topic, discipline to discipline. Fine tuning the activities that you come up with is also an iterative effort that requires “field testing” in the classroom.

Also, because it’s difficult to create good questions, it’s tempting to save those questions for an exam — not give them out to students ahead of time. If the goal is to foster understanding, you don’t want students to just memorize a particular answer. In mathematics, however, the field tends to lend itself to a seemingly infinite fountain from which to draw problems. This isn’t necessarily the case for all disciplines.

These activities also cost in-class time. For some instructors, they see this as limiting the amount of material that they can cover in a particular class. Every minute is precious if you want to maximize the number of facts that you can disseminate.

Though, if a majority of those facts are summarily forgotten, what’s the point? Hope students retain some small percentage of them years down the line? And, if many of those facts are now easily accessed through a medium like the internet, shouldn’t the focus of education be on how to sift through those facts to be able to solve new problems?

“Mature” learners

I think there are multiple dubious assumptions, or expectations, regarding undergraduates. Some assume that:

They’ve graduated to a new intellectual level and are mature enough for the classic lecture.

They are disciplined enough to sit through and pay attention to an hour-long verbal delivery while being minimally distracted.

They’re now fully capable at this stage of extracting nuance and meaning from purely lecture-style lessons.

Another issue related to student “maturity” is the idea that activities such as the ones seen in K-12 are for “less advanced” students. That somehow, these activities are unsuitable for adult learners, and it would be insulting to use them. This idea feeds into a perception among some teachers at the college level that students won’t “buy” into a teaching technique different from the lecture.

In my experience, though, this simply isn’t true.

What students “buy” into is your passion for teaching. That passion serves as the marketing for learning. Harness that and you’ll be able to get students on board to try most any “active” learning exercise you want.

An academic paradox

While requirements differ depending on the state, consider what it takes before a person can be hired as a teacher at the K-12 level. Generally, K-12 teachers have formal training in education (through college courses or teaching prep programs). Student teaching internships are typically pursed. Then, training culminates in passing exams for teaching certificates and licenses (commonly required for teaching in public schools).

What do you need at the college level?

No formal education training, certification, or licensing. Usually, an advanced degree in the field you’re going to teach is the minimum.

It’s assumed that through your advanced studies you gain sufficient teaching experience or education training.

This frequently isn’t true.

The amount of teaching a grad student does is dependent on their own inclination towards teaching and how tolerant their thesis adviser is of it. After all, time spent teaching is time away from the lab doing research. And, classes in education are often not required for the degree program. If you’re lucky, the department might have some sort of workshop to help graduate students develop teaching skills.

Then, for many PhD students, the bulk of their “teaching” practice comes in the form of giving research presentations. Talks where they stand at a podium delivering information. Sometimes for 45–60 minutes straight.

Is it surprising, then, the prevalence of the classic lecture as the foremost teaching tool in higher ed?

There’s a large discrepancy in education training between K-12 and higher-ed teachers. It definitely shows based on one of the comments (by kbpole) from the NPR article we started with:

He’s revolutionized education with active learning? K-12 could learn from his model? Are you serious, NPR? Any respectable K-12 teacher practices “active learning” every single day — small groups, large groups, jigsaw activities, fishbowl discussions, silent discussions, Socratic discussions, Socratic seminars, document analyses, project-based learning, lit circles, independent reading and research projects, hands-on labs, field trips, interdisciplinary team teaching, and the list goes on. I have the utmost respect for the academic achievements of university faculty, but it’s time for university faculty (and NPR staff, evidently) to recognize K-12 teachers as professionals. If colleges and universities want to learn how to teach, take a look out the window of that ivory tower.

The tools of the teaching trade are many — lecturing being the most frequently used in higher ed. This is because it’s the tool that gets practiced the most in graduate student training and professional settings (seminars and conferences). Despite its widespread use, though, the skillful use of the lecture is relatively rare — in either research or teaching.

However, the tools that we use should fit the educational tasks at hand. But, if all we know how to use is a hammer (lecture), then every class is going to look like a nail.

To revolutionize higher education, we’ll need to become masters of the tools we already know as well as expand our proficiency with many others.

Tools of the Trade: Active Learning and Lecturing was originally published in Scholarly Sojourn on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I had the pleasure of attending a teaching workshop put on by the Graduate College at the University of Arizona. It featured five of the top teaching faculty that we have here on campus (Paul Blowers, Albrecht Classen, Lisa Elfring, John Pollard, and Edward Prather). It seems pretty clear based on their presentations/demos in the workshop that they have earned the distinction of being referred to as “master” teachers.

The workshop focused on ways to increase interactivity in the classroom with both low tech and high(er) tech methods. It was a bit of an informal session, that included (of course) segments of lecturing about active learning and educational research, demonstrations of group activities, sharing ideas to improve student engagement, and more general teaching tips. Here are just a few of the things that were highlighted:

Think/Pair/Share

A simple and powerful way to get students to wrangle with an idea is to ask them to talk about it with their fellow classmates. After introducing a concept, pose a question that students can then take the next few minutes discussing. Questions that prompt students to consider their own personal values and opinions are especially effective.

Accountability

Knowing that your work could be seen/heard/experienced by your peers can be motivation to put more effort/thought into what it is you are doing. Telling students that random examples of their work will be shared with the class after the activity is a way to instill that sense of accountability. To ease the sense of anxiety, try to foster a “safe” learning environment by keeping the comments positive and leaning on student anonymity (unless it is to point out particularly stellar work).

Low tech response card system

Dividing a standard sheet of paper into four quadrants labeled A, B, C, and D is a low cost, low tech way to give students a “response card” system akin to “clickers”. Folding the sheet to reveal only one of the letters allows them to cast their vote. While the aspect of anonymity is removed with this system, negative student sentiments and “wrongness” anxiety can be lessened by nuanced execution. For example, having students all vote at the same time (i.e. at the count of 3) and asking them to hold their response card right below their face makes it so any “peeking” from peers is minimized (and if they do, they have to effectively look the person in the eyes).

Fill in the _________ lecturing

This is a way to involve students by having them vocally contribute to the lecture topic by having them fill in content. For example:

Instructor: “We live on the planet…”

Students: “Earth.”

Instructor: “Which orbits the…”

Students: “Sun.”

Instructor: “Which is a…”

Students: “Star.”

If a particular student’s response doesn’t match the chorus, they have the opportunity to learn something. However, if the student chorus is totally off from the expected response, you as the instructor have just learned something about your class.

What, overall, did I take away?

There are an array of tools/techniques that can enhance interactivity and student engagement. When thinking about using these tools in the classroom, keep in mind your own teaching style, and realize that lecturing (which is a tool) doesn’t have to be completely ditched in favor of using these engagement activities. In fact, test driving these techniques for a portion of the class/semester can help you decide whether or not to fully “buy” into them.

Teaching Workshop: More Doing is Better was originally published in Scholarly Sojourn on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.