ScienceGuide talked with Terry Aladjem, Executive Director at Harvard's Derek Bok Center, before next week's Roosevelt/Harvard seminar on excellent teaching. He says that major developments in technology and our understanding of learning will redefine the way we teach. This would be a great opportunity for teachers themselves to "reclaim and redefine the mission of higher education".
What are your expectations regarding the upcoming Roosevelt/Harvard seminar and the exchange you will have with your Dutch colleagues?
Last year we had a wonderfully collegial exchange with our Dutch collaborators, and expect to do so again! We learn a great deal from these interactions, and we have found that the faculty of the Netherlands have thought deeply about teaching and have received many sorts of training that they bring to a conversation like this. An international exchange about teaching can spark many ideas and I expect the week will be inspiring and eye opening.
Which new priorities/challenges are coming to the forefront in your work on excellent teaching at Harvard?
Of course we are facing a new frontier in which online learning and digital media are changing the landscape of higher education. This is compelling educators to rethink their mission and reconceive their best practices. Even the great research universities like Harvard are being challenged to redefine excellence and to be more deliberate in generating their curricula and classroom practices. Our new program in General Education at Harvard for example is launching numerous innovative courses that engage students in different ways, as it is focused more deliberately on their present and future engagement with the world. This is a challenging time for all of us, but also an exciting one that is ripe with new opportunities.
How will you address this here in Holland?
We will focus on two principles of teaching excellence that are borne out by research:
1.) Designing courses based on learning objectives that are intelligently thought out by faculty-something that many teachers do already in the Netherlands.
2.) Active learning, or the principle that students actually learn best from what they do (as cognitive science tells us) even in a classroom. We will have sessions with our Dutch colleagues on course design, and we will engage in a practice we call micro-teaching to closely examine and critique one another's classroom practices. These exercises are bound to make us all more reflective about what we do.
Is teaching professors about excellent teaching different from teaching students in a classroom?
We are fortunate to be working with a group of highly experienced faculty. A great deal of what we do will involve drawing upon their expertise, discussing its virtues and thinking about how we might capitalize on and improve it. You can do something similar in teaching students, but re-imagining the best practices of teaching with experienced faculty is a distinctive pleasure.
How does the Derek Bok Center affect teachers at Harvard University?
We work with faculty and others teaching at Harvard at all
levels:
Senior professors planning a course may work
with us to think through effective assignments or elements of
course design. We have a seminar on designing the courses of the
future for graduate students, who will be the faculty of the
future, in which participants explore the research on teaching and
think deeply about the practice. This has begun to affect the
entire teaching community at Harvard, and to stimulate a broader
conversation. The Center has become a place to which more and more
faculty want to come to have that conversation in a way that makes
it clear that the Center truly belongs to them.
How do you translate your findings into real teaching?
Translation is indeed the challenge, it is one thing to say that research tells us that active learning works, and quite another to discover how to make it happen. Our website is full of good advice. We create events in which experts on teaching share their findings with Harvard faculty and deans. In an initiative launched by the Dean of our faculty, Michael D. Smith, we have created a series of short films of excellent teachers at Harvard, which we hope will inspire all who teach here to reflect on the best practices of teaching and to experiment with new things. There are other big things happening at Harvard that are exciting thinking about teaching: a very large gift to fund the President's Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT); a partnership with MIT to put courses online. These projects will involve all of us who care about teaching and change the practice in our classrooms, and will inspire others who don't have such resources.
Liberal Arts are growing increasingly popular in the Netherlands with 6 colleges set up already. What do you think can the Netherlands learn from American style liberal arts degrees???
At its best, liberal arts education produces independent thinkers who are well-rounded, quick learners who have transferable skills to offer any future employer. They are learned people with the breadth of knowledge and will also be well-informed citizens. Specialization is highly important for the education of our youth and the young adults of the Netherlands, but so is the opportunity to think broadly and deeply that is afforded by liberal arts education. It is not my place to say what should be done in your country, but I do believe that both kinds of education are important.
The next International Summit on the Teaching Profession will take place in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. What is your main message to the world regarding what excellent teaching looks like?
We are at a crossroads at which the conveyance of knowledge through the Internet requires us to reimagine what we do as teachers. There is a great opportunity for our faculties to reclaim and redefine the mission of higher education. We must be more deliberate in the design of our courses and curricula, thinking freshly about the learning objectives we have for our students, and we must find innovative ways to engage them through active learning. I think we should not be afraid to try new things and that we should bring our natural talents as researchers to bare on our own efforts to educate our students so that we become truly reflective practitioners of teaching.
This week, ScienceGuide publishes a series of articles on the Roosevelt Academy workshop on teaching excellence. Follow our reports on this event via Twitter or www.ScienceGuide.eu.
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