Photograph by Noah Kalina
Scientists don't use tools from 30 years ago to do research. They've built on discoveries to improve their techniques. But teaching suffers from neglect, according to microbiologist Jo Handelsman, who heads the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Teaching Fellows Program, an intensive yearlong program in scientific teaching and mentoring for graduate students and postdocs, and the HHMI-National Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in Biology, where 50 faculty members learn to think about teaching as they think about science. Five years ago, Handelsman, also a professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, says she became fed up with science's main pedagogical tool: the lecture, in which information is piped in the direction of inert students. < Back | Continue >
"I realized that we were doing an enormous disservice to science in this country," she says, "when science is really about discovery and inquiry and the excitement of finding out how the world works." Scientific teaching strives to represent science as it's really done, adapts to reach a diversity of people, and repeatedly evaluates its own effectiveness. Handelsman drew the details of the approach from literature on educational theory, with the same eye that she would bring to a research proposal. At least as difficult has been convincing scientists to think about teaching as rigorously as they do about research — scientists' resentment of such responsibilities can get in the way, Handelsman has found. But the futures of generations of students, she argues, make the commitment necessary. She is catalyzing a similar attitude shift about training graduate students to mentor. < Back | Continue >
The first exposure of many undergraduates to research is through a mentoring relationship with a graduate student, who receives little instruction in how to guide a novice at the bench. In fact, the idea of such instruction is foreign to many science departments. Handelsman found it was graduate students who were most open to rethinking the way they taught and, by extension, mentored. Immersing them in theories of small-group dynamics in the HHMI Teaching Fellows Program, she gives them that instruction and informs it with evidence from the literature. That way, even if some of today's professors are beyond Handelsman's reach, with any luck, coming generations of undergrads will find it strange that their professors were taught by people who didn't think much about what they were doing. Handelsman wishes the same for herself, she says with a laugh: "When I retire I'm going to take classes — taught in a different way than I was taught." < Back | Continue >
