by Susan Griffith

Robert Brown has created "a revolution" in the way he teaches his physics classes at Rockefeller Hall.

photo by Susan Griffith Robert Brown, 2003 Diekhoff Award winner for graduate teaching, discusses imaging devices with his graduate students Timothy Eagan (left), Tanvir Baig (standing) and Tesfaye Kidane (right).

The Institute Professor of Physics—and one of this year's John S. Diekhoff Award winners for excellence in graduate teaching—steps to the head of the class when it comes to changing the old and bringing in new ways of teaching.

In teaching some 27 courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels over the past 30 years, he has moved away from the lecturing and note-taking format. Someone pausing outside his classroom door may find that one minute things can be quiet as Brown explains physics and next the classes erupts into conversation and is abuzz with activity.

He started to find a new satisfaction in teaching more than 15 years ago as he engaged in new ways of reaching students in his freshman physics honors classes. He now implements those teaching strategies in his most recent course on the physics of imaging at the graduate level.

"What is really revolutionary is that what I'm doing with my undergraduates; I am now doing with the graduate students. And they like it," Brown said.

These teaching methods are coming under the scrutiny of his former honors physics student Kathleen Andre Harper (B.S. "93, M.S. '96). Harper is now a postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State University, continuing research started as a doctoral student at OSU. This past semester, she collaborated with Brown in an experiment to analyze the effectiveness of his teaching.

Brown said as she was learning about the art of teaching, she took a new interest in the innovations she recalled from Brown's classes.

They plan to write about their research findings in order to share the information with other teachers.

"While we are improving our classes with this and that thing, I worry that students have to work twice as hard with all they have to do. My goal is to find a way that we can teach more efficiently so that they get more out of the time we have together and out of the exercises we do," Brown said.

He does not want to repeat the style of one mathematics teacher he had in college who talked and wrote so fast that Brown would leave class with an aching wrist from taking down so many notes. When he later reviewed what he had written, the numbers looked like hieroglyphics, he said, adding that he also was writing so much that he never had time to think about what the teacher was saying.

Brown calls his classroom changes "revolutions," meaning significant departures from the way he used to do things. Among them are:

• Prepared lecture notes that he hands out at the beginning of each class
• Every 10 minutes the class breaks for an in-class exercise that reflects what was just taught and gives Brown feedback on how well he has taught and how much his students have absorbed
• Homework follows each student in his graduate and undergraduate classes
• E-mailed homework hints are sent to all students in a conversational tone that walks students through their homework assignments as though they had come to his office with a problem and needed his help
• In preparation for the exam, he gives students a round of exercises that are more challenging and demanding and do not have the hints to help them
• Once the test is taken, he lets students revisit a test, with the option of redoing any missed questions. Each question has an explanation of how Brown arrived at the answer as well as asks for the student's input in how they had solved the problem and why it is different from his method. (Brown remarks that he has found that many times he was not clear in what he asked of the students.)
• In questionnaires handed out after each test, students are asked to answer two questions-what do you need for me to do differently in order for you to learn more effectively and what do you NOT want me to change?
• At the undergraduate level, sophomores, juniors and seniors can serve as teaching assistants, which reinforces what they have learned and helps them put it into practice
• At the graduate level, he explores real industrial applications of physics while exposing students to the academic side of the discipline

"I know daily what the situation is. I don't have to wait five weeks for an exam to find out," Brown said.

With the in-class exercises, he also quickly learns every student's name and who they are-even in his physics honors classes of 70 students.

While he has more paperwork to handle, he said every day he turns the papers around; thus everyone is earning points for the work, and Brown is gaining perspective on his class.

He has noticed more students attend class and fewer drop out of physics.

In Harper's and Brown's experiment with the students, Brown tested the effectiveness of having students revisit their exams and work through the problems missed. He divided his class into two groups with equal scores on the test. One group received a follow-up exercise prior to revisiting the test, while the other group redid the test and then had the exercise.

"The group going through the exam and fixing up the errors seemed consistently to move ahead of the other class," Brown said. This finding requires a statistical analysis he is presently undertaking to test his belief that students benefit from revisiting the examinations and correcting any errors before they move forward in physics.

This Diekhoff Award is the first for Brown, who has received several Diekhoff nominations and as many as eight nominations for graduate and undergraduate teaching awards. He also has won two Undergraduate Student Government teaching awards.

While in the past he found himself encouraging the awards committees to give the honor to someone else, he said he realizes now that by winning the award he could tell his story and how it has made a difference in his classroom.

The John S. Diekhoff Award honors John S. Diekhoff, who served CWRU and Western Reserve University from 1956-1970 as professor and chairman of English, dean of Cleveland College, acting dean of the graduate school and vice provost. The awards, which carry a cash prize, are presented at CWRU's annual commencement convocation.

 

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