Confessions of a Converted Lecturer: Eric Mazur

Eric Mazur: "I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material. Who was to blame? The students? The material? I will explain how I came to the agonizing conclusion that the culprit was neither of these. It was my teaching that caused students to fail! I will show how I have adjusted my approach to teaching and how it has improved my students' performance significantly." 


Eric Mazur is the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University. An internationally recognized scientist and researcher, he leads a vigorous research program in optical physics and supervises one of the largest research groups in the Physics Department at Harvard University.





Dr. Mazur is author or co-author of 243 scientific publications and 12 patents. He has also written on education and is the author of Peer Instruction: A User's Manual (Prentice Hall, 1997), a book that explains how to teach large lecture classes interactively. In 2006 he helped produce the award-winning DVD Interactive Teaching. (also see:  Peer Instruction: Ten years of experience and results.)

Blended Learning Revisited

John Seely Brown
Dava Newman
John Belcher
March 10, 2010

 

 “Playing at its deepest sense -- making, testing, trying, riddling the system -- that’s the thing.... If that isn’t an interesting description of deep research, I don’t know what is.”  ~John Seely Brown


Screen shots from Dr. Brown's Lecture