Super Courses

The Future of Teaching and Learning

Ken Bain

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691216591
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Metodi di insegnamento

From the bestselling author of What the Best College Teachers Do, the story of a new breed of amazingly innovative courses that inspire students and improve learning Decades of research have produced profound insights into how student learning and motivation can be unleashed—and it's not through technology or even the best of lectures. In Super Courses, education expert and bestselling author Ken Bain tells the fascinating story of enterprising college, graduate school, and high school teachers who are using evidence-based approaches to spark deeper levels of learning, critical thinking, and creativity—whether teaching online, in class, or in the field.Visiting schools across the United States as well as in China and Singapore, Bain, working with his longtime collaborator, Marsha Marshall Bain, uncovers super courses throughout the humanities and sciences. At the University of Virginia, undergrads contemplate the big questions that drove Tolstoy—by working with juveniles at a maximum-security correctional facility. Harvard physics students learn about the universe not through lectures but from their peers in a class where even reading is a social event. And students at a Dallas high school use dance to develop growth mindsets—and many of them go on to top colleges, including Juilliard. Bain defines these as super courses because they all use powerful researched-based elements to build a "natural critical learning environment" that fosters intrinsic motivation, self-directed learning, and self-reflective reasoning. Complete with sample syllabi, the book shows teachers how they can build their own super courses.The story of a hugely important breakthrough in education, Super Courses reveals how these classes can help students reach their full potential, equip them to lead happy and productive lives, and meet the world's complex challenges.

PART I

THE IDEA

Prologue

We are in the midst of a profound revolution in teaching and learning. This change has come in the form of a new breed of “Super Courses” that have emerged in the humanities, social and natural sciences, arts, professional fields, and other areas. While these new experiences have appeared in all stages of education, they have made their biggest difference in undergraduate colleges and universities. These dramatic changes have also appeared in high schools and medical institutions.

These new kinds of courses are altering the nature of what students encounter in school. While fostering deeper and more widespread learning, they have redefined what it means to become educated and the conditions most likely to produce that end. When Harvard University Press published our What the Best College Teachers Do in 2004 and What the Best College Students Do in 2012, the nature of this revolution had already become somewhat clear, but it has continued to grow, transforming itself and the landscape around it.

We’ve Come a Long Way

For decades, many educators simply focused on finding “superior minds” and helping them to develop. These teachers assumed that the best way to educate was to give students facts to digest. Yet the innovations of which we speak are now demonstrating that traditional classrooms have too frequently left most students far short of their potential, even those who score the highest marks. Furthermore, our methods of measuring learning have long been inadequate. It’s tough to detect and appraise the changes that go on in people’s minds when they learn. Sometimes students have received praise for largely empty accomplishments. Other times some marvelous progress has gone undetected by our antiquated methods of assessment.

In the traditional classroom, instructors might laud the power of comprehension, critical thinking, creativity, and problem solving but often test for memory. Only with improved understanding of evaluation can teachers from grade school to the university focus more clearly on deep learning, adaptive expertise, and the ability to take an idea and realize its implications in a large variety of settings, some far distant from each other (what we sometimes call “far transfer”). Only then can we appreciate the importance of living at the edge of our own cultural perspectives and constantly exploring the problems we might face in accepting whatever we believe.

New technologies have certainly affected change, but they have not been the driving force that so many observers assume. The strongest influence has come instead from research on human learning. True, we have often pinned our hopes on our machines, and a variety of technologies have made it easier to create transforming learning environments. Yet sophisticated gadgets do not create better schools without advances in how we comprehend and measure learning and motivation. Indeed, the emphasis on technology as a savior of education has led to some false starts and pedagogical dead ends. Even in the spring of 2020, when a pandemic forced thousands of classes to go online, insights into how our minds grow, not computers or the internet, determined success or failure.

Our brains work in elaborate and often mysterious ways, but studies in a collection of fields we might call the learning arts and sciences have shed a bright light on those processes. As a result, we have come to recognize that learning is far more than rote memory. We know that teachers must master their subject before they can teach well, but that isn’t always sufficient. Professors can become experts in, say, biology or history or any other subject yet never grasp what other people may need to achieve a similar level of understanding. That’s a tough pill to swallow for some whose prowess in their field has been so outstanding, but recognize it we must in order to benefit from the new Super Courses.

The sea changes in schooling come at a time of both great promise and a growing sense of crisis. Many critics have lost confidence in formal education. Some people have even urged students, especially in college, to drop out, follow the example of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and seek their fortune in entrepreneurship. Yet the emerging Super Courses could solve many of the problems that have long bedeviled elementary, secondary, and higher education. These new opportunities are so profound that they foretell a bright and productive future for human beings, unless something derails the process. At minimum, they change the debate about schools and learning.

Several factors threaten the future of Super Courses. Despite their achievements, far too many educators cling to outmoded thinking and practices, often unaware of the brilliant advances that have emerged. Others know of these developments only as a perplexing and off-putting wilderness of terms like flipped classrooms, team-based learning, gamification, and role-playing. Meanwhile, still others who have tried to join the upheaval have misunderstood the secrets that power its achievements, often focusing on a single component.

To save and advance the merits of this leap forward, we must understand what makes these Super Courses tick. How can teachers replicate these educational successes, or, more important, use their insights into human learning to create their own innovations? In the pages that follow we’ll explore both some powerful examples of these remarkable inventions and the principles that underpin them. We hope this investigation will inspire the next phase of the movement.

But our book isn’t just for professional educators. Even casual readers can enjoy comparing Super Courses to their own school experience. Parents and students should pay attention as they make choices about schooling, from kindergarten to graduate school. Any high schooler searching for the right college should become acquainted with this revolution and use it to measure the places they consider. When taxpayers and political leaders ask questions about the value of public commitments to education, they must take these innovations into consideration. The whole debate has shifted.

Two important points to keep in mind. First, we’ve chosen a relatively few examples of Super Courses, but we don’t want to imply that these are the only possibilities, or even necessarily the “best” college and high school courses in the world. No ranking system is intended or offered. We could have chosen other examples to illustrate our point. But the collection we offer you does exemplify some of the major trends in the movement and the rich diversity of ideas that have emerged in a variety of schools and disciplines.

Second, none of these courses is perfect. Indeed, their architects are acutely aware of the opportunity for continued improvement as new research and ideas emerge. We’ll explore some of those efforts to find better ways to create what we call a natural critical learning environment.

What Now?

When the pandemic erupted in 2020, the movement gained more converts and took new forms as the shift to online education exposed old weaknesses in traditional teaching. Faculty members who had never tested the Super Course ideas frequently had only one question: How do I record my lectures and post them on the web? It was like going back to the dawn of the automobile age and asking, how can I hitch old Dobbin to that new vehicle? If professors simply brought to Zoom their old methods of fostering learning, they didn’t work so well. Without the charms of personal contact or the power of extraordinary speech, the deficiencies of the traditional approach became glaringly apparent. Students and parents began to protest.

For others, the crisis has become an opportunity to innovate. The models we will explore here have become blueprints and inspirations for the future of schooling—in the classroom, online, or in the community—but they are the beginning of the process, not the end.

CHAPTER ONE

Pinning Our Hopes on Our Machines

One day in 1999 some children playing in the streets of Kalkaji, New Delhi, found a computer fixed in a wall that separated their poor neighborhood from a rich office district. It might have been a strange sight for these young residents of such disadvantaged circumstances, but within hours they had mastered some basic workings of the device and had begun surfing the web.¹ The man who put the machine in the crevice, education engineer Sugata Mitra, later told the world in a series of web articles and TED talks, “within six months the children of the neighborhood had learned all the mouse operations, could open and close programs, and were going online to download games, music and videos.” When Mitra discovered that the kids had taught themselves how to work the magic box, he saw it as proof of his favorite educational theory: If you let children follow their own curiosity, they will learn by tinkering about, discovering something new, and teaching each other.

Mitra called this process “Minimally Invasive Education,” and after he showed his “Hole in the Wall” experiment before television cameras in 2007 and again in 2010 and 2013, more than seven million people eventually downloaded and watched the excited Indian professor bubble with enthusiasm. Mitra told stories of Tamil-speaking and poverty-stricken children learning English and the biochemistry of DNA replication in a matter of months. While they played with a computer he had placed under a tree, a twenty-two-year-old woman looked over their shoulders and occasionally vocalized little signs of encouragement: “Well, wow, how did you do that?” (in the fashion of a doting “grandmother,” as Mitra put it). Without conventional teachers, these poor children with so few worldly advantages had outperformed rich kids in a traditional school.

When the effervescent researcher spoke about his experiment on a TED talk, his live audience gasped, laughed, and applauded, and around the world, internet viewers contemplated the wonders of letting children follow their own curiosity and the alleged fascination of computers. One of those viewers in faraway northern Mexico taught in a conventional school located next to a foul-smelling garbage dump in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, just south of Brownsville, Texas.

Sergio Juárez Correa, a thirty-one-year-old teacher who had grown up in similar circumstances, stumbled onto Mitra’s videos one day, and they changed his life. How they did so, however, has been seriously misunderstood, even by the Wired magazine editors and writer who made Correa and his students somewhat famous. Indeed, as we will see, many people have misunderstood what took place with both Mitra and Correa and the role that computers did and did not play in teaching and learning. In the process these commentators have created a serious misunderstanding about the nature of our emerging Super Courses.

In a story that has become part of the lore of the computer industry’s promise to the world, Correa decided to do his own version of Mitra’s experiment. It would be quite a challenge. But for one twelve-year-old girl it would reveal the “extraordinary abilities” of a budding genius. Paloma Noyola Bueno, a thin young girl with long black hair, lived in a world where a foul smell “drifts through the cement-walled classroom,” a world where her father scavenged for little pieces of scraps he might sell to eke out the barest of existences, and where cement and wood “homes had intermittent electricity, few computers, limited Internet, and sometimes not enough to eat.” On their daily trek to school, Paloma and her classmates would walk along beside a sewage-filled ditch and sometimes find dead bodies on the streets, victims of a drug war shootout the night before.² They didn’t have a generous and inventive benefactor like Mitra to set up a magic box for them.

In the fall of 2011, on the first day of class, Correa put his students in a circle, sat down with them, and told them they had as much potential as anyone. He invited them into a world where they could “build robots and airplanes” and “write symphonies.” The young educator then asked that powerful question, “So, what do you want to learn?” That was a radical change. No more would he follow some fixed curriculum handed down from on high. Those traditional lessons often wore the tattered clothes of their nineteenth- and twentieth-century origins, and Correa would have no more of it. From now on he would simply follow the whims and inquisitiveness of the kids in his class. Or so it seemed.

The results were astounding. In June 2012, when his students took the national standardized exams that Mexico uses to find out how schools and children are doing, Paloma made the highest math score in the country, even better than rich kids in major cities who attended posh private schools. Some of her classmates did almost as well. Ten placed in the 99.99th percentile in math, and three did so in Spanish. In the weeks to come, television and newspaper reporters showered Paloma with attention.

A popular TV show sent a variety of gifts, and even a year later, Wired, the industry-favored magazine that celebrates technological advances, called her “the next Steve Jobs” and put a somber-looking picture of the young girl on its cover. Since Jobs made no major contributions to mathematics, it wasn’t at all clear why the magazine didn’t label her the next Albert Einstein, or, better yet, the next, Emmy Noether. But the comparison with the Apple founder fit the narrative that Wired seemed to push: it’s the high-speed processors that made the difference.

But was it?

It’s easy to read these stories and agree with that assessment. Sugata Mitra even fell into that trap and once proclaimed, “If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it, like bees around a flower.”³ He should have known better, and we suspect he did. After all, the South Asian scholar was not the first person to pin his hopes on our machines. But the general move in that direction has not always gone well. The Wired article by Joshua Davis that made Paloma something of an international celebrity got much of the story right, but it littered its tale with too much unrelated noise about computers and technological progress, rather than focusing on the news about changes in the way we understand and foster learning.

Devil in the Wired City

Contrast for a moment the stories you just read with this one. In the 1980s Jeffrey Hawkins dreamed of putting a computer in everybody’s pocket. Make it small enough, and the costs will go down, he once told us, bringing near universal access to the world.⁴ Surely that vision could support Mitra’s. By the early 2000s, such miniature computers existed, and Hawkins’s T...