Variety as the Spice of Education

In mid-July, NSF sponsored a conference called Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education. They invited several hundred people involved in college biology education to plot out ways of improving biology teaching over the coming decades. There is a bit of hubris in doing this. Still, it seemed like some nice ideas could come out of the meeting with that many innovative teachers in one place.

The formal parts of the conference left something to be desired, unfortunately, no one I talked with afterwards heard many good broad ideas. My own session on "tools" ended up as mostly a forum for people to share websites that they liked—not really what I would have chosen to spend a day of my time (and 40 other busy people's time) doing. But the informal parts of the conference, the poster session and hallway gabbing, were great. Lots of interesting people, many of whom think hard about teaching, assessment, and teaching tools. There is a lot of cool biology education and education research happening in this country.

Seeing so many posters on different tools and approaches to teaching biology in one place got me thinking. One of the professed goals for the conference was to come up with national guidelines for what students coming out of a biology class or a biology major should know. I think this is a good idea insofar as it leads to good assessment tools—it would be a boon to everyone involved in biology teaching if we had good ways of testing whether students were learning, and not just learning facts but also learning how to think like a biologist. A list of major concepts and thinking skills, and a good set of tests for those, would go a long way towards enabling us all to teach better.

But defining what "thinking like a biologist" means beyond some small core of ideas is going to be tricky. I'm not sure there is so much value in having all biology students come out knowing the same facts and skills. If instructors in one school are strong on tropical forests and another are excited about the golgi apparatus, isn't it better to let each focus on their own interest in their classes? And if one professor likes using problem-based learning while another finds success with clicker questions and group projects, perhaps that's good too. There are certain teaching techniques that seem not to be effective—straight lectures with multiple-guess tests at the end, for instance. We should learn which techniques are crap and encourage people not to use them. But beyond that, perhaps we should be encouraging evidence-based teaching rather than any one particular style. That is, develop a science of figuring out whether your students are learning, rather than a science of finding the number one method for teaching them. Although a magic teaching bullet could be nice, biology is all about variety so perhaps biology teaching should be as well.