"What the Students Say,"
Vol. X, No. 3, November/December 1997

Lori Breslow

Over the past semester, I've been given the opportunity to meet with groups of students to listen to what they have to say about their education at MIT. These conversations have been important and enriching to me, as I hope they have been to the graduate students, undergraduates, and alumni who have joined me. While many of the discussions have been about housing, R/O, or alcohol on campus because of the soul-searching this community has done in the recent weeks, in this "Teach Talk" I want to focus on students' perspectives on their learning (and, by implication, of course, on our teaching). For in listening to what the students have been saying, I've been privy to some extraordinarily intelligent, imaginative, and astute observations.

What I'm about to report may be old hat to many of you who have been at MIT longer than I, or who know MIT students better than I do. Most of what I'm going to describe comes from a conversation that took place at a pika faculty-student mixer in mid-November. When I arrived at that event (later, unfortunately, than I had planned), rather than finding a crowd engaged in the usual party banter, house residents were sitting together in their living room in animated conversation with two other faculty members; Professor Dick Larson, Course 6 and director of the Center for Advanced Educational Services (CAES), and Professor Stephan Chorover, Course 9. The remainder of that conversation, which lasted for over another hour, was far ranging, honest (as far as I could tell), emotional, and at times intense. It was, I thought, an outstanding example of what can happen when students and teachers try hard to hear what each other is saying.

I wish I could recreate the atmosphere in the room for you. The best I can do is offer you some snapshots. There was the student who was so excited about what she wanted to say that she bounced up and down waiting for her turn to speak. A second young woman was so frustrated about some of her MIT classes that upon finishing her diatribe, she literally flung herself back from the edge of the couch on which she had been perched. There was the clicking, clattering sound of students snapping their fingers to signal they agreed with something someone said. And there was the young man who, when called on to speak, simply said, "I do have something to say, but I know Amy has been trying to get the floor, so I want to give her a chance." (I tell students in my communication class that at the base of all good listening is the ability to suppress the ego. If that young man's act was not a perfect example of that principle, I don't know what is.)

I want to make it clear that what follows are my recollections of that evening; Professor Larson and Professor Chorover may have different impressions, as may the students. (Everyone in attendance is invited to send their reactions to this column to The Faculty Newsletter.) And again I want to stress that the ideas I'm going to describe are devoid of the passion which, in many cases, accompanied their expression. I'm also going to distill down our conversation, which often took twists and turns, into six main themes - please understand that we weren't nearly so logical in our exploration!

Here, then, are some of the ideas I heard that evening:

Putting Ideas in Context Is a Vital Aid to Learning

The students didn't exactly express this point as I have. Instead they talked about the professor who explained how a certain set of equations once helped him understand something about the nature of the solar system, or the faculty member who asked his students to consider a phenomenon from a changing set of perspectives. The point is that classroom discussion was broadened to go beyond a narrow topic, a specific equation, or a particular concept.

In another "Teach Talk," I wrote about the importance of giving students the "picture on the box." I likened teaching in science and engineering to putting together a jigsaw puzzle because of the number of ideas or elements that have to be manipulated at any one time. I suggested that one technique to balance the necessarily focused nature of teaching technical subjects is to pull back the lens and, from time to time, help students marvel at how a specific topic connects to a larger idea - the picture on the box of the jigsaw puzzle. Some things we know about learning support the view that this is a powerful educational tool. James R. Davis, for example, writing in Better Teaching, More Learning, reports, "…researchers have found that context, meaning, and prior knowledge affect information processing directly and deeply."

But the pikas didn't need to study cognitive psychology to come to this conclusion. They told us when instructors provide them with a sense of the larger picture, it made what they were learning more engaging, more comprehensible, and more meaningful.

Meeting Ideas in More than One Setting Is Exciting

Not only did the students say they were fascinated when they learned something about the broader implications of their course material, but they were also excited to hear the same idea discussed in different subjects. For example, one young woman told us--with great joy--how wonderful it was when she learned (in the same semester!) about fluid dynamics in her mechanical engineering course, her biology course, and her geology course. The advantages of this multi-perspective view is also supported by research into learning. Joseph Lowman, a professor of psychology at UNC, Chapel Hill, summarizing at least 30 years of work in learning theory, writes in Mastering the Techniques of Teaching, "Students will learn and remember information better if they have many cognitive associations with it; the learning of isolated information is more difficult and less permanent than the learning of information that is connected to a network of other material." The logistics of consciously building connections between disciplines within the MIT curriculum may be mind-boggling, but if the two dozen pikas talking to us that evening at all represent the student body as a whole, these are precisely the kinds of connections that are mind-enhancing as well.

Recitations Shouldn't Be Lectures

Whatever the function of recitations in a particular subject is meant to be, the students were firm in their opinion that what they don't want is for their recitation instructor to get up in front of the class and deliver another lecture. (Or, and here I'm projecting my own prejudices into the conversation, the recitation instructor who fills the hour working problems at the board with only a wayward glance once in a while towards the students she/he is supposed to be teaching.) The students want recitations that are interactive although, as I'll describe in the following sections, they have mixed feelings about group work, and some of them readily admit to their own reluctance about speaking in class. Thus, the obstacles to making recitations more participatory are real and difficult to overcome. But, it seems to me, it is the responsibility of the recitation instructor both to create a climate in the classroom that encourages interaction, and to structure assignments that naturally lend themselves to student involvement.

Working with Other Students Is Often Effective, but Sometimes Isn't

Because I'm a devotee of collaborative learning, what the students had to say about working together was of particular interest to me. Teamwork in class (that is, primarily recitations and small classes) got mixed reviews. The students reported many of the problems they were asked to solve in teams simply didn't lend themselves to group work. (It is true that one of the "axioms" of collaborative learning is that groups should only be asked to work on tasks that, by their very nature, need more than one person to accomplish them. But often in technical subjects, this is more easily said than done.) So, the students described how they "humor" the instructor by scooting their chairs together and huddling over their papers, while, in actuality, they are solving the problems on their own. On the other hand, when the problem is conducive to working together, there seemed to be much enthusiasm for doing so. What that means is that it is up to the instructor to make teamwork a worthwhile investment of students' time and energy.

What the students did talk about with unabashed enthusiasm was getting together informally outside of class to work with each other. One young woman described a group of four who studied together every week with papers spread out across the pika dining room table. She talked about how members of her group supported each other both intellectually and emotionally through a class that could best be described as challenging. Another person reported how she and her teammates got through assignments much more efficiently than a group of students who hardly ever consulted one another on work for the course.

The fact that students study together is, I'm sure, no news to most MIT faculty. The fact that they see studying together as an integral and important part of their educational experience was surprising to me.

It's Hard to Figure Out How to Behave in Class

One of the pikas was a young man who had transferred to MIT from a liberal arts school where he had studied engineering. He began his contribution to the discussion with something like, "What goes on, anyway, with MIT students when they get into class?" What he was referring to was the reticence of our students to participate in class discussions, either by asking questions or by answering questions instructors put to them. This behavior seemed foreign and downright confusing to this student who was used to classes where students spoke freely and at will.

That question began a cascade of comments about what it's like to sit in a class at MIT. The students spoke of their reluctance to ask questions about material that's confusing to them for fear of "holding the rest of the class back," and, of course, for fear of being seen as stupid. Even if they know the material inside and out, many of them said, they don't want to answer questions in class because they're worried they'll be seen as a showoff. (There was widespread disdain for the student who was always answering the instructor's questions.) I get the sense that many MIT students are between a rock and a hard place: They can't participate in class because they run the risk of being labeled either foolish or loud-mouths.

One more observation on this point: When I told the students that in working with faculty I had come to believe their instructors really wanted to be able to interact with them in class, they seemed surprised. I described one faculty member with whom I consulted who confided in me that he "felt lonely" in front of his class - even though there was a roomful of people! I got the feeling that I might as well have been telling them their instructors were space aliens from Mars….

Education Has a Human Dimension to It

One student told this story. All semester long he had been having an e-mail correspondence with another student whom he had never met, I believe about a class project they were working on. One day in another class, the story teller was paired with a second student to work on a problem. The pika said he felt awkward in the situation because he was being asked to work with a stranger. By some coincidence (or stroke of luck) he found out the other fellow's name, and, as I'm sure you've guessed by now, it was the student he had been e-mailing all semester. At the end of his story, the student expressed his frustration with the anonymity and isolation of MIT classrooms. His point was that even the simple act of asking students to introduce themselves on the first day of class would go a long way to humanizing the situation. (Even in large lectures, it would be possible to give students the chance on the first day of the semester to exchange names with the people sitting near them.)

Richard Light, in a classic study of teaching and learning at Harvard, found that involvement with others was a key to a successful college experience. "Nearly every student who describes strong academic performance," Light writes, "can point to a specific activity that ties academic work closely to another person or a group of people." If it is true that MIT students are more shy than the average college student (and I don't know if they are or they aren't), and if it is true that they are particularly shy in class because it is there they feel most tested, then we, as faculty, need to grease the social wheels. We can make it easier for students to connect if we make it clear from the beginning of the semester that our classes are places where people who know each other learn together. It may take some effort to get students over their initial reluctance to make contact, but once they do, the potential for successful learning is significantly increased.

I realize this "Teach Talk" has been a hodgepodge of ideas and observations; that it has not, by any means, been a methodical exploration of teaching and learning. But that is often the way people talk to one another, and it was the way the conversation unfolded that evening. As I said, I was so amazed at what I heard from these students, at how articulate they were about the strengths and weaknesses of an MIT education, that I couldn't help but want to report my experience to a wider audience.

I've spent the last four or five years combing through the literature on learning theory, pedagogy, educational assessment. And in a little over an hour, these students had done a pretty credible job of summarizing much of what I had read. I only hope I listened well enough so that I can apply what I learned to strengthen my own interactions with my students, to better my own teaching, and to improve their learning.