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| Vol. 18, No. 20 | Feb. 18, 1999 |
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| Vol. 18, No. 20 | Feb. 18, 1999 |
As a young instructor at Yale University in the early 1970s, Harry Shipman, physics and astronomy, astounded his faculty supervisors by asking to teach non-science majors. He soon found himself lecturing to 160 undergraduates, which turned out to be a relatively manageable class, compared to some he has directed over the past several decades.
"I took that class outside; I found a stair railing where I could stand; and I tried my best to teach," Shipman said recently, shaking his head at the memory. For many years afterward, teaching meant "standing in front of a postage-stamp-sized blackboard in a lecture hall," he recalled.
These days, Shipman describes his classroom lectures as "lecturettes," which may or may not feature costumes, props and other theatrical devices, depending on the topic and his mood. Introducing 340 non-science majors to basic physical principles-without lulling them to sleep-is all in a day's work for Shipman.
With a half-dozen pioneering UD educators, Shipman is developing new techniques to encourage active learning, particularly for courses serving hundreds of students. The goal, he said, is to achieve "student-centered, inquiry-based learning, even in big classrooms."
Since the early 1990s, when UD faculty launched a campus-wide campaign to make learning less passive, Shipman has been experimenting with a teaching technique originally developed for use by small groups of medical students. Known as problem-based learning, or PBL, the method prompts five or six students to solve real-world mysteries. This approach is "extremely effective for working with small groups," Shipman said, but it can be tricky in larger classes.
"Organization is the key," Shipman said explaining how he customizes traditional PBL techniques to make them work in large lecture halls. His high-energy teaching style also seems to help him communicate with each student as an individual. In Sharp Laboratory's room 131, for example, he sometimes ropes off sections of chairs, creating walkways so he can move from one group of students to another.
In larger classes, "You can't just let students get their own information completely independently," he said. "That really does work in smaller classes, but it will quickly turn to chaos if you're working with many students at the same time."
So, Shipman races through the classroom, constantly checking in with groups working on such problems as "the oobleck question." Oobleck, he explained, "is a mixture of cornstarch and water, which behaves very strangely." Students are asked to explore and describe the material's composition, characteristics and behavior. In the process, Shipman said, they invariably learn the fundamental principles governing a material's viscosity.
Anything goes in Shipman's classes-so long as his activities don't violate what he calls the "Courtright/Zimmerman rule." That is, the resulting classroom conditions must not antagonize faculty member John Courtright, communication, who shared teaching space with Shipman when he first began reinventing his methods, or Linda Zimmerman, head of custodial services for Sharp Lab.
Investigating oobleck is a lesson students won't soon forget, Shipman said. And, he added, that's the whole point of such guided PBL exercises. When documentary filmmaker Phil Sadler covered commencement at a major Ivy League university in 1989, he found that 21 of 23 randomly selected students, alumni and even faculty could not explain why the moon has phases. The film, "A Private Universe," contends that U.S. students are routinely failing to learn science.
Shipman said the film profoundly affected his way of thinking about teaching. Now, he's likely to produce a small blue ball whenever he explains the moon's phases to future elementary-school teachers enrolled in one of his courses.
"The reason we see phases of the moon," he said recently, holding the ball in front of him and then executing a perfect pirouette, "is because the moon moves around the Earth!" By projecting light onto the ball and moving it in a circle around their heads, students in Shipman's courses can watch different shadows fall across it, mimicking the way the moon appears to us as it orbits the Earth.
Shipman smiles when he recalls how this simple demonstration "turned on the proverbial lightbulb" for one of his students-an elementary teacher participating in a summer course for educators. "She said, 'I've been teaching the phases of the moon for years, and I never really understood them before now.' That was very satisfying to me because she will reach so many more students, through her teaching."
In addition to his organizational skills, Shipman brings his athleticism to larger courses. To demonstrate the principle of energy based on motion, for example, he might race up and down stairs. During the course, Physical Science and Technology-co-taught by Barbara Duch of the Mathematics & Science Education Resource Center-Shipman pantomimed what happens to students during lengthy lectures:
"I've seen the postures people adopt when they're sitting through classical lectures," he said, before suddenly hopping atop a table, lying down, closing his eyes and snoring into a microphone.
Such classroom acrobatics reflect Shipman's prowess as an amateur ice skater, a hobby that takes up much of his leisure time. Last semester, he managed to carve out four practice sessions each week. His skating has earned a number of awards, including a first place for freestyle skating at the 1994 Ice Skating Institute World Championships. He also has competed three times at the U.S. Adult National Championships, where he received a Silver Medal one year.
Shipman laughed when asked whether he has shared training space at the Rust Ice Arena with Olympic Gold Medal winner, Oksana Baiul. "I've been able to watch her skating, but I certainly don't skate at the same time as the champions," he said. "When I look at her and I see how gracefully and how fast she skates, I think, `Yikes!' But, if you get discouraged by comparing yourself to other skaters, you'll never improve, so I try not to do it ... anyway, I have a little bit more body mass than Oksana!"
After receiving an undergraduate degree from Harvard and his master's and Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology, Shipman taught at Yale University and the University of Missouri before joining the UD faculty. He served for six years as faculty director of the Center for Teaching Effectiveness. Currently, he's an active member of the Institute for Transforming Undergraduate Education and other campus efforts to improve the learning experience.
Shipman's research focuses on astrophysics as well as science education. In astrophysics, he studies white dwarf stars-tiny balls the size of the Earth, which are the final resting places of low-mass stars like our sun. In 1998, Shipman and Danish collaborators confirmed a Nobel Prize-winning theory by the late astrophysicist, Subramanyan Chandresekhar, whose work shed light on our knowledge of the tiniest stars. "I study the life cycle of cosmic objects," Shipman explained. "I want to know how stars live and die."
In the field of science education, Shipman studies the effects of active learning strategies on student learning, particularly in large classes. Recently, he and collaborators Nancy Brickhouse, Zoubeida Dagher, and Will Letts in the School of Education analyzed student growth in understanding the nature of science in his college astronomy course. They also have made presentations at the National Association of Research in Science Teaching, and have a paper pending with the Journal of Research in Science Teaching.
-Ginger Pinholster
