hen Jo Handelsman began teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison ten years ago, innovative teaching methods were the farthest thing from her mind. In the rush to set up her own laboratory and apply for grants, she did what most new faculty members do: teach the same way she had been taught. Three events transformed Handelsman's thinking about teaching. The first was when she brought a sick plant to an introductory course for non-majors and asked the students to design and conduct simple experiments to determine the cause of the symptoms. "The classroom was buzzing with discussion," Handelsman says. "It made me see for the first time the enthusiasm these non-majors had for science." The second was when, at a friend's suggestion, she moved away from lecturing toward more active forms of teaching. In her classes she broke students into groups and had them discuss possible causes of plant diseases, which she then gathered from the groups. "The results were stunning," she recounts in her recent book, Biology Brought to Life (Dubuque, Iowa: William C. Brown, 1996), cowritten with Barbara Houser and Helaine Kriegel. "During the rest of the lecture the students asked many more questions and seemed more interested than usual. This got us thinking about what we were missing with the exclusive use of the lecture." The third turning point came from working with a bright, diligent student who consistently failed exams. One day, in an attempt to figure out what was wrong, a colleague of Handelsman's asked to see the student's notes from that day's class. The student had written only three lines during a 50-minute lecture. So Handelsman began to incorporate more explicit guidance in her classes about the skills needed for success in college science courses. She developed these techniques in a class for non-majors entitled "Plants, Parasites, and People," and what she calls "turning the curriculum on its head" remains the goal of much of her teaching. "The people we should be teaching about how to design experiments and actually do science are freshmen, and especially non-majors," she says. At the same time, Handelsman has been using innovative teaching techniques increasingly in her classes for majors — sometimes in rooms with 200 to 300 students. "It's harder with 250 students, but it's do-able," she says. "And it's really the most rewarding with majors because you can use the hardest biological problems with them and they respond." The most common objection to active learning techniques is that classes cannot cover as much material as traditional lectures. Handelsman disagrees. Lectures in her course might be somewhat less comprehensive, she says, but students do a better job of reading and retaining the material in textbooks and handouts because they are more motivated. Handelsman also insists that students get much more out of her classes than just a compilation of facts. They get the reasoning skills needed to acquire and apply new information throughout their lives. "What we try to do is build a scaffolding so that students can hang new information on it," she says. "If the scaffolding isn't there, what we teach them or what they try to learn later can't stick."

Changes In The Classroom Active Learning Practical Strategies Introductory Courses Curriculum Redesign MCATs and GREs Electronic Learning Writing, Groups, Ethics Biology for Non-Majors Infrastructure for Change A World Of Opportunity Laboratory Experience Faculty in the Crossfire Women and Minorities The Many Paths to Success Assistant professor Janine Maddock's life at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor reveals the tight connections between teaching and research.