n interest in teaching cannot thrive when it remains limited to a few individuals. In successful biology departments the large majority of faculty members are interested in the quality of teaching and strive to improve it. Sustained progress comes from the group, not from heroic loners. Such departments foster a collective concern for teaching, a sense that the department as a whole is responsible for what occurs in classrooms and laboratories. The biology department and human biology program at Stanford University in California have been particularly successful in building this collective responsibility for teaching. "The question is whether your department values good teaching or not," says biology professor Craig Heller. "People are influenced by the messages they get from the culture." The human biology program demonstrates many of the emphases in biology education at Stanford. Taught by faculty members from biology, education, anthropology, psychology, and other disciplines, the program focuses on the relationship between human biology and human behavior. It graduates between 150 and 170 majors a year, making it about the same size as the more traditional biological sciences major. "Leaders need to understand science, but they also need to understand human behavior," says Heller, a former director of the program. The program's leadership works continually to maintain the high level of teaching in the program. Six or seven times a year the faculty members who teach in the program meet to discuss undergraduate teaching. According to anthropology professor William Durham, who has directed the program for the past three years, the meetings revolve around such questions as "How do you supervise your teaching assistants?" and "Which activities most engaged your students?" The program also encourages the involvement of faculty members from the medical school and other parts of the Stanford community who do not normally have undergraduate teaching responsibilities. "There are a large number of faculty at Stanford who love to teach undergraduates if given the chance," says Heller. The biology department at Stanford has adopted many of these same techniques in working with students, nurturing what Heller calls the culture of research. He has devised a sequence of activities designed to get students to think like scientists. First, a seminar course introduces them to the literature and basic questions in a field. Graduate students and postdocs serve as role models and help generate an atmosphere of discussion and inquiry. Next comes an advanced laboratory course emphasizing research methods, with students writing grant proposals that are reviewed by their classmates, just as in a "study section" of a funding agency. Many of the students then submit their research proposals to a university-wide competition for grant support to begin work during the summer on their projects. The emphasis on students as partners in research has had impressive results. No other major has been as successful in getting undergraduates involved in research. In human biology about half the majors do independent research projects, and the proportion is similar in biology. In any given year well over 100 students in the two programs combined are engaged in original research in the laboratories of Stanford's faculty. In the past few years faculty members from the biology department, the human biology program, and other science departments have been involved in an effort to extend good science teaching more broadly throughout the student body. A 1995 memorandum from Stanford's provost invited teams of faculty members to design and implement new year-long courses in science, mathematics, and engineering for students majoring in the humanities and social sciences. A number of faculty teams have been designing new courses. One team includes a physicist, a mathematician, a neurobiologist, an engineer, and a biochemist who have organized a course that examines "light" from various perspectives. Sharon Long, a professor of biological sciences and HHMIinvestigator, is among the five organizers. She points to the great need for more interdisciplinary--and more effective--science courses for non-majors. "I think this is one of the most important missions that university educators have right now," says Long.

HHMI investigator Sharon Long at Stanford University discusses genetic crosses with student Eric Engstrom. The Many Paths to Success Undergraduates in Research at the University of Arizona A Community of Scholars at Stanford University Reaching Across Generations at Morehouse College Lessons Learned Faculty Voices A World Of Opportunity Changes in the Classroom The Laboratory Experience Faculty in the Crossfire Expanding The Talent Pool   Yale University also has pioneered innovative biology courses for non-majors.