Carl Wieman: The Teacher's Teacher

Dr. Wieman mentioned Anders Ericsson’s book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise in regards to Malcolm Gladwell’s idea that you need 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something

• Carl Wieman is an American physicist at Stanford University. In 2001 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the Bose-Einstein condensation
• For more information about Carl Wieman check his nobelprize.org page
• Host: Dr. Brian Keating (@DrBrianKeating)
• In this interview, I talk with Dr. Wieman about the lessons he learned in pedagogy and creativity, especially in regards to how they can be applied in Physics

• I was surprised to learn that to become a certified flight instructor I had to study a great deal of human psychology
• That made me realize that in my 14 years as a professor, I was never taught how to teach
• I ask Dr. Wieman whether he thinks Physics professors should be taught how to be instructors

• He thinks it’s clear that if we want to have good professors, they need to be experts on how to teach well

• That means that they have to know 
• Latest research on basic learning
• Cognitive psychology
• How to implement those insights in the classroom
• Until 20 years ago, there was not much research on the topic, so teaching was considered more as an art
• We’re still in a transition, as we have to integrate the lessons from research
• We are in education where medicine was in the mid-1800s, when scientific medicine was starting to emerge 

• “The standard University professor is still currently practicing the pedagogical equivalent of bloodletting when there are antibiotics out there” Carl Wieman

• Science professors seem to be very confident about their knowledge and intelligence
• This may prevent them from wanting to learn how to be more effective teachers

• “It doesn’t take any more time to teach well than it does to teach the old, traditional stuff” Carl Wieman

• If our culture recognized the importance of training new faculties and set up efficient programs to do so, both professors and students would benefit tremendously

• New professors often spend enormous amounts of time not so productively
• There’s no need to re-invent the wheel every time you start teaching a course that’s been taught for many years
• It would only take several tens of hours to instruct teachers on how to be effective
• From then on, it wouldn’t take any more time
• It would provide professors with huge leverage for the rest of their careers

• Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that you need 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something
• Gladwell references a lot of research done by Anders Ericsson, but also adds his own perspectives 
• Reading Ericsson’s work Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, you can see where Gladwell’s interpretations went wrong
• 10,000 hours is an arbitrary number, but it’s clear that you need many hours of practice to become an expert

• Dr. Wieman points out that it’s really important that those hours are spent practicing the right things

• As a pilot, for example, you need to practice flying in different environments under different weather conditions

• Cognitive psychology research looking at brain activity showed we don’t actually make great leaps when we are learning

• What feels like a big breakthrough to us is the result of a gradual process that is preparing our brain

• We feel like we made a big leap when the last “link” in our brain has been connected
• Sometimes we get frustrated when we feel like we are not making progress
• But we are actually preparing our brain to achieve our next breakthrough

• Can you teach creativity?
• Dr. Wieman sees creativity as finding a different way to look at an existing situation
  • Creativity is not about bringing something completely new but realizing how we can apply things we already know in a different way

• To be creative in a discipline you need to be very well-grounded in it

• Picasso didn’t start out with Cubism; he started as a classical artist replicating the Masters
• Many physicists had tried solving the problem of Bose-Einstein condensation 
• Dr. Wieman’s breakthrough occurred by realizing that the bottleneck that needed to be solved, was not the bottleneck that other physicists were working on

• Students are encouraged to provide the answer that the instructor wants to see
• That’s the opposite of teaching new ways of looking at things

• Creativity gets penalized

• The education system is still based on the model that was set up to bring up good workers in British Industry in the 1800s

• Through his work in education, Dr. Wieman learned that negative feedback is more useful than positive to improve learning outcomes

• I remember my first flight instructor telling me:
• “Never stop learning because once you stop learning you get complacent. Once you get complacent bad things happen”