Changing the way we teach: from boring lectures to doing, collaborating, having fun

In the 1990s, Eli Lilly vice president Alpheus Bingham worried that the company was spending large capital looking for the next drug blockbuster, so he tried a totally different strategy in research. Instead of using their in-house experts, he created a public website called InnoCentive, where he posted their problems and promised a reward to outsiders who could suggest solutions to them. After a month, suggestions came pouring in. Said Bingham: “We got these great ideas from researchers we’d never heard of, pursuing angles that had never occurred to us. The creativity was simply astonishing.” By 2003, the Eli Lilly website was so successful that other companies copied it.

What is the take home lesson here? It is that in-house experts may sometimes not be able to solve a company’s difficult problems, but nonexperts and outsiders can. Can we use this change in strategy to transform our educational system, which remains deeply entrenched in traditional thinking and keeps doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results?

A huge flaw in the way we teach is using methods that are not based on research, but on experience handed down from one teacher to the next—like the traditional hour-lecture. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology psychologist, Laura Schulz, did research that will change the basic fabric of education from the lecture model of the past century to doing, collaborating, and having fun. She gave a group of four-year-olds a toy with four tubes. Each tube did something different, like making a squeaking sound or turning into a tiny mirror. The researcher told one group of students that she’d just found it on the floor. As she was showing the toy to the kids, she “accidentally” pulled one of the tubes that made a squeaking sound. The scientist reacted with enthusiastic surprise, “Huh, did you see that? Let me try to do that again.” Another group was given a different scenario. Instead of acting surprised, the researcher acted like a typical teacher and told the students that she has a new toy and wanted to show them how it works. She then willfully made the toy squeak.

Both groups of children were then given the toy to play with. All of the children in the experimental and control group pulled on the first tube and laughed at the squeaking sound. What happened next was interesting. The second group, who were “lectured” on how the toy works, quickly got bored with the activity. The first group of children on the other hand continued playing with it. They played with the other tubes as well and found hidden sounds and surprises. According to Schulz, the different response was caused by the method of teaching. When students are lectured on specific instructions, when they are told what they need to know, they are less likely to explore and find out things on their own. This is exactly what our current standards of teaching in the Philippines are.

In 1997, Olin College of Engineering was founded with a $460 million commitment from the Olin Foundation. It was one of the largest grants in the history of American higher education. While the college was being built in the academic year 2001-2002, the new faculty members collaborated with 30 student-partners to form a totally new engineering program designed to involve businesses and entrepreneurs as a requirement for graduation without traditional examinations. Olin is now ranked third in the 2021 US News and World Report.

For our students to compete globally, we should use the Olin way and ditch the race for the top 10 in board examinations.

Leonardo L. Leonidas, M.D.