Episode 1: Diane O'Dowd and Garage Demos

Welcome to the inaugural episode of the NatureEdCast. Please join us every month as Ilona Miko and other members of Nature Education interview thought leaders in science education.  In this episode, Ilona interviews Diane O'Dowd, HHMI Professor at University of California Irvine, and creator of 'garage demos'. Gargage demos are Dr. O'Dowd's way to turn science students into active participants during the teaching and learning process. In today's podcast Ilona learns Diane's philosophy behind this teaching approach and the warm response she's received from it. Join Dr. O'Dowd as she talks about how using a pair of socks to illustrate chromosomal pairing goes a long way towards sealing the concept in the minds of students, and how inspiring other faculty to do the same in their classrooms has grown into a successful HHMI-funded project. A full transcript of the podcast is below. [16:12]

Full transcript

ILONA MIKO, host:

Welcome to the latest edition of Nature Edcast, by Nature Education. I'm Ilona Miko. And today we're talking to Diane O'Dowd, from the University of California, Irvine, about innovative techniques in the classroom for science education. Welcome Diane.

DIANE O'DOWD: Thank you, nice to be here.

MIKO: Thanks for joining us. Diane is an HHMI professor which means that she receives grant funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for something that she calls the HHMI UCI Professor Program. And it's basically a program that helps bridge the divide between research and teaching, and helps enliven teaching techniques for professors and engaged students. You can find out more about this by going to the website, www.researchandteaching.eio.uci.edu. Diane, tell us a little bit about your program. I see on your website you have a wonderful quote by William Butler Yeats that says, education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. We'd like to know more about what you think the difference is between those two things. What's the difference between filling the pail and lighting the fire?

O'DOWD: Well I really like this quote because it characterizes the relatively recent change in my approach to teaching. So during this first 15 years as a faculty member here at UCI, my teaching focused primarily on transmission of facts in large lecture classes. And this resulted in my lectures getting more and more dense each year as a number of facts and access to these facts grew exponentially. I practically had to speak at the speed of light, and I still couldn't cover all the new and interesting information that I thought the students should know.

MIKO: And is that because you kept trying to give them current information along with the dogma of what's in the textbooks?

O'DOWD: That's exactly right. And so as the number of facts grew I found that the students were spending more time memorizing and less time thinking. So this really led to a decline in my interest and what I saw as my effectiveness as an instructor.

MIKO: And you saw this lack of interest how? How did you see them losing interest?

O'DOWD: I felt like they weren't thinking about the concepts, they were spending all their time memorizing facts. And that is basically inherently less interesting.

MIKO: And that's what you call filling the pail, that being a teacher.

O'DOWD: That was, I was filling the pail. And they were full to brimming. And so I was involved in developing a new introductory biology class for freshmen about five years ago, and at that point I decided it was no longer enough to just discuss facts, but I had to motivate and engage the students.

MIKO: Give them a reason to fill the pail, I guess, or something like that.

O'DOWD: Exactly, so the best way to light the fire in my opinion is to actively engage the students by getting them to do things in the classroom, cut down on the number of facts, and get them to think about the material you're giving them, so to focus on some analytical thinking skills and make them partners, or active partners in their learning. So they're not just passively sitting there being filled up with facts.

MIKO: So their buckets aren't getting filled, but their fire is getting lit. And so can you tell me a little bit about something you call a garage demo. I think this is a really interesting concept and it kind of points to this lighting the fire concept.

O'DOWD: Right. So this is the name the students gave to my attempts to use physical objectives, oftentimes very large physical objects because my classroom is huge. There are 450 students in it, and I needed to be able to illustrate how dynamic biological processes are in general, and especially microscopic ones which is what much of my class is about, things you can't actually see with your eye.

MIKO: Right. So they're all sitting in a big, big room, and they're looking at you, and they're having to imagine things that are invisible to the naked eye.

O'DOWD: Exactly. And so they see a static picture, and they think OK, this is a cell, and this is where the nucleus is in the cell, and this is where the mitochondria are, and they don't realize that all those things are moving around. So I use things that come from my garage, from pool noodles to old soccer socks, to coat hangers, to illustrate the physical objects and their dynamic nature, to help the students imagine what's actually happening, and to help them remember the process, and if it's fun and it's something they can relate to, then it helps them sort of not just visualize it at the time but remember it in the future.

MIKO: So what you're saying is that these garage demos are a way to give a physical sort of three dimensional representation of what they're seeing in their textbooks, which is two dimensional I guess.

O'DOWD: Yes.

MIKO: And it also gives them a way to think about while you're explaining it to them, rather than just filling their pail?

O'DOWD: Yeah, and even while I'm not explaining it to them, one of the best quotes I've had from my student evaluations was, I think about mitosis every time I do my laundry because we have soccer socks that are illustrating chromosomes in one of our garage demos.

MIKO: So you're helping them develop different associations to the same basic things they need to learn in introductory biology class.

O'DOWD: Exactly.

MIKO: So do you think that this is actually the way that science is taught at most institutions in the U.S.?

O'DOWD: Well it's becoming more so. I do think that there is a big movement to try and engage the students even in very large lecture classes. At small liberal arts institutions they've been doing active engagements with students for many years, very successfully. But at large research institutions where the focus is primarily on research, and teaching often takes a back seat to that, then that's where we need to focus our attention here at the research university to try and inject into our large classrooms some of the things that we know work extremely well in small classrooms all across the country.

MIKO: So how do you think that these research scientists have gotten to this point of filling the pail, and not light a fire. Can you talk a little bit more about the state of the research university that you're a part of at UC Irvine and other large very well-funded and well-established higher levels of science learning places basically. Can you talk a little bit about why does that happen, why do research, you know research scientists are so close to the objects that are creating all this new information and new discoveries that students are learning about in their classes. Why would that person be so disconnected from teaching in a large lecture hall?

O'DOWD: I think you'll find that most research scientists are fabulous teachers in a one on one in lab situations. And the administrative burden that's associated with teaching 450 students in a large lecture hall is just mind boggling. If only 10% of your students want to email you, you have 45 students that are emailing you all with questions that may be relatively similar but.

MIKO: Do you think that email changed the way that students interact with professors?

O'DOWD: I do at some level, but I think many faculty don't actually answer those emails because it's so intrusive. And we're trying to develop strategies that will help students interact with faculty in a more productive fashion, for example, to, if a student has a question to put it on a blog or a forum where the faculty member can answer it once and everybody else will benefit from that. So I think that, where the faculty are happy to help the students they just don't simply have the time to help 45 or 450. So in a research institution where the promotion ladders are really dependent on your research success, and are not often linked to your teaching prowess, that there is a huge --

MIKO: Lack of motivation perhaps for --

O'DOWD: Yeah.

MIKO: -- these teachers to, for these research professors to be more connected with their students, or pay more attention to innovative ways to explain things, I would think.

O'DOWD: Right.

MIKO: There's motivation to really try and explain something. I guess there's not even a motivation to answer email, but as we know email isn't the greatest form of teaching somebody something.

O'DOWD: Right, although, I mean students have wonderful questions, and if they can ask it in a forum where oftentimes being face to face with the faculty may be a little bit more intimidating, but being able to ask it by email and getting a good response is really empowering to the students. So I try and answer every student's email, but it does get overwhelming when I teach two classes of 450, so there's 900 students at a time that want your attention.

MIKO: Right. So if you had a way to, and many professors do this, communicate with their students through some sort of online classroom page that helps them coordinate things and have discussions, and you can actually group answers together and reach maybe a larger group of people without having to have them all 400 come through your office hours or your email inbox. That's a huge advantage so you have some virtual resources I gather. So on the one hand there's the garage demo which is the low tech pipe cleaner to, I think you had a garden hose in one of your demos on your website, that kind of thing.

O'DOWD: Yes, yes.

MIKO: That kind of thing, and then there's the other level where you can really take advantage of technological innovations and coordinate information that way, and have more impact because the student feels like the professor's talking to them directly on a discussion board, it's almost like a virtual office hours I gather.

O'DOWD: Right, and so to have the tools that are available for faculty to take advantage of without cutting into their research time where they can --

MIKO: Be more efficient. Yeah.

O'DOWD: Yeah, and be really effective faculty. I don't know one faculty member who doesn't want to educate their students and light their fire. But there is just not enough time in the day of many based on the fact that they need to maintain their two NIH grants and their NSF grants, and serve on a number of committees, as well as teach where, if all you had to do is teach that would be one thing. But in these large classes there's also a huge administrative burden associated with them where technology can really help with that.

MIKO: Do you think many universities should have something like this HHMI, UCI professor program?

O'DOWD: A lot, not a lot but there are a number of institutions that do, and I think they're extremely effective. Some of them are focused on courses like mine, like large introductory courses. Others are focused on developing new and innovative ways to engage students in addition to the broad range of students but underrepresented minorities in onsite research programs, are really important for enlivening the research universities in terms of an educational opportunity for their students.

MIKO: Well that sounds really interesting. It sounds a lot like if you get professors thinking in advance about how they can manage some of these volume problems that they can actually not only be better teachers, but they could be more efficient at getting their message across, and have a better positive impact, and hopefully create more interested young scientists which is I guess what everybody would like to see.

O'DOWD: That's exactly right. And I think that the value to the faculty, it will be intrinsic because every time I do this, every time I put in a new innovation that actually works, the students like it more and they give me lots of positive feedback. And so there is an intrinsic reward in actually doing this, and doing it well so the students feel like you're really teaching them what they want to know, and motivating them.

MIKO: It's interesting, this thing about the enthusiasm you're getting from your students. You had a recent paper in the Journal of Life Sciences Education where you actually quantified the responses from the evaluations, and it seemed to be that positive responses were coming from every grade category. So even the students who got a low grade were still giving you a very positive response about your teaching style and your teaching technique. Can you talk a little bit about that?

O'DOWD: Yeah, that was to me maybe the most surprising was in the cell biology education paper we were quantifying their responses to the garage demos, and asked them how helpful was this for you in learning the material? And just like you said, students in all grade categories, and these were all done anonymously, but the students were directed to particular survey sites based on the final grade they got in the class. So these surveys were done after the class was completely over.

MIKO: After they knew how they did and everything.

O'DOWD: Exactly. They had no reason, they had no motivation to actually respond, and we had students in the very low grade categories, the D and failing category that said things like, these garage demos really did help me visualize the material, and the reason I did poorly in the class was because I just didn't work hard enough. And to me that --

MIKO: That's so interesting.

O'DOWD: Yeah, that's the most, the only way that somebody can improve their learning is to get over the barrier of it's somebody else's fault.

MIKO: Of somebody else's fault, right, it's about my own incentive.

O'DOWD: Right.

MIKO: My own curiosity. But then you can sometimes even change those to, you know it's about their attitude towards learning I suppose. It's redirecting it.

O'DOWD: Right. So if they've now recognized that they are the barrier, not you the teacher, then they can solve the problem. If you're the problem, that's much harder to solve, and so I think it's extremely important and that we are going to be trying to figure out, what are the features of some of these things that we do that actually get the students to feel like, OK, I didn't get it, but I didn't get it because I didn't go at it the right way, rather than because you didn't give it to me the way I needed it.

MIKO: Or because my professor's no fun.

(Soundbite of laughter)

O'DOWD: Right, or --

MIKO: Which is often a very common, a very common complaint.

O'DOWD: My professor sucks is definitely the common complaint of why did you not do well in a class?

MIKO: It sounds really like you're at the cutting edge of trying to enliven teaching techniques amongst people who haven't probably thought about them for a while, and have so much information that they're just overwhelmed about how to get it across. It sounds like you're reinjecting some energy into that, that problem that a lot of research professors face at these institutions. And I'd like to thank you for joining us today. We've learned a lot.

O'DOWD: Thank you very much, and it's been a pleasure to talk with you.

MIKO: thank you for listening to this edition of Nature Edcast. You can find this podcast and others at Nature.com/scitable. That's Nature.com/S-C-I-T-A-B-L-E. Please join us again next time.