Teaching for Student Success

Episode 1

With Great Power: Why A Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Became An Education Researcher with Carl Wieman

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STEVEN ROBINOW: Welcome to Teaching for Student Success, a podcast devoted to student-centered, evidence-based teaching practices to improve student success, equity, and inclusivity in your courses. I'm your host, Steven Robinow.

Today we'll talk with Dr. Carl Wieman, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, about his motivation to leave a successful fundamental research program and embark on a career in education research and education reform.

Stick around to the end to hear a beautiful story of one particular life changed by Dr. Wieman's commitment to student success.

However, before we start, I would like to remind you that this podcast is divided into chapters. You may have limited time, so if you want to hear about Dr. Wieman's motivation to improve the education of students, use your podcast app to skip to chapter two. Without further delay, let's get to the interview.

I'm very excited to welcome Dr. Carl Wieman to Teaching for Student Success. Dr. Wieman is a professor of physics and a professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Prior to arriving at Stanford in 2013, Dr. Wieman held professorships at the University of British Columbia and at the University of Colorado.

Many of you may be familiar with Dr. Wieman's research, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2001 for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases and for fundamental studies of the properties of condensates.

Today I have asked Dr. Wieman to discuss his current passion—perhaps one of his current passions, science education and science education research. Welcome, Dr. Wieman. Thank you for joining us on Teaching for Student Success.

CARL WIEMAN: Thanks. It's a pleasure to be here.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Before we turn to science education, perhaps you could talk briefly about your background and what drove you to become a physicist.

CARL WIEMAN: I have trouble, actually, identifying what it was. The part of physics that I always liked the most was building things and figuring out how to make things work, not addressing great fundamental questions of the universe. And so when I was a child, I had projects, and built things, and tried to design them.

And then I found out you could do that same sort of thing and people would give you money to build lasers and blast atoms with it and learn interesting things. And so it was, I know I kind of look at it as an almost natural extension of being curious about things, and exploring, and designing, and building.

And I was fortunate enough that I, very early on in my college career, got involved in undergraduate research and then in physics and found that was so much more interesting and rewarding than actually taking classes about this stuff. So I worked very hard as a college student to do as little coursework as possible and as much undergraduate research as possible. And it turned out all right.

STEVEN ROBINOW: It turned out all right. Thank you. I was actually reflecting as you were saying that. Of course, you grew up during a time of Sputnik and the space program. And I don't know if that had—

CARL WIEMAN: You know—

STEVEN ROBINOW: —any impact.

CARL WIEMAN: I think it did. I remember as a seven-year-old wanting to be an astronaut because that was an impressive thing to do. And then I discovered—the reason that I spent so much of my young life reading, my eyes weren't very good. And that ruled me out for becoming an astronaut. I had to go on to other activities.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Optics. Your eyes aren't good. And you're going into optics. Interesting.

CARL WIEMAN: Right, yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So now I'd like to turn to the issue of science, science education, and science education research. In addition to your Nobel Prize and 13 other prestigious awards for physics research, you have also received 10 prestigious awards in the realm of education, including the Carnegie United States University Professor of the Year from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Also, in terms of publications, this is what fascinates me. In terms of publications, from 1975 to 2003, you published 148 papers. One hundred percent were about physics research. Since 2004, you've published another 139. I mean, one, you're very prolific. It's amazing. But since 2004, 90% of those articles focus on science education. And all recent papers focus on science education.

CARL WIEMAN: Correct.

STEVEN ROBINOW: First, let me say, as I said before, the numbers are mind blowing. And your group is amazing. And you're very prolific. It's just fantastic.

However, the shift from physics research to education research is what really interests me. In the early 2000s, your publications switched from one to the other. I'm fascinated by that. And I'd love to know, what happened to cause that shift? What motivated you to essentially leave a most amazing and successful career in physics research to pick up the underappreciated and probably undervalued mantel of science education?

CARL WIEMAN: So that's a—a lot of things go into that. So, first, just to kind of clarify the history.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Thank you.

CARL WIEMAN: The reality of how I got into education was through my physics research. And the kind of research I did, I worked very closely with small groups of graduate students and paid a lot of attention to how those students were developing as physicists. And how to select potential graduate students who would be successful.

I came to see, after a dozen or so PhD students, I came to see a pattern that really puzzled me. And that was how these students could go through many years of great success in physics courses. They didn't get to work in my lab if they hadn't. But, in spite of getting all of these A's in physics courses when they started out, most of them really couldn't do physics much at all.

But it clearly wasn't anything fundamentally defective about them. Because after a couple of years working in my research group, they turned into physicists. And so I started thinking there's some fundamental puzzle about the brain and how it learns to do physics. This isn't just an idiosyncratic thing of individual students.

And so I kind of jumped into that, of what do we know about how people learn, how they learn physics? That was a long time ago, almost 40 years ago. When I was spending a few years just interested in that question, I learned a lot about what research there was. That was the early days, but there was a certainly not a trivial amount at that time of people doing these kind of experimental studies of learning physics and teaching by different ways.

I came out of that kind of funk after a couple of years of saying, OK, I understand why these students can do well in courses and not do physics and why they're becoming physicists. I also learned, oh, there's a lot better ways to teach than what I'd been doing, what others have been doing. I'm really an experimental scientist at heart from the very beginnings of my own trying to teach.

I was kind of, OK, what works best? What's the data that you can see? And for a long time, I couldn't see any data. There wasn't anything that really shook me after this period of kind of looking in research and say, oh. Now we could do a lot better. I could do a lot better in teaching. And so that's part of an appeal of just, gosh, this is part of my job.

Now I see how to be a lot more effective at it. We should want to do that. But beyond that, it was just the idea that I also saw the whole concept of approaching teaching as a scientific activity where you could do experiments. You could collect data. From that, you could get generalizable principles.

And so, in fact, for probably almost 20 years I had two independent research programs. I had my larger program was about blasting atoms with lasers. But then I also had graduate students and postdocs, actually studying the teaching and learning of physics. And I wasn't publishing as many papers. But, actually, there's a substantial number of years in which there's publications of both kinds.

When people introduce me, they very often say, oh, he got the Nobel Prize and then he switched to doing education. And I always try and correct them, saying, no, I was doing education, you know, 15 years before that. It's just people didn't pay any attention to it until I got the Nobel Prize. So, anyway, that's how I got into it.

And then as time went by, first, the Nobel Prize kind of opened doors and got people to listen to me that wouldn't have otherwise. And why was that important? Well, I'm convinced, and I've been even more convinced since then, that we just know a whole lot more from research about how to teach people than what's actually being done in our schools and courses.

And so it's just terrible that we're kind of wasting all this human capital, if you like, by teaching that's ineffective. And I always use the analogy that we're doing the teaching equivalent of bloodletting when we've got research kind of giving us the teaching equivalent of antibiotics. And people just have to understand that.

And so, on the one hand, having the—just say that the stature, or getting the attention, even though it's not necessarily warranted, but the attention to this kind of gives a responsibility to focus on this and make a difference. But beyond that, it's kind of a real fundamental issue for me as you sort of look at the state of the world and where we're going.

And I think that education, particularly science education, is kind of going to make or break the future of the human race. That we're faced with energy choices and climate change and environmental questions where these are obviously global, incredibly important. They're fundamentally technical at their heart.

You just can't expect people to make wise public-policy decisions about global change if they don't understand the basic ideas of heating and why carbon dioxide makes things get hotter.

I'm looking at that and saying, OK, we have to have people capable—and, not just a few people, a lot of people—capable of not becoming experts but understanding the basic scientific process, the idea of models. And why we believe in the models, and why we can predict things. And how we can use that to make better decisions.

If I want to get high-level philosophical, I'd argue that what science is it's a different way and a better way for human beings to make decisions. And that's what the world needs in the future. And so that's why I ultimately think it's so important.

And, of course, at some level it's not personally rewarding. It's just kind of a personal responsibility. But it's really something that every scientist, every teacher needs to be thinking about accomplishing.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Right. Well, thank you for taking up that responsibility. It is an interesting—it's a huge responsibility for people to step up.

CARL WIEMAN: People ask about what's the impact of getting a Nobel Prize. Well, to be honest, I'm not that unusual. But I think, for me, the biggest impact is, well, it means you can't sort of walk away and figure somebody else can deal with this because you've got this soapbox to stand on. It comes with a responsibility to use it.

STEVEN ROBINOW: With great power comes great responsibility, huh?

CARL WIEMAN: I'm not saying it comes with great power. With a little power still comes the responsibility.

STEVEN ROBINOW: And one of the nice things about what you're doing, and what a lot of people around the country are doing in the science education realm, is that it provides opportunities for groups that have previously not succeeded.

Because when you talk about this bloodletting analogy, the groups that don't make it through the system, that don't churn through, are the diverse students. We lose a lot of diversity as they go through with their education. And they never get to the point to be able to get into your lab to become the physicist to go to the next realm without high-quality learning environments for them to go through in the first place.

CARL WIEMAN: What I think is the most important thing we've learned about learning science, learning the complex thinking involved in that, is that the old way of thinking about how this happened and, therefore, what was important in education, was really based on the fundamental beliefs that the brain is largely a fixed object. And that it doesn't really change much.

You just educate by putting information into it. And that brain then can use that information to do science or whatever. Because of that view of learning, then what it means is, OK, you give all these tests and so on because you're selecting for the brains that can absorb that knowledge in the best way.

What we now know is, no, that's quite wrong. That, actually, the brain is techno plastic. It changes, and changes a lot. And it's the educational process, the right kind of educational process, has the brain strengthening. It's actually rewiring itself to be to have increased capabilities.

What was kind of always thought about previously, as well, we do these tests and we select for the best brains and use them. Now what we realize is, no, we're just selecting mostly for educational privilege.

We're throwing away all these brains that if they were just given the educational opportunities, like you say, they could develop greater capabilities, much greater success by all kinds of measures, a much greater benefit to humanity.

And for where we are now in kind of thinking about improved education, now that's, I think, the most fundamental point is to recognize that now we understand the brain a lot better than we did just 20 years ago. Education's really about developing that brain and let educational processes do that effectively. And that that can be far more important and powerful than the old-fashioned way we thought about, that we're just trying to choose the select few.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Right, interesting. Let's go down this path of those that have adopted your practices, you and the other science education researchers around the world. There's many practices now that have been validated. What has been the impact on the faculty that adopt those practices?

CARL WIEMAN: I led these big institutional change programs at Colorado and British Columbia and now smaller, but at Stanford. The original goal and design of the program was to provide incentives and training for not just the few who were believers, but entire science departments to adopt these teaching practices.

One of the most surprising and striking—not super surprising, but striking results of this was that once people were trained and had experience using these practices in a classroom, they never switched back. We'd provide them with incentives of various ways to change to teach some course this way. Then those would go away. And they'd keep teaching the course this way. They're going to teach a new course, they would adopt all these methods.

And you'd see how they'd be interacting with their other instructors. And it was just, they found the teaching so much more rewarding. You can understand why, fundamentally, because what these—I like to think of the heart of these better-teaching practices, at least for science at the university level, is the instructor's kind of thinking about the problem-solving process and the decision process that someone like a physicist would use.

Thinking of how to give the students the right kind of practice at doing this. And then they're giving them feedback on what they're doing right, what they're doing wrong, and so on.

So how is this different from the traditional lecture? You're standing up there talking. A bunch of people who are probably not paying much attention to you at all, maybe there's a few in the front who are asking questions. But the great majority, even if they show up, most of the time aren't paying much attention.

The difference between that and something where the students are really actively engaged in figuring things out, you're monitoring those conversations. They're asking you many more questions. They're much deeper questions. They're really calling on your expertise as a scientist much more directly. And you sort of feel you're sharing it with them.

And they're so much more interested and engaged in the material that, when you sort of think about when people kind of realize, gee, the classroom experience can be this way? But who doesn't love being asked lots of questions in which you're particularly trained and skilled at knowing the answers to? That's sort of the simple, egotistical way to think about this. But it's just much more rewarding as a way to teach you.

They're realizing and recognizing that they're having much more impact. And the students are learning much more. And that, of course, makes you feel better as a teacher. So that's really been an interesting experience. It gives someone a lot more hope that, once we kind of get this started, once as more and more people kind of have that experience, then they sort of will grow. Hopefully we're sort of near a tipping point. But we'll see.

One of the biggest challenges is that the formal incentive system just doesn't reward the use of effective teaching and actually penalizes it. Because it's so grounded in this kind of old-fashioned view of learning, old-fashioned view of teaching. That has to change. But once people start getting rewarded for doing things that's actually more fun for them, I think we can hope to see change happening pretty fast.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Do you actually really need structural changes? As you're talking about this, I'm thinking, you're going to be in the classroom, anyway, teaching.

CARL WIEMAN: Yeah.

STEVEN ROBINOW: And, yes, like any good chemical reaction, there's an activation barrier you have to get over. So there is some investment to get to that transition, to transition over into a newer modality. But once you do transition to that newer modality of teaching, not only is it no more work than it was before. As you said, it's not just more engaging for the students. It's not just that the students succeed. But as an instructor, you just have more fun.

How many more times do you want to get up there and talk about whatever basic principle you're talking about, versus engaging students and seeing that excitement and engaging with that?

CARL WIEMAN: Yeah, so that's all exactly right except it's that barrier. I think, yeah, the formal system is going to penalize me for taking the 50 hours or so. You're just not going to get people over that barrier unless you reduce it.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Or convince people that investment of time over the career is going to be worth it. And you're going to have a wonderful job.

CARL WIEMAN: That's right. It all has to do with numbers and culture. Once enough people have done that, it becomes the norm. They're used to seeing that happen. Then, yeah, it's not a big deal at all. But when it's new and different, I've come to think a lot about culture. Culture as a structure that keeps people behaving in a consistent way. That's kind of what culture is all about.

Most of that consistent behavior is valuable to societies, but it does provide a tremendous inertia to change, if you like. And so that's kind of what we're up against here.

STEVEN ROBINOW: What I've seen as an administrator when I was at Chico State was incoming faculty were very open to modern teaching practices. And I will give a shout out to Mandy Banet, who was at UBC and went through your program there. And she landed at Chico State and is and was an amazing educator from day one. And I'm sure some of that is thanks to your program. So that's great.

With our remaining time, I'd like to ask about you and some of your experiences teaching. First, how has this choice to become an education researcher and focus on student success impacted you and your life outside of the STEM classroom, perhaps even outside of academia?

CARL WIEMAN: Some of the things that have happened was when I launched these programs at UBC and University of Colorado. That was driven by doing these experiments, studying, teaching, and learning. And realizing, gee, we collectively just could do so much better. And then thinking, all right, what can I do to help make that happen?

And so one of the things I did was saying, look, I need to do an experiment in institutional change. That's really when I stopped doing my atomic physics research because that was when I said, OK, it's one thing to do small-scale educational research. It's another to say, OK, we're going to change how our university functions like British Columbia.

And so that involved essentially moving, setting up a whole new program, changing my directions to this massive program that was doing the experiment of seeing how you could change hundreds of faculty in their thinking and approaches to teaching, and really some basic-level change at the university. So that was kind of one great big change.

And then connected with that, which led to me being asked to be part of the Obama administration and the Office of Science and Technology Policy as the Associate Director for Science. But with the understanding a big part of that would be focusing on what could the federal government be doing to improve science education.

So, again, these are kind of, especially that part. I would never call it fun. Again, it was kind of one of these things that, responsibility, though. That if I hadn't gotten into this area and sort of realized the potential to have an impact and the need, from getting into science education research. I never would have ended up going out and spending a few years in Washington, DC, wearing a suit and all those horrible things.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Besides the suit, that must have been a fascinating experience to be working on public policy at that level, in the White House, in that administration. That had to be an amazing experience.

CARL WIEMAN: Fascinating, yes. But an awful lot of it was frustrating. You have lots of, in some sense, responsibilities and aspirations. But it's awfully hard to get things done. And so it's very much a double-edged sword. It is actually useful, though, for kind of changing your perspective and thinking, as a university faculty member, and thinking about what you're doing is teaching.

And that experience, I come away with, OK, the point of universities and how they operate from a government national policy perspective is really very different from what university faculty think about. And it's important to understand your, let's say, place in society, there, that in some sense, we kind of delude ourselves as to our importance, among other things.

But, anyway, that's just interesting issues to look at. It also makes me understand far better the challenges of making widespread educational change when you understand more about what the national structures and chaos really is and what drives different things. And it's quite different than what most of us faculty think as driving.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Hmm, interesting. It seems like there is a change in the pressures at the university level to improve student success, not by lowering the bars but by improving the success of all of the students, not just some of the students.

CARL WIEMAN: Yeah, that's fundamentally a national need. Universities are coming to, at various levels, embrace that, accept it. They still could do much, much more than they are now. I don't think universities came to that by themselves. It's much more that national policy and policy makers recognized, no, we need the universities to do more for us than they have.

And as you say that, especially, the issue of diversity, that a place like Stanford, it can happily go along and take its 0.1% and they all do wonderfully. And pat itself on the back because they're doing a great job in education. Now even Stanford recognized, no, we really can't. We've really got to make sure we're serving a broader population and we're making them successful.

STEVEN ROBINOW: So there are interesting public pressures that are changing university policies in maybe a very progressive direction.

CARL WIEMAN: Yeah, but, again, these things go very slowly. The universities are some of the most stable structures that, probably, society has ever had.

STEVEN ROBINOW: I was giving a talk once. And I was looking for a Rube Goldberg model of a university. You'll remember Rube Goldberg.

CARL WIEMAN: Yeah—

STEVEN ROBINOW: I remember Rube Goldberg. Some of our listeners won't. Well, you're going to have to Google it and find out. Anyway, so I looked for a Rube Goldberg machine of a university. And I couldn't find one. And then, of course, as I thought about it, I realized, it's ridiculous. Why would he need to generate this insane machine to run a university when universities have already generated that insane machine? Right? Unbelievable mechanism.

All right. So, on that point, maybe a final few questions about you and some experiences in the classroom. What has been your greatest classroom failure or possibly your most disappointing moment in the classroom?

CARL WIEMAN: I'm sitting here struggling because, to be honest, I approach teaching, like I say, very much like a science experiment. And what that means is you always focus on the failures. And so in any course I've ever taught, I can make a list of things that were failures.

I'll talk about the most recent, which is that once I came to Stanford, because I like to look at data, I start poking around, looking at their data. And I came to realize that Stanford has this incoming class which are by any measure incredibly extraordinary, every single person in there. And I come from large public universities with a much broader distribution of backgrounds.

But when I started looking at the Stanford data, they had a lot of students who, in their big introductory physics class that you needed to do well in to go into science and engineering, a lot of students were doing badly in that course. And so I'm sitting there thinking, this doesn't make any sense. These are students that if I put them in Colorado would have been incredible. And here they're failing.

I spent years studying this and trying interventions. First, looking at supplemental instruction, then kind of modifying the teaching approaches, and still haven't solved that problem. And they developed a whole new course for it.

It was frustrating because COVID got in the middle of that. But, also, it turned out well. A lot of students saw that it was grading more easily than the regular course. So the only people who took it were the ones who didn't really want to go into science or engineering. They just had to check off a box with the best grade, the minimum effort. That was kind of OK. I didn't think through that issue. So that's a recent frustration to me.

But I'd say, in general, that's always been my biggest failing is the fact that not every student was successful. Because I kind of go into this thinking, all right, by the time these kids get to a reasonably good university like, I guess, the ones I'm always dealing with, they all have the capability to be successful with the right kind of education.

Yes, in many of these classes, I can show how I can move the distribution up so they're learning a lot better. But there's still the distribution. I want to have everybody piled on at the top and perfect. And that's an ongoing challenge for me. And to be honest, lots of other people working in education research, too. The biggest challenge and my biggest frustration is not being able to be successful at that.

STEVEN ROBINOW: But you don't control everything in their lives. Students have amazingly complex lives that challenge all sorts of things. And it's amazing that many students can get through.

CARL WIEMAN: That's absolutely right. Yes, they have complex lives. But I've got to believe that if I could control certain things, I could provide them enough motivation, incentives, structure the workload, tailor the instruction better for them, and particularly this is this—what we're learning more and more is that there's just there's a big diversity.

And the way—a lot of the aspects of the way we're teaching and what we're teaching are only really reaching very effectively a subset of that group. Ultimately we'll never be incredibly perfect for everybody. But I think we could be a lot better for most.

STEVEN ROBINOW: I like the notion of taking responsibility for the failures in students that are not succeeding and really thinking about those students and how you can help them progress. What's been your greatest or most proud moment teaching?

CARL WIEMAN: When you see you've changed the student's life. They come in, not thinking they could learn physics. They're not going to do it. And they go away and pursue a career and are successful. That's clearly something that I'm very proud of when you really see how you could make a big impact on someone's life.

The other aspect, which is kind of not teaching, per se, but it's educational. Which is this PhET interact project with these interactive simulations, PhET for teaching science.

I started this program. And now I'm just an advisor. Person who works really hard [INAUDIBLE] at work is Kathy Perkins. We just had the billionth simulation run.

STEVEN ROBINOW: Billionth?

CARL WIEMAN: Billionth, yes. That says this is impacting a whole lot of people across the world. And I think we have good evidence these are pretty powerful educational tools in a beneficial way. I'm pretty proud of having started that.

STEVEN ROBINOW: We'll put a link to that on our Teaching for Student Success website. Last question, what was your sweetest or most poignant moment teaching?

CARL WIEMAN: Most poignant, there. Boy, that's hard to say. I can think back to whole sets of interactions with students, when they come back and talk about value and particularly when they talk about what they learned, not about whether they like the class, but how it really impacts their learning and their thinking.

I could pick some of those out from pretty much every class I've ever taught. So I'd hate to try and identify which one was most notable.

I do remember one that's always stuck in my mind. A student who was at Colorado in my introductory physics class. Had to take it for some science requirement. She was a single mother, young, very low-income background, and really struggling. Never done well in school. It was just kind of hoping to get through. And after my class I worked with her and she completely blossomed. She's a PhD engineer.

STEVEN ROBINOW: That's wonderful. And you keep in touch with her? A little bit? She knows where you are, you know where—

CARL WIEMAN: I did for 15 years. It's been a while.

STEVEN ROBINOW: That's pretty good, though.

CARL WIEMAN: Keep in touch with her long enough to know she's been incredibly successful.

STEVEN ROBINOW: That's fantastic, congratulations. Those are stories that you know you've changed people's lives. And as you said, there's many of those stories that you have that's really wonderful. And I think those are the sweetest moments, changing people's lives are the sweet moments.

Carl, I'd like to thank you so much for the time you spent with us today. It's been fascinating to hear about your motivations to improve student success.

Congratulations on the work you do and the students’ lives you impact, both personally and through your work. Perhaps we can have you back to talk about specific evidence-based practices that you and your group are researching in the future. Thank you, again, so much for your time, Carl. It's really been a lot of fun to talk to you. I've really enjoyed our conversation.

CARL WIEMAN: Thanks, it's been a pleasure.

STEVEN ROBINOW: For more about Dr. Carl Wieman, please go to our website, TeachingforStudentSuccess.org. There will be links to his favorite recommended reading for teaching and a link to the PhET interactive simulations website. This program has developed simulations for physics, chemistry, math, earth science, and biology.

Thank you for spending time with us today. I hope you have found this discussion interesting and motivational. Please share this podcast and website with your friends. Thank you for caring about your teaching and your students.

Thank you, also, to the growing army of education researchers out there working to improve the learning experiences and learning environments for all students with the goal of providing opportunities that help all students succeed, an honorable and important goal.

Those of us at Teaching for Student Success would love your feedback. Please contact us through our website at TeachingforStudentSuccess.org. Teaching for Student Success is a production of Teaching for Student Success Media. Let's end this podcast with some music by Julius H. Some of Julius's music can be found on Pixabay.

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