By Eileen K. McCluskey

Special to the Gazette

Everett Mendelsohn was taken by surprise when students in one of his classes experienced deeply emotional reactions to a discussion on the space shuttle Challenger's explosion. In this instance, as well as in others, this professor of the history of science availed himself of services offered by the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.

"I hadn't realized that, in this group of students, 75 percent of them had been sitting in classrooms in which the television was on, watching the Challenger's launch, and waiting eagerly to hear Christa McAuliffe speak to them from space," says Mendelsohn, professor of the history of science and third-time chair of the History of Science Department.

"McAuliffe taught some of them, and they all felt that they knew her," he explains. These students experienced the Challenger disaster "as personal and dramatic. They were just as shaken by the Challenger tragedy as were students of a generation ago by the destructive power that was unleashed with the first use of the atom bomb."

Although Mendelsohn, as well as the teaching fellows (TFs) who co-taught the class, were surprised by this classroom episode, they rose to the occasion thanks, at least in part, to Mendelsohn's close involvement with the Bok Center.

"The TFs quickly adjusted from treating the subject matter as distant history to that of personal relevance," says Mendelsohn. "We encouraged students to respond to questions such as 'Where were you when the Challenger explosion took place?' "

Lee Warren, an associate director at the Bok Center, was the person with whom Mendelsohn worked on ways to approach the Challenger discussions. Warren, who has been with the Bok Center for nine years, has faced many novel challenges with faculty and graduate students over the years.

Where Teachers Are Made

"I don't believe the maxim that teachers are born, not made," Warren says.

The Bok Center offers teaching orientations, workshops, one-on-one consultations, and a host of other services to realize its mission, which is to improve the quality of teaching in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Programs serve a wide constituency, from new TFs just beginning their teaching careers and international students teaching in the United States (and often in English) for the first time, to seasoned faculty seeking additional expertise.

One of the Bok Center's services for new instructors is called micro-teaching. "This is where TFs practice teaching," says Warren, "by giving a five- to-ten-minute discussion in front of their peers, a Bok Center consultant, and often a faculty member from their department."

The TF receives group feedback for the demonstration, and later, because the sessions are videotaped, individual feedback with a Bok Center consultant. The Center's Director, Jim Wilkinson, explains that, "The first things we say are all the good things we saw -- 'I really like the way you used the blackboard,' or 'Your enthusiasm for the subject matter was really contagious.' Only after that do we offer constructive criticism and specific strategies for any weak points."

Teaching Fellows Tackle The Issues

Elaine Zanutto is a Ph.D. candidate in statistics, and has served as a TF for the past four years. "I've done the practice teaching offered through the Bok Center," she says, adding that this micro-teaching "helps TFs who are nervous, and it serves as a good introduction to the Bok Center because the practice teaching happens at the beginning of the semester."

Noël Bisson, a TF and graduate student in music, says of her first practice sessions, "I was incredibly nervous beforehand, but came out feeling relieved and encouraged."

Weekly TF meetings can be crucial in the teacher-training process. Warren and her colleagues attend these meetings, helping the TFs sift through their challenges to find effective solutions.

"Most of the statistics TFs meet once a week," Zanutto reports. One commonly discussed theme in these meetings is how quantitative material can be presented to those students who shy away from quantitative analysis.

"We get a lot of students in these courses who are afraid of math," says Zanutto. "But we've found that there's room for different learning styles. For some students, it helps to draw diagrams of the concepts behind the math."

Bisson has also found a mix of student expertise in her classes and, she says, "When faced with students who have no background in music, you have to deal not only with teaching the subject, but also in helping the students overcome their unfamiliarity with the language of a musical score.

"That's why we put together a network for music TFs," Bisson says of her collaboration with Bok Center consultants. Through this network, the music TFs meet regularly to discuss issues such as how to develop criteria for grading fairly.

In Partnership With Faculty

Teaching fellows aren't the only ones finding their way to the Bok Center. David Layzer, the Donald H. Menzel Professor of Astrophysics Emeritus, has used the Bok Center to develop videotape tools for his TFs.

Layzer taught two Core courses -- Space, Time, and Motion and Chance, Necessity, and Order -- from 1970 until 1996. Layzer says, "These courses were taught entirely in discussion sections with common reading and writing assignments. Students prepared for each week's discussion by writing a two- to three-page essay which they later revised in light of the discussions and of written comments by a discussion leader."

To help TFs "learn the art of leading a discussion," Layzer says, "I asked them to film meetings of their discussion sections at the Bok Center. Afterwards, they viewed the film, often with a member of the Bok Center staff."

TFs, Layzer says, have been "unanimous in their praise for this form of training. It showed up strengths and weaknesses in their discussion-leading skills as nothing else could have done."

Marlies Mueller, senior preceptor in Romance languages and literatures, has had a long-standing connection with the Bok Center. "My relationship with the Bok Center goes back a long way," says Mueller, who has worked with Bok Center staff since the 1970s to create teaching materials.

Mueller explains that, as director of teacher training in French, "I get teachers coming in from France fresh off the plane and I have 10 days before placing them in front of the undergraduates."

With little time to prepare these new instructors to meet their classes, Mueller has found that videotapes can be immensely helpful. She has made a number of videotapes, and an interactive video disk in partnership with the Bok Center and with Video Services. These pedagogical tools address such topics as combining the teaching of literature and language. They also offer tips on how, for instance, to structure lessons in French, Italian, and Spanish.

When The Going Gets Tough

Perhaps one of the Bok Center's most valuable contributions to teaching and learning at Harvard comes in the form of helping faculty and TFs to respond constructively to controversial situations in the classroom.

"Suppose you're a TF, and the discussion topic is the Holocaust, and someone in the class declares that the Holocaust never happened," muses Warren. "Or suppose you're talking about racism, and a student says something like 'Well I don't see what's wrong with the idea that white people are superior to black people,' " she says. "How do you, as the instructor, handle those kinds of moments?"

Mendelsohn and the TFs working with him have faced precisely such an issue in their courses, Science and Society in the Twentieth Century and The Darwinian Revolution.

"In both of those courses, questions of race come up," Mendelsohn says, noting, "Our group of 12 TFs worked closely with the Bok Center on ways we can cultivate class discussions that are intellectually honest, morally aware, and culturally sensitive." One way this can be done, says Mendelsohn, is "to make sure that the TFs understand that their role is not to bring a group around to their view, but to allow the views of different members of the group to be aired, and to discuss what's at stake with each perspective."

One hallmark of a successful class discussion, according to Mendelsohn, is when the TF uses his or her role "to make sure that students work hard to listen to others, and that one student, by virtue of a strong voice, is not allowed to dominate the entire discussion." TFs are helped along in this task by, for example, simulating a situation in which one student begins to dominate the discussion, and then answering the question, "How would you handle this?"

Warren notes, "We try to help the teaching fellow to solicit everyone's opinion up front, before the discussion starts, and to make it clear that all opinions belong on the table."

"After a discussion section is finished," Mendelsohn says, "we debrief. What went wrong? What went right? Sometimes, remarkably positive things occur, such as when a traditionally quiet students jumps into the middle of the discussion."

"We get to train the future professoriat," Warren says. "We're helping to shape the future of higher education in this country."