The bloody history of MIT's iconic freshman physics class [Lunch with Prof. John Belcher]
A story about 8.02 TEAL based on a lunch interview with its co-creator: Prof John Belcher
In the early 2000s, 3 in 20 freshmen failed physics every year - a staggeringly high 15% failure rate. That created immense pressure for the physics department to do something. So Professor Belcher and Dr Dourmashkin proposed a new way to teach - the TEAL format.
After 20 years, failure rate plumetted to 0.4%. In Spring 2021 and 2022 for example, only 3 in 800 freshmen failed. TEAL is now in the DNA of freshman physics, and had been naturally adopted by other departments in versions of 6.042, 18.01.
But what’s less known about TEAL is the dramatic history and backlash it faced its early years.
What is TEAL?
Traditional lectures are a 1 - 1.5 hour experience of listening to a speaker. TEAL classes, in contrast, are interspersed with 10-minute time blocks of group problem-solving and quick experiments. For example, the first 30 minute of a class might involve:
Learning about a theoretical concept from an instructor’s presentation
Solving a theoretical problem with your groupmates to apply what you just learnt e.g. solve the integral that predicts the behavior of a magnet around a coil
Doing an experiment related to the problem you solved e.g. put a magnet through a coil, and read the ammeter
Watching a visualization that elaborates on the experiment you did e.g. watch a colorful 3D animation of force fields that change as a coil moves through a wire
Given the right orchestration of a specially designed classroom, experimental equipment and trained staff team, it’d create a wonderful student experience.
So why did it face public criticism in its early days?
Public criticism
“By the third week in March, student discontent had reached a fever pitch, and 173 current and former students presented Kastner with a petition objecting to TEAL…
…That condemnation was the last straw for Belcher, who had been previously stung by the vehemence of the student criticism. He announced he would no longer be involved with TEAL."
TEAL is hard to execute well, and early iterations were messy. One aspect of this was that most instructors were trained to teach in lecture style, and were simply unfamiliar with teaching under TEAL.
Group dynamics were also unpredictable - whether students actually talk to each other and figure things out, or they’d just be confused, solve things on their own, or whether someone would dominate the conversation at the cost of the learning others. This would be made worse if staff didn’t know how to help out with the group dynamics or the hard problem at hand (and TEAL required a lot of active staff).
These type of execution-related problems got better over time, and TEAL matured as a format over the years. But there were two fundamentally unresolvable disagreements from some students and some instructors.
Firstly, some students didn’t like that you need to attend all classes to receive an A. It comes down to efficiency - attending all classes increases the minimum amount of time you need to spend on the class. Without the attendance constraint, students can pass or get an A by spending less time, which was crucial in a time-scarce environment like MIT.
But from the TEAL perspective, paternalistic attendance was designed for the students who were failing at the margin, not the students who can thrive without coming to lecture. The primary cause of students failing is misjudging how much work they need to put into the class, until it’s too late. Getting these students to come regularly not only spreads their workload across time, they’d know early on if things aren’t going well in class and do something about it. (It turns out that all students benefited from the attendance, that learning increased across the board, according to later studies).
Secondly, some traditional lecturers just didn’t like that the new format, and argue that it sacrifices too much rigor in favor of simplicity. The debate is more nuanced, but in any case, TEAL was willing to make the trade-off, based on the belief that mandatory freshman classes are taken by mostly students who will never take another physics class after they decide to go into their respective majors; teaching them with the same analytical style as higher-level physics classes isn’t necessarily a good fit for the audience.
Regardless, criticisms of TEAL continued in different forms, including several Tech articles, and even a student petition involving more than a hundred signatures to cease TEAL. When Prof Belcher left, his co-pioneer Dr Dourmashkin and a big team of supporters continued and kept TEAL alive til this day.
Today, 8.02 offers a more analytical version 8.022 for freshman who intend to become a physics major.
What’s the incentive to teach differently?
At first, I asked: “Why didn’t more projects like TEAL happen around MIT?”
Prof Belcher said: “You need to consider the reward structure for a research university”.
It made sense. Tenured-track faculty are hired and promoted on the basis of their research, not their teaching. And it’s not just about the financial incentives. It’s also about the desire to be ambitious, to do something great, and be respected for it. How much credit do you receive for making the lives of students intangibly better, versus if you’re an established figure in the research world, or even win a Nobel prize.
The benefits of researching well far outweighs teaching well.
I realized I should’ve been asking the opposite question: “Why would anyone want to go through the hardship of creating TEAL?”
Money, opportunity and doing something good
In our 2022 lunch interview, I asked Prof. Belcher a natural question. Why were you interested in space research?
What surprised me was that he could clearly articulate the blend of internal and external motivations for his decisions. Yes he loved physics, yes he was really good at it. But the US also was panicked after Russia sent a satellite into space (Sputnik), thereby putting a lot of money and opportunity in NASA and space research.
That’s when it clicked - money and opportunity was the missing narrative all along.
Earlier we said the physics department faced immense pressure to reduce the failure rate. Pressure from where exactly? That pressure came from a number of sources, but a notable one was a famous physics alumni donor Neil Papparlado - someone who routinely writes $5 million dollar checks as contributions to MIT - who was upset about MIT physics failure rate.
It also turns out that year, Bill Gate and Alexander V. d’Arbeloff donated $35 million to MIT to support education innovation, an initiative called iCampus. This created a temporary environment where instructors are well-funded to run ambitious teaching projects like TEAL.
Ending notes
In the end, Prof. Belcher was awarded a prestigious chair position. As a researcher, the spacecrafts he sent many decades ago to study plasma has arrived at all the outer planets, and still sends data back to his lab today.
When I wrote my lunch invite to Prof. Belcher, I mentioned that after my freshman year, my only recorded “A” grade came from a TEAL class - 6.042. I got a lot out of the active problem-solving in class because when I get stuck the staff was just around me and I could just ask them questions. With videos, I could review all the concepts I didn't understand and re-watch them, and instead of just having to give up in my room. It was enjoyable and efficient.
I’m guessing it’s students who enjoyed TEAL that led to Prof. Belcher to say “Well, I don’t regret it. The bottom-line is, it saved a lot of…shed tears from the tumult failing a course brought onto their lives”
There were certainly some shed tears in my time at MIT, but most of the times, the feeling of failing and not understanding was never that intense. Rather, it was prolonged - the day-to-day experience of exhaustion, anxiety and pointlessness, repeated over and over again. That for me was far worse, a type of purgatory.
Then there’s the flip side of that - feeling excited to wake-up for lecture, grasping the material, having the confidence to work out new problems, looking forward to work with my group. Even at times where I’m not “excited”, at the very least there’s enough hope to not give up completely, to fight another day.
While TEAL could have been negative for some students, it was also undeniably positive for many many students - students like me.
Thank you Professor Belcher for coming on the interview.
Sources:
Wrestling with Pedagogical Change by Lori Breslow