Ever notice the slight sag of the shoulders or heavy sighs or rolled eyes when you tell students they must work on a team project for the semester? It is a method of constructing what we tell the students is "the way it works when you're out there in the world," and yet it's so contrived as to be void of creativity, and certainly novelty! I've noticed that some of our students have 4 or 5 team projects per semester during their junior year.


One dedicated faculty member at North Carolina State University, Dr. Robert Beichner, developed a new approach to teaching the funamentals of physics - not a simple undertaking! This method, known as SCALE-UP (Student-Centered Active Learning Environment for Undergraduate Programs), has so many benefits that I don't believe I can express it all well in a short blog. I will encourage you to explore the possible use of this approach in your classes. There are two critical components of this learning environment that, in my opinion, make this program increibly valuable:


1. The teams are designed by the faculty to have a distribution of students with different academic records/performance. While it was expected that the honors students would be bored and would carry the group, that was not the case at all. In fact, the students with the highest GPAs learned more than those they guided though the material.


2. The test format is designed to guide the students through the fundamental questions; to learn to frame the problem and identify the approach to solve it. Once the student has addressed the problem, he or she has the opportunity to make the connection as to what the answer actually means.


The website where you can learn more about SCALE-UP is http://www.ncsu.edu/PER/scaleup.html.