Hutchinson earns top teaching prize

Chemistry’s
Hutchinson earns top teaching prize

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

If there’s
one word that best sums up John Hutchinson’s general
chemistry course, it’s “questionable.”

Hutchinson —
a devotee of the Socratic teaching method — estimates
that he asks up to 30 questions during each class, and no
one in the room — least of all Hutchinson — knows
what direction the day’s lesson will take.

“To teach
Socratically, the first thing you have to do is to relinquish
control,” Hutchinson said. “I typically start
lectures with a blank blackboard or transparency, and I
don’t write anything down until a student has spoken
it.”

One thing that
isn’t in doubt is Hutchinson’s skill as a teacher.
He is the winner of the 2004 George R. Brown Prize for Excellence
in Teaching, Rice’s most prestigious teaching award.

Each year, Rice
honors several of its best teachers with George R. Brown
teaching awards. One is singled out for the excellence prize
and several others are recognized with awards for superior
teaching. The recipients are selected based on survey responses
from recent alumni who graduated two and five years ago.

“Awards
from students are always meaningful, but it means even more
that these awards come from alumni who have been out in
the world and have had a chance to reflect upon the things
that are most valuable about the education they received
at Rice,” Hutchinson said.

Alumni certainly
appreciate Hutchinson’s teaching method. He is now
a five-time winner of Brown teaching awards, having won
the excellence prize in 1997 and superior teaching awards
in 1994, 1996 and 1998.

Kenton Whitmire,
chair of the chemistry department, said it is remarkable
that alumni remember their first chemistry course in surveys
completed years after graduation.

“My impression
is that students are much more likely to remember the professors
in their upper-level, major classes rather than those who
taught required, introductory science and math classes,”
Whitmire said. “This long-lasting impression that students
get — that chemistry is something that they can understand
— is perhaps one of the most valuable contributions
that John makes to the department’s teaching mission.

“Having
John recognized for his excellence in teaching is obviously
a plus for the department, and it goes a long way to convincing
students that there really is something positive that they
can get from chemistry,” he said.

Hutchinson said
one of the main goals of his class is to teach students
to become independent learners. To that end, the questions
he asks are not based upon rote memorization. Instead, students
are expected to read prior to class and be prepared to think
on their feet.

Some questions
are directed at individual students, but others are multiple-choice
questions that everyone answers. Hutchinson gives each student
a set of colored index cards and flashes a question on the
overhead. Students choose an answer, hold up the appropriate
colored card and the totals are tallied.

“Both the
students and I learn as much from the wrong answers as we
do from the right ones,” Hutchinson said.

That’s because
students in every course, Socratic or otherwise, process
new knowledge through an existing frame of reference. They
tend to try to make new knowledge fit with what they already
know. But all too often, students have the wrong notion
about something, and the new facts just don’t fit.
Drawing out these inconsistencies — and the underlying
misconceptions — is one of Hutchinson’s main goals
in class.

“If 80 percent
of the class holds up a purple card, and the correct answer
is green, then I need to figure out why,” Hutchinson
said. “Why aren’t people getting this? Why do
they all suffer from the same misconception?”

Hutchinson said
he first started teaching Socratically in 1985, three years
after he arrived at Rice. He got the idea when his wife
was in law school at the University of Houston. In her classes,
the Socratic method was the norm.

“When you
see old episodes of the TV show ‘The Paper Chase,’
it appears that the only reason they teach that way is to
torment the students, but my wife pointed out that the method
helped teach students to think like lawyers,” Hutchinson
said. “They were learning how to analyze a situation,
apply the law to that situation and make an informed conclusion
on the specifics of the case.”

Realizing that
scientists needed the same skills in order to apply the
appropriate theory and experimental methods in specific
cases, Hutchinson decided to reinvent his course. Not knowing
the first thing about Socratic teaching — he never
took a science course that was taught that way, and he didn’t
know anyone who had — Hutchinson sat in on some of
his wife’s law courses for a semester.

Today, Hutchinson’s
research and teaching are inextricably bound. He is actively
pursuing studies to build a body of quantitative data that
shows scientists that it’s worth their time to reorganize
their classes and begin teaching Socratically.

“Can I prove
that students learn from this approach? Yes,” Hutchinson
said. “Can I prove that they learn better? I’m
working on that.”