In the early 1990s, Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur was convinced that he was teaching extremely well.
His students were getting good grades on standard exams, and he was receiving good student evaluations.
Then he gave them a different kind of test.
Not problems where they could remember a formula and calculate the answer.
Instead, he asked simple questions where Newton’s laws had to be applied to ordinary, real-life situations.
And he discovered a huge gap.
Many Harvard students could solve quantitative problems and pass their exams — but they could not apply the same knowledge when they had to actually understand what was happening.
In one of his later interviews, Mazur recalled that around 60% of his students could not apply Newton’s laws in practice despite their strong academic results.
And that discovery changed the way he taught.
Instead of explaining more, he created Peer Instruction. He would give students a conceptual problem, ask them to think about it individually, then discuss their reasoning with each other, challenge different answers and explain why they thought they were right.
The lesson was not that Harvard students were not intelligent enough.
Quite the opposite.
They were smart enough to pass the test.
The problem was that passing the test did not mean they could use what they knew.
And this is exactly the problem we wanted to solve for large groups.
Because universities already give students enormous amounts of knowledge. What is much harder – to give 50, 100 or 150 students at the same time is the opportunity to think, question, reflect, hear different perspectives and practise using what they know.
That is what we created Academic Crowd Coaching® for.
Large groups work in small coaching groups around one real challenge, facilitated by professional coaches.
Practice in thinking — at scale.
And because we define the outcome before the intervention, we can also measure whether anything actually changed.
If your educational organisation is interested in testing Academic Crowd Coaching® around one measurable student-development challenge, message us ACADEMIC – we will send you the full presentation.
If you want to learn more about Crowd Coaching methodology – please check the Concept here.