Today, we are officially relaunching our opening keynote from BLC11 with Dr. Eric Mazur. Dr. Mazur is the Area Dean of Applied Physics and  Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.

In his keynote, Dr. Mazur shares his vast research on teaching and learning. Students in Dr. Mazur’s class are moving far away from the traditional stand and deliver lectures given in many k-12 and university classrooms around the world, and they are gaining a much deeper understanding of the material being taught in the process.

As you watch this video, we invite you to take some time and respond to one or more of the following questions.

• Where does the balance lie in providing students with answers and having them discuss and apply reason to get to their own answers?
• Would you agree that the more a teacher is an expert in his/her content, the more difficulty this teacher has in understanding how a first time learner in this subject struggles? Explain your thinking.
• How practical is it for any teacher to apply a flipped learning model, like the one Dr. Mazur shares, where students guide themselves through content on their own at home and then send their questions to a teacher before coming to a class where this material is then applied at a deeper level? If it’s not practical, what are the barriers.