This interview with Richard Felder, Hoechst Celanese Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering at North Carolina State University, took place on the campus of Clemson University on March 19, 2001.

Susan Ledlow: I’m here today with Dr. Richard Felder, the Hoechst Celanese Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering at North Carolina State University. Dr. Felder, many of the faculty that we’ve interviewed have talked about you as a really important influence on their teaching. How did a chemical engineer get to be an expert in teaching?

Richard Felder:   I’ve taught chemical engineering for over thirty years, all at North Carolina State University, and for about the first fifteen of them I was pretty conventional, teaching the way my teachers taught me. It took that long for me to figure out that something was not quite right. For example, I would be in there lecturing, and doing a brilliant job of it, and I’d look out on the sea of glazed eyes and nodding heads and people reading newspapers and know something was wrong...or I would give a test on material that I had taught in excruciating detail, and the average would be something like forty-eight and again I would know something was wrong. I was putting the information out, but it was not being taken in by a lot of people. At that point I started looking around in the literature of cognitive and educational psychology to see what those folks could tell me about what I was supposed to be doing for a living. Somewhat to my surprise, I found out that some of them could tell me quite a bit. I started trying things, and some of them worked pretty well—I was getting more of the kind of results that I was looking for.  After a while, I persuaded my dean to sponsor a workshop where I would tell some of my colleagues about some of these methods, and I also started writing about them. People started noticing and asking me to go places to talk about the methods.  One thing led to another and here we are. 

Ledlow: You told me you make a distinction between active learning and cooperative learning and you do both of those things. Could you talk a little bit about how you distinguish those methods?

Felder: Active learning is anything course-related that students do besides listening to a lecture. They may write, reflect, discuss, solve problems, whatever. They may do it individually or together. As long as it is something other than watching and listening to me, it is active learning. Cooperative learning is a more formal kind of activity where students work in teams that stay together for extended periods of time under conditions that involve five criteria. (I should say that I’m using a model of cooperative learning developed by Johnson and Johnson—there are several others out there.) The first criterion is positive interdependence—the team members have to count on one another to do what they are supposed to do, otherwise everyone loses. Second is individual accountability, which means everyone is held responsible for understanding both their part of the work and everyone else’s parts. Third is face-to-face interaction at least part of the time. That rules out the familiar “You do problem one, you do problem two, I’ll do problem three,” and we come together, staple the problems together, and hand them in. That happens a lot, but it isn’t cooperative learning. The fourth criterion is the development of interpersonal skills needed to work effectively in teams. Students are not born knowing how to do conflict resolution, communication, leadership, time management, and so forth—some attention must be paid to helping them learn how to do those things. And the fifth criterion is regular self-assessment of group functioning. Periodically, teams have to stand back from what they’re doing and ask themselves, “What are we doing well as a team? What could we be doing better? What are we going to differently next time?” The extent to which groupwork has those five elements in place is the extent to which it qualifies as cooperative learning.

Ledlow: It sounds like a lot of new skills for students to be learning. What about faculty? Do they have to learn new skills to do this well?

Felder: Yes, but it’s not rocket science.  Many faculty members who come to my workshops are afraid I’m telling them that they have to throw out everything they’ve ever known about teaching, everything they’ve ever done, and start from scratch. And it really doesn’t require that. Most of the active learning exercises I do require no redevelopment at all.  Instead of asking the whole class a question and enduring the silence that follows, you tell students to turn to a neighbor, give them thirty seconds to come up with an answer to the same question, stop them, and call on a few of them for their responses, and move on. You don’t need to acquire any new skills and it doesn’t even take extra preparation time.  Now, there are some things faculty need to learn in order to make formal, structured cooperative learning work well, but it doesn’t take a massive re-education. In the workshops that Rebecca Brent and I give, we spend two to three hours talking about those things, and then the rest of the learning is experiential. You try things and they work, or they don’t work and you modify them. That’s how we learn to do everything—this is no different.

Ledlow: A lot of faculty who come to workshops that I give on cooperative learning ask me a question that I bet you get too. It is “Yeah, this seems like a lot of fun, and I bet the students are really engaged, but does this work any better than the traditional lecture?”

Felder: The answer is very simple—yes.

Ledlow: Could you tell us a little bit about the research?

Felder: What we say early, and then repeat frequently, is that this business is not just a matter of opinion—it’s not Felder coming in saying, “Hey, you should do cooperative learning because I really like it and so do the students.” Cooperative learning is probably the most exhaustively researched instructional method in all of education. There are literally thousands of studies out there that have looked at cooperative learning in every conceivable setting: K–12, higher education, laboratory settings, natural classroom settings, and so forth. The overwhelming body of evidence is that cooperative learning, done right—and that means with those five elements in place and not just turning students loose to get into groups to do something—has a positive effect on almost every learning outcome you can think of.  Whether you look at achievement in the classroom, performance on standardized tests, skill development, students’ attitudes toward their education—you name it and there are studies out there showing that you get those benefits if you use cooperative learning correctly. An important part of the workshops is pointing people to the research. We urge the participants to think critically the way they’ve been trained to do—don’t take our word for it but check the research out for yourselves, and if it’s persuasive, try the methods. 

Ledlow: I’d like to turn to the topic of setting the climate in the classroom. A lot of faculty tell me that they were convinced themselves about the research, but they don’t necessarily share that with the students. When you have faculty who are new to cooperative learning, and trying it out in their class for the first time, what would you recommend that they tell their students about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it?

Felder: The first thing we recommend is to do just that. You have to tell the students what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. If you don’t, then they jump to one of two assumptions. Some assume you’re playing some kind of game with them—and engineering students in particular don’t like that. Others assume you are running some sort of research study with them as the guinea pigs, and they’re not too thrilled about that either. So at the beginning of class, I always tell them, “Here’s what we’re going to be doing. We’re going to be doing team activities in class—answering questions, solving problems, troubleshooting—and you’re going to be doing most of your homework in teams.  This isn’t a game or a research study. I don’t need to research these methods, because it’s been done many times and here’s some of what the research shows....”  I don’t give them a whole seminar on cooperative learning after that, but I talk enough about its proven benefits to students to make it clear that I’m not doing it for my own good but to help them learn more, get better grades, and have a better experience. Some of them may not like it—usually a lot of them don’t like it at first—but as long as they think that I’m doing it with their interests in mind, they’re willing to sit still for it long enough to see the benefits for themselves. 

Ledlow: How would you recommend that faculty set up teams? Must teams always be heterogeneous? How long should they stay together? How big should they be?

Felder: Let’s make the distinction again between active learning in class and formal cooperative learning for homework and projects. For the active learning exercises, where you give them a problem or question and they work in groups to solve it, my teams vary from two to four students sitting in adjacent seats, and I don’t worry about the composition. Anything less than two is not a team and anything more than four is unwieldy, but you can do four in a class, even in a fixed seat auditorium—two people lean one way, two people lean toward them, or two people turn around and work with the people behind them.  Once in a while for variety I tell them at the beginning of a class to sit with different people, but that’s as far as I go in structuring groups. 

For formal cooperative learning, where they’re working in teams outside class, I form teams of three or four. Pairs are not good for two reasons: you don’t get enough diversity of ideas, which is one of the things you’re looking for in group work, and there is no built-in mechanism for conflict resolution, so the dominant member of a pair will win every argument, whether they are right or wrong. Once you get up to five, unless you’re doing a project that really requires five people, somebody in the group will probably be off in a corner somewhere not fully participating.  I’ll tend to have more teams of four in the beginning so that if anyone drops the class, I’m still left with a viable group. When I form the teams, I use ability heterogeneity and common blocks of time to meet outside of class as my main criteria.  Also, in the first two years of the curriculum I try to avoid having at-risk minority students isolated in a group. I can say a bit more about that if you like.  

My primary condition for forming a group is heterogeneity in ability levels. This is very important. What I don’t want are all the top students in the class clustered together, leaving the weak students to fend for themselves. If I have a heterogeneous group with some good students and some weaker students, everybody wins. The weaker students get the benefit of one-on-one tutoring if the team is working the way it’s supposed to, and the strong students get an even greater benefit.  If you ask any instructor “When did you really learn structural dynamics? When did you really learn advanced circuit analysis?” or whatever, we’ll all tell you the same thing. “I really learned it when I had to teach it.” When I take a body of material and figure out how to make it comprehensible—trying to find examples and clearer ways of expressing concepts—I’m learning that material at an absolutely unparalleled depth. And now when you’re doing cooperative learning, some of the students are getting the same benefits, and the ones that get the greatest benefits are the strongest students. If you have homogeneous groups composed of all strong students then they’re not going to get that benefit.  They’ll also tend to divide the work among themselves with no real interaction.

Ledlow: How long do you keep your teams together?

Felder:  I form the groups at the beginning of the semester and tell them, “You’re going to stay together for about five weeks and then I’m going to dissolve all the groups and form new ones, unless I get signed statements from each group member saying, I like my group and want to stay in it.”  If I get those statements I let them stay together for the entire semester. I teach big classes, so I’ll have twenty to forty groups in a class, and I’ve never had more than two groups elect to dissolve. Frequently it’s one; sometimes it’s none.  If it’s one, I distribute the members among existing groups of three.

Ledlow: Let us go back a little bit and talk about the issue of the token minority, or woman, or at-risk student in the team. Some people feel it is important to have at least two women on the team or two students who might be classified somehow at-risk for dropping out. I know there is some research in social psychology, particularly that of Delia Saenz, talking about the effects of tokenism. That if you’re the only woman on a team, or even the only man on a team of women, that you might not be as attentive to the content. You might not learn as much, because you’re nervous or under stress. What do you think about team formation in that way? Is it critical to not isolate women or other groups that are at-risk?

Felder: I have a conditional answer.  I agree about the desirability of avoiding one woman or one at-risk minority in a group, and the main reason I want to do that is that those students tend to be relegated, or relegate themselves, to passive roles within the group. Their views may be discounted, which has a demoralizing effect, and I want to avoid that. But I think this precaution is only important early in the curriculum, when those students are at greatest risk for attrition. So if I’m teaching a freshman or sophomore course, I avoid groups with isolated at-risk minorities. Later on in the curriculum, my job is no longer to help them survive.  By the time they’re juniors, they have survived—the overwhelming chance is that they‘re going to make it to graduation. Now my job is to prepare them for the workplace, where nobody is going to be watching out for them in that way, so now I tend to let that rule go.  Sometimes the minorities will be isolated in groups, but that’s okay.

Ledlow: How important are formal team-building activities?

Felder: There’s a lot of disagreement on that in the literature. I do some up-front things that involve goal-setting and differentiated team roles, but I don’t use other formal team-building exercises. It’s not that I think there is anything wrong with them; I’ve just made the decision that I don’t want to take that much time at the beginning of the semester to do them. What I prefer to do is just form the teams and let them get into the work and start to beat their heads against the interpersonal problems that invariably emerge.  In other words, I use a problem-based learning approach, rather than giving teamwork theory and exercises at the outset. Once the students start to run into the problems, I start introducing strategies for dealing with them.   

I’ll give you an example. The problem that almost always surfaces first is someone not pulling his or her weight in the group—not preparing for meetings, not even showing up for the meetings, things like that. So about two weeks into the semester, I’ll come into class and say, “I’ve been hearing from several of you that you’re having problems with slackers in groups. I want to give you some ideas about dealing with that problem.” I get them into small groups in class and say, “Let’s suppose you’re in a homework group in which somebody is not pulling their weight. What I want you to do is brainstorm possible things the group can do.  I’m not just looking for good things—I’m looking for good things, bad things, illegal things, anything goes.  You’ve got one minute. Go!” I turn them loose and they start churning out ideas, and then I stop them and I collect the ideas, possibly throwing in a few of my own if I feel moved to do that.  Then I say, “Okay, that was the creative part of the exercise. Now what I want you to do is go back and choose the best response to a hitchhiker (as they’re called in the cooperative learning literature). I want you to decide on the most appropriate first response, then on the best thing to do if the first response doesn’t work, and finally on a last resort response—what you would do when you’ve tried everything else and nothing works.”  Then I turn them loose, give them a couple of minutes, and stop them and collect their ideas. Then I go on teaching the course.  Now all of the students leave with an arsenal of really good techniques for dealing with hitchhikers, and the hitchhikers have been put on notice that their behavior is not acceptable and that their team members have things to do if they keep it up.  That knowledge often straightens them out.  If another week or two goes by and I start getting complaints about, say, the student who dominates the group and doesn’t let any team members get a word in edgewise, we’ll do another one of these mini-clinics to deal with that problem. This is my main way of equipping students with the skills they need to deal with team dysfunctionalities.

Ledlow: What sorts of skills do you think it’s important for students to take away from their college preparation—before they get into their first team in an engineering environment?

Felder:   You need to be able to communicate, to express your ideas reasonably clearly, and to deal with differences of opinion. You need to have the skill of leadership, because you never know when you’re going to be called on to take charge of a team effort, and you need to know how to do it assertively without becoming domineering or abrasive. You need to know how to listen—this is a really important skill—to hear what the other person is saying, or trying to say, and to respond to it in an appropriate way as opposed to putting your defenses up immediately and going on the attack if you feel that your ideas have been criticized. These are not easy skills. They are not abilities students bring in with them.  I talk some about them in class and in my office.  Individuals and teams having problems sometimes come into my office and we work explicitly on helping them develop some of those skills, particularly listening, which I sometimes think may be the hardest thing for them to learn to do.

Ledlow: Let’s get into planning to use cooperative learning. Under what circumstances would you give people the advice that cooperative learning would be an appropriate strategy, versus some other strategy, such as lecture or problem-based learning, or cases? When do you say, “Yeah, this is a good opportunity for you to use cooperative learning”?

Felder:  I can’t think of a situation where I would say, “This is not a good place to use cooperative learning.” I’m not saying that such situations don’t exist, I’m just saying that I haven’t found one yet. But it’s not an either/or question. First, remember that when I say cooperative learning I’m talking about what I do in homework; in class I’m doing active learning, but I don’t do exclusively active learning—I still lecture.  I know there are approaches—guided inquiry is one—where the whole class consists of students working in groups on questions and problems. I don’t do that.  One of the buzzwords in the teaching workshops I give is “variety.” I believe that the more you can mix things up in class—the more different techniques you use—the more interesting the class will be and the more likely the students will be to achieve your learning objectives. So in any class that I teach, I’m going to be doing some lecturing interspersed with active learning exercises with varying formats.  Sometimes I have the students work in pairs, sometimes in groups of three and four, sometimes individually, sometimes individually then in pairs, and so forth. Sometimes I’ll give them a quick series of these exercises; sometimes I’ll go for ten to fifteen minutes without doing it. It’s never the same—they never know what I’m going to do next—and that’s what keeps active learning from getting stale.  

Regarding cooperative learning versus problem-based learning versus case studies and so on, I don’t really have any basis for saying, “Use this method under these circumstances and that method under those circumstances.”  If someone is a passionate advocate of problem-based learning (which I also strongly believe in), I say go with it.  Group work is an important part of problem-based learning, so introduce it in that context. If PBL is not something that you’re interested in doing and you want to stay with the way you’ve been teaching only using groups to a greater extent, then hold off on PBL until you’re ready to try something new.  There’s no rush about this—you have decades to figure out the right balance. Just keep playing with it until you find the approach that works best for you now, and remain open because that’s probably not going to continue to be the approach that works best for you. Teaching is a dynamic profession.

Ledlow: Yes I agree. In my own teaching, I’ve begun mixing cooperative learning a lot with the use of cases. To some people that seemed like a surprising idea, “Oh, well case teaching is Socratic, and cooperative learning is in small groups.” But I certainly know that at ASU we are recommending that people mix and match and pick and choose among these strategies. How do you feel about that?

Felder: That is absolutely my philosophy. Whether you’re doing problem-based learning, cases, or straight expository teaching, you can blend active and cooperative learning in with whatever else you’re doing and make your teaching more effective.  (Incidentally, I don’t see why you have to be Socratic when you use cases—I know the lawyers do it, but since when are they our role models?)

Ledlow: A lot of us started with pre-designed cooperative learning strategies like Think-Pair-Share or Jigsaw or Academic Controversies. What are some of the advantages of starting that way, of picking a structure or a design and plugging your own content in as a way of getting comfortable using cooperative learning?

Felder: The biggest advantage is that you are starting with something that has been tested by many, many people under many different circumstances and has been found to work well in almost every conceivable educational setting.  Knowing this should inspire confidence.  Another advantage is that you can go to the literature and get a lot of pointers on how to make the technique work effectively.  On the other hand, if you invent your own strategies as you go along, you’re to be admired but you’re going to have to go through a fairly long trial-and-error learning curve, making the same mistakes that the people who first tried the standard techniques made, which is not particularly efficient and can be painful. I think it makes more sense to start with the proven strategies and then gradually modify them to suit your own teaching style.

Ledlow: And then when we get to that point where we are ready to start modifying, what are some of the tips for planning your own lessons from scratch? What are some of the things you do to make sure students are prepared and that the activity is productive? How do you go about designing a cooperative learning lesson or activity or homework assignment?

Felder: I really don’t do anything special, which is an important point to note.  Faculty members have this misconception that undertaking these methods is a huge undertaking—that to plan an active learning lesson or a cooperative learning homework assignment requires a major creative effort. It doesn’t.  You can of course choose to make such an effort, but it isn’t necessary.  When you are lecturing, teaching how you have always taught, I presume you occasionally stop the lecture and ask a question.  Take the identical question that you would have asked under any circumstances but instead of asking the whole class, just tell them to turn to their neighbors or get into groups of three and answer that question.  Give them thirty seconds, a minute, whatever you think is appropriate. Then stop them, collect a couple of the answers—it is vitally important that you collect some answers initially rather than asking for volunteers—and then go on about your business.  I also find that if I spend five minutes before class looking over my lecture notes for possible active learning exercises, I’ll always find as many as I want. 

For the cooperative learning exercises in lecture courses (as opposed to labs and project courses), I take the homework I would give in a traditional class and up the ante.  If you’re giving homework that the students could just as easily do individually, then they’re going to resent the extra time they have to spend meeting with their teams. And so I increase the difficulty of the assignments. Not necessarily their length—I don’t want to double the length of the assignments, because it takes time for the students simply to meet outside class. But instead of the usual 10-15% of the assignment being the high-level material that separates the “A” students from the “B” students, I may kick it up to 30–40% high-level stuff and the rest of it basic. That’s the only change I make.

Ledlow: I want to back up. You said a minute ago that it is very important that you collect two or three of these answers from groups in your class. Why is that?

Felder: Because if you don’t, many of them won’t bother to do the thinking. Engineering students tend to be sort of introverted, and the first time I tell them to get into groups and do something, I’m looking at a class full of people staring straight ahead at their papers, probably thinking “If I look over and say something and they’re not into it, I’m going to look stupid.”  If they know that at the end of the exercise I’m just going to call for volunteers, they have no incentive to do the work and many will continue to just sit there staring straight ahead, knowing that sooner or later somebody will provide the answer (usually me).  Students are driven heavily by fear of embarrassment.  That’s why most of them never ask questions in class or volunteer answers when you ask questions—they don’t want to risk saying something that looks stupid to their classmates.  And so most of them really don’t want to be in a position of having been given something to do with two or three other students and then being called on individually and having nothing to say, which will also make them look foolish.  Since they know I am going to call on somebody, almost all of them will make it their business to get into the group activity so that they’re ready with something in case I happen to land on them.  I may just call on one or two and then open it up to other groups or individuals who want to provide answers, but without that one or two up front, it’s not going to work. 

Ledlow:  If we are doing active learning or some of the more formal cooperative learning activities in class, what do you recommend that we do while our students are working on those in-class activities?

Felder: Float around if you’re giving them more than 30 seconds.  I’ll go out into the class, look over people’s shoulders, and kibitz. Sometimes people see me coming and they’ll raise their hand because they have a question their group couldn’t figure out. Occasionally, I’ll see a group that seems to be wandering off task, so I’ll just head in that direction and that’s usually enough to get them back on task. That helps me keep track of what’s going on during the activities, and if there seems to be general confusion about what’s going on, it lets me jump in and straighten them out and get them back on task.

Ledlow: That’s easy to do when they’re in class, but when they’re out of class, how do you make sure you don’t have that common complaint of, “one student did all the work,” or “one person dominated”? How do you build in individual accountability with out-of-class cooperative learning?

Felder:  Giving individual tests is the most common way, and collecting peer ratings from team members and using them to adjust the team grade is another way. Peer ratings are critically important in the way I do cooperative learning. What I don’t want to do is have a team do something, hand it in, and get a common grade, because that inevitably leads to resentment over hitchhikers not doing the work and getting the same high grade as their more responsible teammates. So in my class, three times per semester the team members rate themselves and their teammates on citizenship. (The first time is just for practice, and the second two count.)  Not on how smart are you, or what percentage of the work did you do, or anything like that, but did you show up for meetings, notify team members if you weren’t going to be able to make a meeting, make the best effort that you could to prepare beforehand, ask questions, help teammates if you could, and so forth.  I give the students a rating form and spell out the criteria, and they rate themselves and one another on a verbal scale that starts with “excellent”, “very good”, and “satisfactory”, and proceeds all the way down to “no show”. I tell them I’m going to adjust the team grades based on those ratings, and I do. (They think I’m just going to make some fuzzy adjustment, but I actually have a rigorous quantitative method to do it.)  Now even if they’re willing to keep putting the hitchhiker’s name on the assignment, they’re not going to rate him or her with the same “excellent” as the people who are really doing the work. And if they’ve really been messing up, they’ll get a very low rating which will be reflected in their individual grades.  

Another thing I do for individual accountability is to offer last-resort options for firing and quitting. If someone is just not doing the work, refusing to cooperate, and the rest of the team has  tried everything else they can think of and the student is still not working, they can send a memo (with a copy to me) to that student saying, “Unless you straighten out, you’re fired.” If they still get no cooperation, the next memo (again copied to me) says, “You’re off the team.”  Those who get fired have the responsibility for finding a team of three willing to take them on as a fourth member; otherwise, they get zeroes for the rest of the course or project. It very rarely happens. The knowledge that it can happen is enough to get some of these miscreants to get their acts together.

Ledlow: There is a lot of controversy about what proportion of group and individual grades instructors should give. How do you feel about that?

Felder: It depends on the course I’m teaching. If I’m teaching a straight lecture course with weekly homework assignments and no major team project, then I generally count the team homework 15–20% and the individual work, mostly the tests, counts for 80–85%. If I’m teaching a project course, such as the capstone design course, and traditionally the team project has been 100% of the grade, then I give some individual exams or quizzes to get the individual accountability.  In this case the individual work may count for 15-20% of the course grade and the group project count for 80-85%.   

The cooperative learning criterion usually missing in the laboratory course or the capstone design course is individual accountability.  I use my peer rating system in such courses, and even if the team gets a high grade on the lab or project report, somebody who has not contributed will get a low grade...plus, they probably won’t do very well on the individual tests that cover every aspect of the project and so they’ll crash and burn in the course, even if they’re on a very good team. 

Ledlow: What’s a good way for you or other instructors to get feedback on whether or not assignments that you have designed—either in-class or out-of-class—were well-designed? If they accomplished their goals? Do you get feedback from students, from colleagues, or from whom?

Felder: Well, I certainly get feedback from students, and if I’ve assigned them to do something, I can judge the quality of what they’ve done. If I’ve given a test, I can judge the difficulty of the test, and see how the students have done compared to how I think they would have done before I was using cooperative learning.  The peer ratings also tell me a lot about how well the teams are working.  Teams that are working well together turn in reasonably consistent peer ratings, while teams on the verge of fistfights turn in peer ratings that vary wildly.   

Also, I always do a mid-term assessment, which is another one of my standard recommendations to people using cooperative learning.  The assessment can be just a simple “How is this class working for you? What would you like me to keep doing? What would you like me to change?”  The reason to do this is that under normal circumstances, you only hear from the people who don’t like groupwork. They’ll grumble to you that they don’t want to work in groups, they work better by themselves, you have no right to make them do it, and so on. Many instructors encountering that resistance get discouraged and figure, “Wow, this is failing. I’d better go back to the old way of doing it.” But if you do a mid-term assessment, and you’ve been paying attention to how you’ve been implementing cooperative learning—making sure all five criteria are being addressed—the overwhelming response from the students is generally: “This is great—it’s really working for me,” and there will also be several students who are still complaining bitterly. I’ll share those results in the next class.  It’s healthy for the people who have been complaining to find out that most of the class is doing just fine with groupwork—it quiets down the resistance pretty effectively.

Ledlow: For what size classes do you think active learning and cooperative learning is appropriate?

Felder: Anywhere between four and infinity. In fact, the larger the class the more imperative it is to use cooperative learning and active learning. Active learning—getting students to do things in small groups in class—is the only conceivable way to get large-scale student involvement in a class. Some students will be willing, in a class of fifteen or twenty, to ask questions, or, if you ask questions, to volunteer answers. However, very, very few students have the courage to open their mouth in front of 299 classmates and risk looking foolish. We can make all the speeches we want about how there is no such thing as a dumb question, but forget it. They are not buying that, and they know that any question they ask has the potential to sound like a dumb question.  If they ask it, they run the risk of looking like an idiot in front of all their classmates. If they keep their mouths shut, they risk nothing. So they keep their mouths shut. But there is nothing threatening about talking to two other people in a small group, and so really the only difference between a class of 200 and a class of twenty is you have ten times as many little groups in the larger class. It could get noisy, but you just give them some rules about keeping it down so it doesn’t get deafening in class.  When I’ve got a very large class and call on students for responses after an active learning exercise, I overload on the back of the room, which is where they go to hide. They learn that you can run, but you can’t hide; and in fact, if what you’re trying to do is remain invisible, the back of the class is the worse possible place you could go.   

Regarding the cooperative learning outside class, again, there’s no limitation on class size, and if I have a really large class, having them do their homework in teams is the only way I can keep my homework grading load manageable.  If I’m teaching a class of a hundred with weekly homework assignments, that’s a hundred papers I have to grade every week. If I’m doing it in teams of four, then that’s twenty-five papers I have to grade every week, and that’s obviously a much nicer number.

Ledlow:  Does class size have any impact on what kind of activities you may choose to do?

Felder: None that I can think of.

Ledlow: As you personally have gotten more skilled as a teacher using active and cooperative learning, how have you changed? Have you evolved over the years? Do you see the faculty you work with growing more skilled, evolving? Or do you learn to do cooperative learning and then stick with what you do? 

Felder: No, it never stays the same. I go to meetings like this [Multicoalition Conference] and the annual ASEE [American Society for Engineering Education]  meeting, and people who are using CL have come up something else that they’ve tried in class or a new way of assessing learning or team functioning.  If something sounds interesting, I may go back and try it.  Another change is that I’ve become more familiar with the student resistance—what forms it takes and how to deal with it—and so I’ve been progressively more willing to try more, go out on more of a limb, delve more deeply into cooperative learning. But it’s a gradual progression. Speaking generally, if anything I do in my classes were to stay exactly the same from one semester to another, I would think that it’s probably time to get into another line of work. 

There is one more thing that I wanted to say, going back to the active learning. In the workshops, somebody always says something like, “What do I do about students who won’t participate? I tell them to get into groups to do something and there will be some students in the class that just sit there like, ‘I’m not going to play this stupid game. If you ask me a question, I’ll just say I don’t know. I don’t care.’” This situation really bothers instructors, especially if they are new to active learning, and many of them think, “This is failing—I’d better abandon it.”  But that’s the wrong way to look at it. Here’s the right way. Let’s suppose that you’re doing an active learning exercise in your class and ten percent of the students are just sitting on their hands, refusing to participate. It’s never nearly that high in my classes after the first week, but let’s just suppose that ten percent are not involved.  That means that while you’re doing active learning, you’ve got ninety percent of the students in your class actively engaged in thinking about what you want them to think about, interacting with the material, doing what you want them to do, and ten percent out to lunch.  

Now think about what goes on during a traditional lecture when you’re just holding forth up there, dispensing pearls of wisdom, writing on the board, asking questions and getting few or no responses. During workshops, I ask the participants, “When you’re lecturing, what percentage of your students would you say are actively engaged with what you’re saying—thinking about it, trying to solve problems in their head, doing what you want them to do?  Speculate.” And generally, the answer is around ten percent, which is my guess as well. So the point to remember about active learning, cooperative learning, all of these methods, is that none of them comes with a hundred-percent guarantee. No instructional technique in existence is guaranteed to reach all students all the time. The best that we can do as instructors is go with the odds, and I like nine to one in my favor better than nine to one against me, and so I use active learning. And as for the ten percent who are not participating, it’s really not my problem: they’re the ones who are losing.

Ledlow: Well, that brings us to our final question. You said that faculty tend to get a little upset when they’re first starting and students don’t respond in the way that they had hoped, or it doesn’t go exactly the way they had planned. What advice do you give to engineering faculty who come to you and say, “I’m on the verge of trying this. I’m thinking about it. It seems like a good idea, but . . . how do I start?” What advice would you give that person?

Felder: First thing I’d say is, take it easy. If you’ve been teaching traditionally and abruptly plunge in and completely overturn everything that you’ve been doing to go into whole-hog one-hundred-percent cooperative learning, you’ll probably fail. The student resistance will be overwhelming, and you won’t know how to deal with it because you’ve never done it. Faced with that firestorm, you’re likely to decide, “Who needs these headaches? Let’s go back to something safe.” So the advice I give to new and traditional faculty members is, start small. Give some in-class exercises and get a feeling for active learning, then maybe do a couple of team homework assignments just to get a feeling for what that’s like. Don’t worry about all the cooperative learning bells and whistles right from the start. Then in the next course you teach, try doing more. There is no rush about this—you’ve got your whole career to develop your teaching style, and as you gradually increase your use of the non-traditional methods, you’ll find that your level of comfort with them will keep changing and your teaching will evolve accordingly. 

Another reminder is that you’re not inventing these methods and you’re not required to learn them all the hard way.  Many people have blazed these trails, and a great deal is known about how to do active and cooperative learning and what the pitfalls are and how to avoid them. If you are having a problem, go back and look at the standard references to see how other people have dealt with it, or talk to a more experienced colleague or someone with your campus center for teaching and learning. There are lots of resources out there—take advantage of them.

Ledlow: You obviously still have a lot of enthusiasm for this technique, considering how long you’ve been using it. What’s the best thing about cooperative learning? When you think about the way you teach, what’s the best thing about it?

Felder: My students learn the things I want them to learn to a much greater extent than they ever did when all I did was lecture and give individual homework assignments. They learn the course content, and they learn how to solve complex engineering problems that call on them to use high-level thinking skills. But even more important than that, they are acquiring some of the critical social skills they will need to succeed as professionals. They are learning how to communicate. They’re learning how to work in teams, which they will have to do no matter whom they go to work for.  They’re acquiring leadership skills and time management skills, and they’re learning a lot about themselves and how they learn best. These are all lifelong learning skills, and to me they’re all much more important than learning to design a distillation column or solve a differential equation. When I use cooperative learning, my students acquire those skills; watching me, listening to me in class, and going off to do homework by themselves, they don’t.  Why wouldn’t I stay with this technique?

Ledlow: Thank you, Dr. Felder.

Felder: You’re very welcome, Susan.