Improving How Universities Teach

Book Review – Improving How Universities Teach Science (Carl Wieman)

Been a while since our last book review at Set Physics to Stun! Maybe a bit lazy on my side, but this one is getting reviewed even though I didn’t strictly finish it. The reason is simple: the book is excellent, my wife has now claimed it as her next read, and I am a slow bus reader. So I’ll collect my wins, write down what I got from it, and pass the baton (and the book) on.

The book in question is Improving How Universities Teach Science, by AMO physicist turned education scientist — and Nobel Prize winner — Carl Wieman.

My history with the Wieman initiative

My connection to Wieman’s work on science education goes back to my postdoc days at UBC. I was lucky enough to be exposed to a program that trained postdocs and young faculty on modern, research-based teaching methods, offered by UBC’s Center for Teaching and Learning as part of the final years of the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative (CWSEI).

That experience was eye-opening. It showed me:

• Clear, stubborn data that our traditional lecture-based teaching is largely ineffective.
• How domain experts are usually actually unskilled at transmitting their knowledge efficiently.
• That teaching can be treated as a research problem: hypothesis, evidence, iteration, improvement.

Reading Improving How Universities Teach Science years later felt a bit like seeing the “director’s commentary” for the initiative that shaped how I think about teaching.

What the book is about

On the surface, this can be a somewhat dry book: it’s about university structures, funding, departmental politics, and long-term institutional change. But if, like me, you care about:

• how we train future scientists and engineers,
• how big institutions actually change (or don’t), and
• how to bring evidence into teaching, not just research,

then it becomes a very rich read. Again, it helped me to have an insider’s context.

Wieman uses UBC and CU Boulder as the main case studies to show how he and his collaborators designed and implemented a large-scale science education initiative to modernize how science and engineering are taught. The book doubles as:

• A post-mortem of a real, well-managed organizational change project in big universities.
• A practical guide to the administrative inner workings of departments and faculties.
• A curated entry point into both management literature and evidence-based education research in the context of scientific environments.

Why change science teaching at all?

One of the big-picture frames of the book is historical. Wieman reminds us that university missions have drifted:

• Before WWII, universities were largely teaching-focused, with students as the primary stakeholders.
• Post-WWII, massive research funding reshaped institutions to prioritize research, with nations and global competitiveness becoming central stakeholders.

Teaching never fully caught up with this shift. In many places, it became something we assume will happen “naturally” if you put clever people with PhDs in front of a classroom.

At the same time, student demographics are changing, funding mechanisms are in flux, and the role of universities in society is being questioned from all directions. Under those conditions, relying on traditional, intuition-based teaching methods is not just inefficient — it’s irresponsible.

The Science Education Initiative (SEI) that Wieman describes sets out to change this, by trying to change teaching culture: its values, beliefs, and everyday practices. Crucially, it does this by borrowing from the research culture that scientists already respect.

What made the SEI work?

Wieman argues that the SEI’s relative success hinged on a few design choices:

• Driven by faculty, not imposed on them. Departments had to want to participate and had internal champions.

• Clear measures of success. The initiative emphasized measurable learning outcomes and concrete changes in courses, not just vague “innovation” or “awareness.”

• Real incentives, both individual and departmental. Incentives were tied to educational outcomes and visible improvements, not just to writing reports or attending workshops.

This is a recurring theme in the book: if you want real change, you need to treat teaching improvement with the same seriousness, resourcing, and rigor that we reserve for research.

Management theory: Rogers, Kotter, and beyond

One of my favorite aspects of the book is how openly Wieman leans on existing management and change literature, instead of reinventing everything from scratch.

Everett Rogers – how innovation spreads

Wieman uses Everett Rogers’ framework for how innovations are adopted:

knowledge (awareness) → persuasion (learn more) → decision (weigh benefits/costs) → implementation (try it) → confirmation (keep or abandon)

If adoption fails at any stage, the later stages never happen. This sounds obvious, but in practice we often try to “train faculty in active learning” without checking whether they’re even past the persuasion stage.

He also discusses the classic categories — innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards — and points out their limits for pedagogy. Real faculty members don’t sit neatly in one bucket:

• Someone might be an early adopter of clickers but resistant to changing exams.
• Others might move painfully slowly at first, then adopt new teaching approaches very broadly once they’re convinced.

It’s a nice reminder that people are more complex than diffusion-of-innovation cartoons.

John Kotter – how organizations change

From John Kotter’s work on organizational change, Wieman borrows several key ideas and puts numbers on them:

• Change needs a one-time, limited-duration infusion of resources. It’s more expensive to change practices and culture than to maintain them later.

• Funding must match the scale of change. The literature suggests investing around 5–10% of a unit’s annual budget for ~5 years to meaningfully change culture.

In the SEI case, that translated to something like:

• ~$400k per department per year
• ≈ $2M per department over 5 years
• ≈ $10M to transform teaching in 5 departments
• Affecting ~25–30 regularly offered courses per department

This is 10–100 times larger than the typical early-2000s grants for “improving teaching”.

The strategy was also selective: change a core majority of departments deeply, and let those become the gravitational center that helps pull the rest of the institution along. Both UBC and CU Boulder ran competitive internal grant programs for departments to participate.

If you’ve ever wondered why most “small teaching grants” don’t move the needle much on institutional culture, this book gives a brutally clear answer: they’re simply not at the right scale.

Science Education Specialists: the hidden engine

A large and very interesting part of the book is dedicated to Science Education Specialists (SES) — a role that didn’t really exist before the SEI.

These are usually domain experts (e.g., physicists, chemists, biologists) with a genuine interest in education, hired specifically to work within departments and courses to:

• help redesign curricula and course materials,
• collect and analyze data on student learning,
• coach faculty on evidence-based strategies.

Wieman doesn’t spend endless pages profiling individuals, but he does give a helpful summary of the skills SESs needed and were trained in. It doubles as a great crash course in what “evidence-based teaching” actually entails:

• effect of prior knowledge
• knowledge organization: expert vs. novice
• motivation
• learning and transfer
• deliberate practice
• development of self-directed learners
• learning goals
• formative assessment
• memory and retention
• peer instruction and effective clicker use
• group work
• characteristics of expert tutors

If you’re new to this area, that list alone is a powerful pointer map. Many of these topics — especially motivation, deliberate practice, and how experts differ from novices — overlap with recurring themes here at Set Physics to Stun, especially when we talk about scientific management and mentoring.

Why this book matters (even if you don’t run a department)

You don’t need to be a dean or a department chair to get value from Improving How Universities Teach Science. I’d particularly recommend it if you are:

• a faculty member who wants to improve teaching but is tired of vague advice,
• a postdoc or grad student curious about how teaching reform actually works at scale,
• a science manager, program director, or center lead who thinks about organizational change.

For me, the book serves several roles at once:

• A reminder that teaching improvement is a serious project worth serious resources.
• A concrete case study of change that respects both research culture and educational evidence.
• A source of references and mental models I can bring into my own work as a mentor, collaborator, and occasional agitator for better practices.

So that’s it — a brief tour of the parts of Improving How Universities Teach Science that resonated most with me. I hope this motivates some of you to pick up the book as well (and maybe finish it before your spouse steals it).

If more of us — as mentors, individual contributors, and administrators — start treating teaching with the same rigor and seriousness as we treat research, I’d say Wieman’s project, and this book, will have done their job.

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