Below, Dr. Rea Lavi describes various aspects of how he and his colleagues taught SP.248 NEET Ways of Thinking in fall 2023.
OCW: For this course, you were assisted by a fairly large team of co-instructors. How were responsibilities parceled out among the teaching team?
Rea Lavi: I led the course and was present in every lecture. A different instructor joined me every 3 weeks, and they were only involved in their section, corresponding to the NEET thread they teach. The challenge for me had more to do with preparing and coordinating the various sections and less to do with running the course itself.
OCW: The six course challenges are all exercises in practical problem-solving from diverse disciplines. How did you select those challenges?
Rea Lavi: Firstly, there is a progression from well-structured to ill-structured problems. For instance, the minibot challenge is algorithmic, whereas designing a method for choosing a major at MIT is a lot more open-ended. Each challenge had to center around one or more skills involved with problem-solving, include real knowledge/methods from the domain it was taken from, and be simplified enough so it could be carried out by novices.
OCW: What value do you see in the reflection assignments?
Rea Lavi: For the students, it’s an opportunity to apply, synthesize, and evaluate what they’ve learned—that is, to engage in higher-order thinking, which should help with retaining the information they’ve learned. For the instructor, it helps to see where students are understanding certain concepts and where they’re not. For the course developer, it helps understand the overall progression of students throughout the course.
OCW: You first taught the course in fall 2020; you’ve taught it almost every semester since then. How has it evolved through those various iterations? Where do you see it going from here?
Rea Lavi: The assignments have undergone refinement, but otherwise the course has stayed similar. The synthetic challenge of choosing one’s major was changed from improving learning via Zoom (the fall 2020 and spring 2021 lectures were given via Zoom). For fall 2024, we redesigned the class to focus more on what’s being done in NEET, including lab tours and attending student presentations. The “ways of thinking” exercises are still a part of the course, but not as much as they were before. We did this because we received feedback from students that they wanted to be exposed more to what’s happening in NEET.
OCW: What would you like to share about teaching SP.248 NEET Ways of Thinking that we haven’t yet addressed?
Rea Lavi: The course is modular, which means educators can pick and choose any section, challenge, or way of thinking they like to teach or adapt. The course material is based in research concerning those skills, some of which my own—specifically, the creative thinking and systems thinking–centered assignments.
