Hogwarts Pedagogy
Essay Length: ~7500 Words
Read Time: ~30 Minutes
Spoiler Alert: Harry Potter spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned!
Table of Contents:
Nobel Laureates & Statutory Rapists
Education Optimization
Muggle Assimilation
Fabulous Fraud
Moony the Maestro
Expert Auror
Witch with a Capital ‘B’
The Half-Blood Spy
Hogwarts Finals
Pedagogy Prophecy
References
“Children should be able to do their own experimenting and their own research. Teachers, of course, can guide them by providing appropriate materials, but the essential thing is that in order for a child to understand something, he must construct it himself, he must re-invent it.”
-Jean Piaget
Nobel Laureates & Statutory Rapists
As a student, I had three professors who won the Nobel Prize and two teachers who committed statutory rape. It was a diverse group, to say the least.
If I had to rank those professors based on their teaching ability, the order would be:
Worst → Best
Nobel Laureate 1 → Statutory Rapist 1 → Nobel Laureate 2 → Nobel Laureate 3 → Statutory Rapist 2
I’ll justify my ranking with some examples.
Nobel Laureate 1 was so boring that I often fell asleep during his lectures. And this was the guy who discovered the gene that causes cancer!
Statutory Rapist 1 was a lackadaisical gym teacher who let us do whatever we wanted in class. He’d often yell out funny comments, half as a coach and half as a spectator.
Nobel Laureate 2 was brilliant at explaining difficult topics. But his explanations were so long that our recitation would only get through half as many problems as the other sections.
Nobel Laureate 3 was a passionate lecturer who was engaging in his talks. But when my friends and I went to do the homework, it was still hard to solve the problems without going to office hours.
Statutory Rapist 2 was one of the best teachers I ever had. He forced all his students to participate in answering questions, and he’d always have us doing problems like the homework by the end of class.
Obviously, I’m not condoning statutory rape. The point that I’m trying to make is that expertise in a subject does not guarantee that you are good at teaching that subject. In math jargon, knowledge of the material is a necessary but insufficient condition for good teaching.
So if expertise alone is not enough, what else makes a good teacher? The answer to that lies in pedagogy, or the art and science of teaching.
Education Optimization
Unlike most problems in education, pedagogy is not a zero-sum game. Most debates about problems in education are framed like this: “We should re-allocate these finite resources from here to there.” Some examples include:
“We should focus our time on teaching these subjects instead of those ones.”
“We should grant admission to these students instead of those ones.”
“We should spend more money on the education sector instead of those ones.”
In each case, a finite resource – be it space, time, or money – is being redistributed in some way. But there is no consideration of how to maximize usage of the resources available.
Pedagogy, on the other hand, is an optimization problem. The pedagogy problem formulation goes like this: “Given a set budget, a set amount of time, and a set level of teacher expertise, how can you maximize learning?”
Admissions, curricula, and financing are all important constraints that schools should consider. But even with the smartest professors, plenty of funding, and a magical watch to reverse time, if the teaching technique is poor then no one will learn anything.
The good news when it comes to pedagogy is that 1) it can be measured and 2) it can be taught. That’s right, teachers can be graded on their teaching, and teachers can learn how to teach better.
Let’s see how they like it for a change.
In 2001, three MIT physics professors designed a new pedagogy to replace their traditional lecture format. As good scientists do, they designed an experiment to compare their new pedagogy with the results from previous semesters.
They found that students who took physics with their new pedagogy on average learned twice as much compared to the students who took the class with traditional lectures. Both classes had the same level of teacher expertise, the same caliber freshmen, and the same material. The only thing that changed was the pedagogy.
In 2007, a Nobel Prize-winning physics professor, this time from Stanford, decided to spread new and proven teaching techniques to as many classes as he could. He formed the Science Education Initiative, or SEI for short, to help science teachers take advantage of the most up-to-date and researched pedagogy.
He wrote a book called Improving How Universities Teach Science that describes all the lessons learned from the initiative. It’s a great how-to guide for teachers on how to optimize learning in the classroom.
Before I explain these seemingly magical teaching techniques in extraordinary detail, I have a few confessions to make. First, I went to MIT and took physics with the professors I mentioned above. I liked their pedagogy so much that I became teacher’s assistant for the same courses in the following years.
Second, after I finished my Master’s at Stanford I moved to Peru to be an instructor at the Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología. In English, that’s the University of Engineering and Technology. For the geographically challenged, Peru is in South America.
While I was there, I worked with the Science Education Initiative and implemented their strategies in my classes at the school. So full disclosure, I’m biased in promoting these techniques. That said, I have seen them in action and can vouch for the results.
My last confession is that I am a huge Harry Potter fan. When I was younger, I hated reading for my English and history classes. That’s half the reason why I became an engineer. But when I started reading Harry Potter I couldn’t put the books down.
At this point, you might be wondering about the title of this essay. I promise it will be clear soon.
The new and improved pedagogy from MIT and the SEI is based on an educational theory developed by Jean Piaget called constructivism. This method of acquiring knowledge consisted of two cognitive processes known as accommodation and assimilation.
Assimilation is the process of connecting new information to previously learned knowledge, and accommodation is the process of using new information to update currently held beliefs. The two processes work together until the learner’s ideas are in ‘equilibrium’ with all new information [12].
So, in the spirit of constructivism, this essay will try to accommodate your ideas about pedagogy by assimilating them with a school you are probably familiar with: Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Harry Potter had a different Defense Against the Dark Arts professor each year at Hogwarts, and they were even more diverse than my professors growing up. Werewolves, half-giants, centaurs…some were fantastic, some were mediocre, and some were downright evil.
To construct the best ideas about pedagogy, I’ll rank the five most important Defense Against the Dark Arts professors just like I did with my teachers. Except this time, I’ll do it Hogwarts House Cup style by awarding and taking away points for good and bad pedagogy. My rubric for grading, however, will come directly from the proven pedagogies of MIT and the Science Education Initiative.
Without further ado, let the Pent-Wizard Tournament begin!
Fabulous Fraud
Gilderoy Lockhart looked like the hero his best-selling autobiographies described him to be. With his “sweeping robes of turquoise, his golden hair shining under a perfectly positioned turquoise hat with gold trimming,” he appeared to be the adventurous wizard who gadded with ghouls, voyaged with vampires, and wandered with werewolves [2:43,89].
Appearances can be deceiving however. Lockhart was actually a fraud who hadn’t done any of those things. Dumbledore and the other professors were not fooled by his lies when they hired him to be the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor in Harry’s second year. Hagrid admitted to Harry, Ron, and Hermione, he was simply “the on’y man for the job. An’ I mean the on’y one” [2:115].
In the muggle world, most professorships have plenty of applicants to choose from. Luckily, Carl Wieman, the Stanford Nobel Laureate who founded the SEI, wrote some advice on who universities should hire.
In the first chapter of his book there is a table that is seven pages long comparing the “Differences between current and optimized universities” [8:12]. The table provides a vision of what an ideal university could look like compared to universities today.
Of all the characteristics of the current university that could be improved, there is one trait that Wieman keeps the same. In his table, both current and optimized universities require that “Faculty have sophisticated and extensive content knowledge in their discipline”. In the wizarding world, that means that no Lockhart’s need apply.
-20 points from Lockhart for not having the “content knowledge” to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts.
Even though Lockhart lacked the skills he bragged about, there was a positive aspect to his pedagogy.
In that same table at the start of Wieman’s book, the current university does something that most everyone is familiar with: “Instructional model is that the faculty deliver information to the students, who learn it from listening and then practicing in isolation”. Not all classes today are like this, but unfortunately most are. Lectures and homework are so commonplace that it’s hard for most people to imagine an alternative.
If you’re wondering what else there could be, at the optimized university the “instructional model is based on research on learning. Students must actively practice and develop their capabilities to become more expert, often collaboratively, with ongoing guidance of faculty members.”
In active learning, students practice problems in class, with faculty. Not just from listening and not just at home.
To his credit, Lockhart did attempt to have his students actively practice. In his first lecture, Lockhart unleashed a cage full of “freshly caught Cornish pixies” for his students to round up [2:101]. However, there was definitely no ongoing guidance from a faculty member. Instead, the students were left to struggle on their own as the pixies “wreck[ed] the classroom more effectively than a rampaging rhino.”
As we’ll see later, exposing magical creatures to students can be educational. But in Lockhart’s case, the learning was not collaborative, and the students essentially had to practice in isolation. Hermione defended Lockhart’s class when she said, “he just wants to give us some hands-on experience” [2:103]. Harry on the other hand was unimpressed. “Hands on? Hermione, he didn’t have a clue what he was doing –”
Harry’s assessment was right. If you’re going to ask your students to achieve a task that’s new to them, some instructions and feedback are required.
-30 points from Lockhart for a lesson with zero instruction and no feedback.
However, Hermione was also right, as per usual. She might have defended Lockhart just because she had a crush on him – she outlined all of his classes in her schedule with hearts [2:95] – but as Wieman states, active practice is better than just listening to lectures.
+10 points to Lockhart for at least attempting to give students a hands-on class.
In the end, Gilderoy was living proof of the expertise constraint on teaching. Despite his list of titles,
“Professor Gilderoy Lockhart, Order of Merlin, Third Class, Honorary Member of the Defense Arts Defense League, and five-time winner of Witch Weekly’s Most-Charming-Smile Award” [2:99],
Lockhart did not fulfill the necessary but insufficient condition of being knowledgeable in the subject he was teaching. Ron summed up best why Lockhart was a bad teacher despite his best efforts at having students practice in class: “That’s because he’s a brainless git” [2:163].
Current Standings:
Lockhart: -40
Moony the Maestro
Unlike Lockhart, Remus Lupin was not well known before arriving at Hogwarts in Harry’s third year. But he quickly gained the respect of most students and professors.
In his first appearance, Lupin fended off a dementor that boarded the Hogwarts Express looking for Sirius Black. For you non-Potterheads, “dementors are among the foulest creatures to walk the earth” that guard the wizarding prison of Azkaban [3:187].
Lupin saved Harry by producing a Patronus Charm and then gave him some chocolate to recover from the encounter. When Harry arrived at school and went to the nurse, Madam Poffrey, she said, “Finally, a defense against the dark arts teacher that knows his remedies.”
+20 points to Lupin for having the knowledge and courage to save Harry on the train from the dementor.
Expertise alone however does not equate to good teaching, so how was Lupin’s pedagogy?
In his first class with Harry, Lupin started off with some unorthodox instructions: “Would you please put all your books in your bags. Today’s will be a practical lesson. You will need only your wands” [3:130].
Lupin asked the students if they knew what a boggart was, which of course Hermione knew to be “a shape-shifter. It can take the shape of whatever it thinks will frighten us most” [3:133]. Next, Lupin explained that “the thing that really finishes a boggart is laughter.”
Then he had his students repeat the incantation “Riddikulous” which was needed for the spell they were about to use. Finally, Lupin instructed Neville Longbottom – the most fearful student in the class – to defeat the boggart.
Neville succeeded by casting a spell which turned his worst fear - Professor Snape - into something funny - Snape wearing Neville’s grandmother’s clothes.
The rest of the students formed a line to face the boggart which they transformed from their worst fear into something funny. A more perfect metaphor for students learning to overcome their fear is hard to imagine.
Before I award Lupin his points, I have to explain the details of MIT’s active learning pedagogy.
Professors John Belcher, Peter Dourmashkin, and David Lister are the founders of active learning at MIT. They are the Godric Gryffindor, Rowena Ravenclaw, and Helga Hufflepuff of muggle Hogwarts.
Thankfully none of my professors tried to purge the student body of mudbloods like Salazar Slytherin, so I’m leaving him out of this analogy.
These professors wanted to change their style of teaching physics because of “the high failure rates at MIT, approaching 15%, and the low attendance in lectures at the end of the term, less than 50%.” So in 2001 they created a new pedagogy for their Electricity & Magnetism course called Technology-Enabled Active Learning, or TEAL for short.
As highly trained physicists do, these professors designed an experiment to test their new pedagogy against their previous method of teaching. The experiment consisted of one control group with 121 students and two experimental groups with 176 and 514 students.
The control group took the class like in previous years using “traditional lectures with demonstrations in a large lecture hall and smaller recitation sessions” [9]. The experimental groups were taught with the TEAL format which “incorporated into the classroom a collaborative, active learning approach, enhanced by visualizations, desktop experiments, Web-based assignments, a personal response system, and conceptual questions with peer discussions.”
At first glance, this list may seem more elaborate than Lupin’s final exam which was “a sort of obstacle course” [3:318]. But have no fear, I’ll explain the key points in more detail.
In TEAL, students are given a personal response system (also called a “clicker”) to answer concept questions during class. After the professor introduces a new topic, “each student is requested to respond in-class in real time to multiple choice questions asked by the teacher as part of the mini lecture.” Just as Lupin had Hermione and others answer questions before practicing spells, TEAL requires students answer concept questions before practicing problems.
In addition to concept questions, there were “individual problem sets given as home assignments once a week and analytical problems solved in class.” There was still homework, but notice the key words in class. Like Lupin’s classes, there is minimal lecturing and maximal time devoted to active practice.
To measure the effect of the different pedagogies, each group took a pre-test and a post-test with the same level of difficulty to measure how much each student learned. The difference between the two scores for each student was recorded as the learning gain.
The average learning gain for the control group was 16 points whereas the average learning gain for the two experimental groups was 28 and 37. The TEAL pedagogy resulted in learning gains that were double those from old-school lectures. Active learning, whether at MIT or at Hogwarts, optimizes learning for students.
+100 points to Lupin for designing a Defense Against the Dark Arts that mirrors what MIT professors proved teaches twice as well as lectures.
Lupin proved his dedication to teaching during his private lessons with Harry. After a few encounters with dementors, Harry asked Lupin to teach him how to defend himself. Here are some of the highlights over the months of that training:
Lupin: “The spell I am going to try and teach you is highly advanced magic, Harry – well beyond Ordinary Wizarding Level. It’s called a Patronus Charm.” [3:237]
Harry: “How do you conjure it?”
Lupin: “With an incantation, which will only work if you are concentrating, with all your might, on a single, very happy memory.”
Harry: “Expecto Patronum! Expecto Patronum! Expecto –.”
Lupin: “All right then… You might want to select another memory, a happy memory, I mean, to concentrate on… That one doesn’t seem to have been strong enough…”
Harry: “EXPECTO PATRONUM!”
Lupin: “Excellent, Harry! That was definitely a start!”
Even after months of practicing, Harry still struggled to repel the boggart that took the form of a dementor. To prevent Harry from getting discouraged, Lupin reminded him that for “a thirteen-year-old wizard, even an indistinct Patronus is a huge achievement” [3:246].
When Harry, Hermione and Sirius were swarmed by over a hundred dementors, he couldn’t defend against all of them at once. His shield Patronus flickered and died, but thankfully someone else produced a powerful Patronus in the form of a stag that saved them all.
Luckily, Harry would have a second chance to save his godfather when he and Hermione went back in time using a Time Turner. Even though Harry thought it was his dad that saved them from the dementors the first time, it was actually himself. “I knew I could do it this time because I’d already done it…Does that make sense?” [3:412].
If the purpose of education is to prepare students to be independent in the ‘real’ world, then Lupin definitely helped Harry achieve that goal. “If I’m proud of anything, it’s how much you’ve learned…Tell me about your Patronus” [3:424].
Dumbledore, who found out that Harry’s father had the ability to transform into a stag, realized the significance of Harry’s Patronus. “Prongs rode again last night” [3:428]. Once again, a better metaphor for a ‘coming of age’ moment is hard to imagine.
+60 to Lupin for teaching Harry outside of class, giving proper feedback, and ultimately instilling in Harry the confidence to produce a Patronus Charm.
Lupin was clearly more than capable of teaching a Patronus Charm despite not being an expert by his own admission. “I don’t pretend to be an expert at fighting dementors, Harry…quite the contrary” [3:189]. But his pedagogy was fantastic and that’s what mattered most.
He was harsh when he needed to be, such as when he caught Harry with the Marauder’s Map. Lupin cared deeply about his students, especially Harry who he knew suffered most from the dementors’ presence because of his past.
Lupin’s pedagogy used the same active learning that MIT proved worked twice as well as lectures, which is why Seamus, Dean, and Harry all said that Lupin was “the best Defense Against the Darks Arts teacher we’ve ever had!” [3:170, 424; 5:243].
Current Standings:
Lupin: +180
Lockhart: -40
Expert Auror
Except for Dumbledore, there was no one at Hogwarts more experienced at defending against the Dark Arts than Alastor Moody. Better known as “Madeye” for his “electric blue” eye that moved “ceaselessly, without blinking…side to side, quite independently of the normal eye” [4:185], Moody was an Auror and a member of the original Order of the Phoenix.
For you non-Potterheads, Aurors are Dark wizard catchers. The Order of the Phoenix was the group that Dumbledore formed to fight against Voldemort and his followers, known as Death Eaters.
After hearing what Fred and George had to say about Madeye, Harry and Ron were excited for their first lesson with him [4:208].
Fred: “Never had a lesson like it.”
Lee: “He knows, man.”
Ron: “Knows what?”
George: “Knows what it’s like out there doing it.”
Harry: “Doing what?”
Fred: “Fighting the Dark Arts.”
Expertise alone does not equal good teaching, but it is a necessary requirement that Madeye definitely meets.
+20 points to Madeye for bringing to the classroom years of experience with putting Dark witches and wizards in Azkaban.
Before examining Madeye’s pedagogy, I want to mention another study where active learning was implemented, this time from the SEI. After all, the conclusions of an experiment aren’t valid if they aren’t repeatable.
In the experiment at the University of Colorado, a physics class was split into a control group and an experimental group for a single week of the semester. The control section, which consisted of 267 students, were taught in the same manner as the rest of the semester: “PowerPoint slides to present content and example problems and also showed demonstrations…meanwhile, the students took notes” [10].
The experimental section, which consisted of 271 students, were taught with active learning pedagogy which included “in-class clicker questions with student-student discussion (CQ), small-group active learning tasks (GT), and targeted in-class instructor feedback (IF).” Hopefully some of these strategies sound similar to TEAL.
At the end of the week, both sections took the same 12-question quiz to compare pedagogies. The average score for the control group was 41% whereas the average score for the experimental group that used active learning was 74%. According to the researchers, “random guessing would produce a score of 23%, so the students in the experimental section did more than twice as well on this test as those in the control section.”
Once again, an experiment showed that students who used active learning instead of lectures learned scored twice as high on the same exact test. If I haven’t convinced you that active learning is magic yet, just wait, there’s more.
Madeye’s first lecture with Harry began similarly to Lupin’s. “You can put those away, those books. You won’t need them” [4:210]. Madeye also asked his students questions to introduce a new topic, which in this case were the Unforgivable Curses .
Madeye: “So…do any of you know which curses are most heavily punished by Wizarding law?”
Ron: “Er, my dad told me about one… Is it called the Imperius Curse, or something?”
Madeye: “Ah yes father would know that one” “Anyone else know one? Another illegal curse?”
Neville: “There’s one – the Cruciatus Curse.”
Moody: “Your name’s Longbottom?” “Right…anyone know any others?”
Hermione: “Avada Kedavra.”
Moody: “Yes, the last and the worst. Avada Kedavra…the Killing Curse.”
+30 points to Madeye for introducing a new and grave topic in class with questions.
Like Lupin, Madeye also had his students actively practice in class, except instead of performing spells on a boggart, they were instructed to resist the Imperius Curse performed on them by Madeye himself. “Dumbledore wants you taught what it feels like” [4:231].
Under his influence they did the most extraordinary things including singing the national anthem, imitating a squirrel, and doing gymnastics. Harry was the first one to resist his spell by fighting the voice in his head telling him to jump onto a desk. “Look at that, you lot… Potter fought! He fought, and he damn near beat it! We’ll try that again, Potter, and the rest of you, pay attention…”
+50 points to Madeye for having students actively practice defense against the darkest of Dark Arts in the classroom.
There was however a negative aspect to Madeye’s teaching. It may seem minor but 1) this is a tournament, and 2) this was a problem that the SEI noted while transforming classes. Therefore, it’s worth mentioning for those who might want to adopt active learning in their classrooms.
Towards the back of Carl Wieman’s book there is an appendix titled the SEI Transformation Guide [8:159]. The guide includes resources such as “Basic Instructor Habits to Keep Students Engaged” and “Tips for Successful Clicker Use”. My favorite list in the guide is “What Not To Do: Practices that should be avoided when implementing active learning”.
On the list of 19 “Don’ts,” the first one says, “Don’t use active learning without giving insight into why you are teaching this way.” Without a good explanation as to why a teacher is using a different pedagogy, students often won’t be motivated to participate. Why do clicker questions, group problems in class, or pre-class reading assignments without knowing what the benefit is?
As Wieman notes, “It’s important that students feel that the active learning techniques you are using are to their benefit.” Madeye had trouble motivating his students as well. Harry, Ron and Hermione couldn’t fully understand why they were being shown the Unforgivable Curses or why Madeye spoke the way he did.
Hermione: “But – but you said it’s illegal, Professor. You said – to use it against another human was…”
Harry: “The way he talks, you’d think we were all going to be attacked any second.”
Ron: “Yeah, I know. Talk about paranoid… No wonder they were glad to get shot of him at the Ministry. Did you hear him telling Seamus what he did to that witch who shouted ‘Boo’ behind him on April Fools’ Day?” [4:232].
Eventually, Madeye’s lessons would prove to be an important education for Harry and his friends. They faced the Unforgivable Curses many times when they fought Voldemort and his Death Eaters. But if students don’t understand why something could be useful to them, they won’t be fully motivated participate.
-10 from Madeye for not sufficiently explaining to his students the method to his madness.
In the SEI experiment I mentioned, “the control group was lectured by a motivated faculty member with high student evaluations and many years of experience teaching [that] course” whereas the instructor for the experimental group was a postdoctoral fellow.
In that experiment, pedagogy proved more important than teacher expertise.
There’s no doubt that Madeye was an expert and he did have students actively practice in the classroom. If it weren’t for his struggle to fully motivate his students, he would be ranked even closer Lupin.
Current Standings:
Lupin: +180
Madeye: +90
Lockhart: -40
Witch with a Capital ‘B’
Unlike the other Defense Against the Dark Arts professors at Hogwarts, Dolores Umbridge was appointed by the Ministry of Magic. In her introductory speech at the start-of-term feast, she called for Hogwarts to move “into a new era of openness, effectiveness, and accountability, intent on preserving what ought to be preserved, perfecting what needs to be perfected, and pruning wherever we find practices that ought to be prohibited” [5:213].
The students struggled to pay attention to her speech. Harry and Ron were confused and said it “sounded like a load of waffle” and “was about the dullest speech I’ve ever heard.” Hermione, though, knew exactly what it meant: “It means the Ministry’s interfering at Hogwarts.”
Umbridge’s first class revealed exactly what practices she wished to prohibit [5:239-244]:
Umbridge: “Wands away and quills out, please… We will be following a carefully structured, theory-centered, Ministry-approved course of defensive magic this year. Copy down the following please.”
Hermione: “There’s nothing written up there about using defensive spells.”
Umbridge: “Using defensive spells? Why, I can’t imagine any situation arising in my classroom that would require you to use a defensive spell, Miss Granger. You surely aren’t expecting to be attacked during class?”
Ron: “We’re not going to use magic?”
Umbridge: “Now, it is the view of the Ministry that a theoretical knowledge will be more than sufficient to get you through your examination, which, after all, is what school is all about.”
Harry: “And what good’s theory going to be in the real world?”
Harry, Ron and Hermione identified bad pedagogy right away, especially when compared to classes they had in the past with Lupin and Madeye. Their protesting, however, was useless because Umbridge’s power, authorized by the Ministry, was absolute. Even Professor McGonagall had to urge Harry not to fight with Umbridge in her class: “Do you really think this is about truth or lies? It’s about keeping your head down and your temper under control!” [5:249].
Umbridge’s actions would be more tolerable if she were simply incapable of teaching despite her best efforts, like Lockhart. However, Harry, Ron and Hermione learned from Sirius that her motives were malicious from the start. Thanks to the Minister’s paranoia about Dumbledore training an army, Umbridge had an excuse to deliberately prevent students from learning Defense Against the Dark Arts.
Being the authoritarian that she is, Umbridge embraced her mission to sabotage education at Hogwarts. As Sirius put it, “she’s a nasty piece of work” [5:302].
-100 points from Umbridge for constructing the least active class imaginable to stop her students from learning, and then scolding them for noticing.
Ruining Defense Against the Dark Arts for Harry was terrible, obviously. What made Umbridge truly diabolical, though, was her never-ending desire to control every facet of Hogwarts.
Here are some of the educational decrees from the Ministry that Umbridge enforced at Hogwarts:
“All Student Organizations, Societies, Teams, Groups, and Clubs are henceforth disbanded” [5:351].
“Teachers are hereby banned from giving students any information that is not strictly related to the subjects they are paid to teach” [5:551].
“Dolores Janes Umbridge (High Inquisitor) has replaced Albus Dumbledore as Head of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry” [5:624].
To measure the effect of Umbridge’s bad pedagogy, and the potential ruin she could have caused if she remained Headmaster at Hogwarts, there is a meta-analysis from the muggle world on active learning in STEM classes to compare against.
A group of seven biology professors “metaanalyzed 225 studies that reported data on examination scores or failure rates when comparing student performance in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses under traditional lecturing versus active learning” [11]. The professors define what they mean by ‘metaanalyze’ in the paper, but in summary the professors grouped all the data from those 225 papers and quantified the correlation between active learning and grades.
It’s important to note that the “active learning interventions varied widely in intensity and implementation, and included approaches as diverse as occasional group problem-solving, worksheets or tutorials completed during class, use of personal response systems with or without peer instruction, and studio or workshop course designs.” In other words, the amount and type of active learning varied within the classes.
According to their calculations, the failure rates in classes with old-school lectures were 50% higher than the classes with active learning. To put that into perspective, if active learning was used for all 69 classes – consisting of 29,300 students – then 3,516 fewer students would have failed. In terms of average grade improvement, if active learning was used then “on a letter-based system, medians in the courses analyzed would rise from a B− to a B or from a B to a B+.”
If Umbridge retained her power at Hogwarts, the trends of grades and failure rates would have likely been more drastic than these ones in the muggle world from “traditional lecturing.”
-100 points from Umbridge for trying to force her terrible pedagogy on every class, student club, and free-thinking mind she could control at Hogwarts.
To the best of our knowledge, Umbridge was not a Death Eater. As Sirius told Harry while explaining Voldemort’s first rise to power, “the world isn’t split into good people and Death-Eaters” [5:332]. But she was certainly in opposition to Harry, Dumbledore, and the Order of the Phoenix.
When Cornelius Fudge refused to accept that Voldemort had returned, Dumbledore said to him “Fail to act – and history will remember you as the man who stepped aside and allowed Voldemort a second chance to destroy the world we have tried to rebuild!” [4:708].
Fudge was the Minister of Magic, but it was Umbridge who gleefully embraced her role as dictator of Hogwarts while it was Voldemort who was rebuilding his army. Usually Ron was the best at insults, but in this case Hermione’s description of Umbridge was most accurate when she called her “a foul, lying, twisting old gargoyle!” [5:450].
Current Standings:
Lupin: +180
Moody: +90
Lockhart: -40
Umbridge: -200
The Half-Blood Spy
Severus Snape is the most difficult professor to grade for several reasons. First, most of the pedagogy examples of Snape were when he was the Potions Master, even though he not-so-secretly coveted the Dark Arts post.
Second, Snape hated Harry’s father, James, when they were students together at Hogwarts, largely because he was secretly in love with Harry’s mother, Lily. Since the lens through which we learn about Snape is Harry’s story, the pedagogy examples are warped with emotions.
And finally, Snape was a Death Eater who turned spy for the Order of the Phoenix. Therefore, he had to maintain the appearance of being loyal to Voldemort while helping Dumbledore protect Harry. I told you there would be spoilers.
The good news is, from grading the other four Defense Against the Dark Arts professors, I’ve already explained the good and bad pedagogies necessary to grade Snape.
The most obvious trait about Snape’s pedagogy is that he is ruthless and biased in his feedback. Snape ridiculed his Gryffindor students harshly and almost never criticized students from his own house, Slytherin. As one of many examples, Snape insulted Neville when he failed to follow the instructions for a Shrinking Solution. “Tell me, boy, does anything penetrate that thick skull of yours?” [3:125].
Snape even tried to ‘encourage’ Neville by giving his toad the potion he was making. “If he has managed to produce a Shrinking Solution, it will shrink to a tadpole. If, as I don’t doubt, he has done it wrong, his toad will likely be poisoned” [3:128].
Obviously, this is bad pedagogy. To make it explicit for grading purposes, this strategy violates two items on the “What Not To Do” list I mentioned earlier from Wieman’s book. Number six on the list is “Don’t overlook motivation” and number 15 is “Don’t embarrass individuals” [8:216].
According to the SEI, it’s better to intrinsically motivate students with examples that are “interesting and relevant” for students. As far as reacting to a student’s answer, it’s better to ask individuals “for their group’s reasoning.” If you’re going to risk the life of a student’s pet on the outcome of an assignment, at least make it a group activity and allow Hermione to help.
-40 points from Snape for poorly motivating students and singling out Neville.
There were, however, positive aspects to Snape’s pedagogy. Almost every class that Snape had was active, meaning that the students were actually making potions. “We are continuing with our Strengthening Solutions today, you will find your mixtures as you left them last session, if correctly made they should have matured well over the weekend – instructions – on the board. Carry on” [5:363].
Even Umbridge, who tried to fire nearly half of Hogwarts, had to admit that Snape’s class seemed “fairly advanced for their level.” There’s also no doubt that Snape had the expertise for potion-making. After all, he was the Half-Blood Prince.
+50 points to Snape for being an expert potion-maker and almost always making his classes active.
Like Lupin, Snape also gave Harry private lessons in defending against the Dark Arts. But this time the lessons were at Dumbledore’s request. He wanted Snape to teach Harry Occlumency to prevent Voldemort from controlling Harry’s mind through their connection. In Snape’s words, Occlumency is “the magical defense of the mind against external penetration. An obscure branch of magic, but a highly useful one” [5:519].
Just like Madeye did with the Imperius Curse, Snape used spells on Harry so he could practice resisting control. But unlike Lupin’s private lessons, Snape’s feedback was discouraging and demotivating. Here are some examples from the months of lessons they had together [5:534]:
Snape: “I am about to attempt to break into your mind…Brace yourself, now…Legilimens!”
Harry: “I’m trying, but you’re not telling me how!”
Snape: “Get up! You are not trying, you are making no effort, you are allowing me to access memories you fear, handing me weapons!”
Harry: “I – am – making – an – effort.”
Snape: “[The Dark Lord] will penetrate your mind with absurd ease, Potter!”
Harry: “I am not weak…”
Snape: “Get out, get out, I don’t want to see you in this office ever again!”
Active learning requires proper feedback and motivation to be effective. Snape performed poorly in both those categories which is why Dumbledore later referred to Harry’s Occlumency lessons as a “fiasco” [6:79].
-30 points from Snape for his awful feedback and eventually giving up on teaching Harry.
After learning the history of Snape and James Potter, it’s no surprise that private lessons with Harry failed. But Snape had other lessons that were great. One of Snape’s best lessons was his first Defense Against the Dark Arts class in Harry’s sixth year. Like Lupin and Madeye, he asked the class questions to introduce a new topic, nonverbal spells [6:178].
Snape: “Now, you are, I believe, complete novices in the use of nonverbal spells. What is the advantage of a nonverbal spell?”
Hermione: “Your adversary has no warning about what kind of magic you’re about to perform which gives you a split-second advantage.”
Snape: “An answer copied almost word for word from The Standard Book of Spells, Grade Six, but correct in essentials… You will now divide into pairs. One partner will attempt to jinx the other without speaking. The other will attempt to repel the jinx in equal silence. Carry on.”
Ignoring the snide remark about Hermione – which we’ve already deducted points for with the example of Neville’s toad – the partnering up to practice spells looked exactly like Harry’s lessons with Dumbledore’s Army.
+40 points to Snape for having introductory questions and active practice in Defense Against the Dark Arts class.
In that first Defense Against the Dark Arts class, Snape started with a mini-lecture to motivate his students. “The Dark Arts are many, varied, ever-changing, and eternal…You are fighting that which is unfixed, mutating, indestructible. Your defenses must therefore be as flexible and inventive as the arts you seek to undo” [6:177].
Harry, who hated Snape, couldn’t understand why Dumbledore would let him be the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor given his past. “Did you hear him talking about the Dark Arts? He loves them! All that unfixed, indestructible stuff” [6:180]. Hermione, however, told Harry that she thought Snape sounded like him.
To Harry’s surprise, Hermione remembered what he told Dumbledore’s Army when they were practicing spells against Umbridge’s orders. “You said it wasn’t just memorizing a bunch of spells, you said it was just you and your brain and your guts – well wasn’t that was Snape was saying?”
In the end, Snape was a hero who accepted his role as a villain to fulfill his duty as a spy. He was the perfect wizard to do so given his history as a Death Eater, his hatred for Harry’s father James, and his love for Harry’s mother Lily. Therefore, it shouldn’t be a surprise that his pedagogy was a mix of good and bad that results in a grade in the middle.
Final Standings:
Lupin: +180
Moody: +90
Snape: +20
Lockhart: -40
Umbridge: -200
Hogwarts Finals
The final ranking of Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers is:
Worst → Best
Dolores Umbridge → Gilderoy Lockhart → Severus Snape → Alastor Moody → Remus Lupin
Just like the ranking of my muggle professors, the order does not solely depend on the teacher’s expertise. If that were the case, then Madeye would be the best and Lockhart would be the worst. It’s like Dumbledore said to his favorite pupil: “It is our choices Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities” [2:333]. For aspiring teachers like myself, Dumbledore’s words should be both an inspiration and a warning.
As I mentioned, I took physics with Peter Dourmashkin at MIT and then was a teacher’s assistant for the same courses. Back then I didn’t know about the SEI or all the published papers on active learning. It wasn’t until I was instructor myself at UTEC that I asked myself, “What’s the best way to teach students?”
Luckily, my boss at UTEC – the Academic Director Melanie Cornejo – had also taken physics at MIT in the TEAL format. She was the one who introduced me to Carl Wieman’s book. In fact, the copy I have now might be the one from the teacher’s lounge at UTEC. Might be.
When UTEC students complained about the pedagogy of the introductory physics classes, Melanie sent me and a few UTEC professors to MIT to learn from the best.
Peter Dourmashkin let us watch his Electricity & Magnetism class, and the professors took notes on how TEAL operated. I never took notes in that class and wasn’t about to start. Instead I just walked around like I was a teacher’s assistant again.
A few months later, Peter Dourmashkin came to Lima and talked about active learning at UTEC. He showed TEAL to the students and he even taught a course on tying knots like the Incans did just to show that you can use active learning for almost anything.
After his talks and seminars, I took Professor Dourmashkin and his family out to dinner with some UTEC faculty. I acted as translator between the two parties and we had traditional Peruvian cuisine, which in my ‘unbiased’ opinion is the best cuisine in the world. It was a surreal experience to be an instructor translating for one of my favorite professors half a world away from where we first met.
Pedagogy Prophecy
Whenever I listened to Peter Dourmashkin introduce TEAL – first when I was his student, then as his teacher’s assistant, and lastly as an instructor when he visited UTEC – he always told his audience a startling fact: the lecture was invented before the printing press.
Carl Wieman mentions the same fact in the beginning of his book: “The lecture format, which still predominates in STEM teaching today, began before the invention of the printing press, as an efficient way to pass along basic words and information in the absence of written texts” [8:7].
Since then, Newton established some laws about motion that pushed forward the Industrial Revolution, Maxwell compiled some laws about electricity and magnetism that sparked the Computer Revolution, and Einstein created some theories on relativity that are helping enable space travel throughout the solar system. Relative to physics and engineering, pedagogy is way past due for an upgrade.
According to Wieman, the biggest reasons that active learning isn’t implemented in more classrooms are 1) professors aren’t aware of the most up-to-date advances in pedagogy and 2) professors are incentivized to focus on research instead of improving students’ learning [8:118]. Prioritizing student outcomes will likely continue to compete with research for the foreseeable future. But spreading knowledge of active learning should be easy.
At Hogwarts, as with universities in the muggle world, the power to teach young minds can be used for good or for bad. Dumbledore suspected that Voldemort wanted a position at Hogwarts so he could have “great power and influence over young witches and wizards” [6:431]. He knew that Voldemort was lying about his intentions and confronted him about it: “you do not want to teach any more than you wanted to when you were eighteen. What is it you’re after, Tom?”
Dumbledore, however, was dedicated to the growth of his students. Voldemort was surprised Dumbledore stayed at Hogwarts: “I always wondered why a wizard such as yourself never wished to leave school.” But Dumbledore found more meaning in his role as an educator: “to a wizard such as myself, there can be nothing more important than passing on ancient skills, helping hone young minds” [6:442].
As Hogwarts, TEAL, and the SEI have shown, the best way to hone young minds is through active learning. The grades of students would improve by simply switching from traditional lectures to the proven pedagogy of Lupin, Dourmashkin, and Wieman. Adopting active learning will require effort, but once again the wizarding world has an analogy to motivate the transformation.
The saga of Harry Potter began when Voldemort tried to kill Harry because of a prophecy that said, “The One With The Power To Vanquish The Dark Lord Approaches… And The Dark Lord Will Mark Him As His Equal, But He Will Have Power The Dark Lord Knows Not… And Either Must Die At The Hand Of The Other For Neither Can Live While The Other Survives.” [5:841]
A similar prophecy might be said about traditional lectures and active learning. The pedagogy with the power to vanquish the lecture has been growing in recent decades. Lecturers might think it’s equal, but active learning has the power to educate that lecturers don’t know. And the time used in the classroom is finite, so neither can live while the other survives.
Whether you’re a student, a teacher or a parent, imagine the following.
Imagine being at Hogwarts in Harry’s position after Voldemort has returned.
Imagine being asked the question that Dumbledore asked Harry after discussing the prophecy [6:512].
But in this case, replace the word Voldemort with lectures:
Dumbledore: “How would you feel about lectures now? Think!”
Hopefully - if I’ve convinced you of the power of active learning - you’ll respond like Harry did:
Harry: “I’d want them finished. And I’d want to do it.”
References
J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Scholastic Inc. 1997).
J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Scholastic Inc. 1998).
J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Scholastic Inc. 1999).
J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Scholastic Inc. 2000).
J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Scholastic Inc. 2003).
J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Scholastic Inc. 2005).
J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Scholastic Inc. 2007).
Wieman, Carl. Improving How Universities Teach Science. Harvard University Press, 2017.
Dori & Belcher. “How Does Technology-Enabled Active Learning Affect Undergraduate Students’ Understanding of Electromagnetism Concepts?” The Journal of the Learning Sciences, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 243–279, 2005.
Deslauriers, Louis, et al. “Improved Learning in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class”. Science, vol. 332, no. 862, 2011. DOI: 10.1126/science.1201783.
Freeman, Scott, et al. “Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics”. PNAS, vol. 111, no. 23, 10 June 2014.
Piaget, J. The Moral Judgment of the Child. (The Free Press 1932).