A day spent discussing teaching practices

EPFL held a special Education Day last Friday, 17 May, as part of events commemorating its 50 ^th anniversary. The day included a ceremony to announce the winners of the LEARN Awards - prizes given out by EPFL to recognize innovative high-school teaching initiatives. "Dare to know." Kant's words were the inspiration behind the keynote address given by Pierre Vandergheynst, EPFL's Vice President for Education, at Education Day on Friday, 17 May. The event was held at the Swiss Tech Convention Center, where over 300 people - mostly education professionals - took a close look at the discipline and, more specifically, at how to teach science more effectively and how to help students manage the transition from high school to college. "We were delighted to see so many high-school teachers from across Switzerland attending our event," says Sabrina Rami Shojaei, head of EPFL's Education Outreach Department (SPE), which organized the conference. The first speaker - Eric Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard University - addressed the important challenge of capturing students' attention and, above all, making sure they learn the material. As an expert in the topic, Mazur gave the audience a demonstration of his peer instruction method by turning a metal plate with a hole in it into a subject of debate for the entire room. The trick is to ask a lot of questions and get people involved in the learning process. "You don't learn by watching. You learn by doing," says Mazur - whom EPFL President Martin Vetterli called "the rock star of education." Putting students in researchers' shoes