Friday Profile: Thurnau Professor Bradford Orr

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What if every college course had "curiosity" as an explicit prerequisite?  

When Bradford Orr introduced the course "Everyday Physics" into the University of Michigan curriculum in 1993, he included such a prerequisite on the syllabus. Moving away from the then-standard Physics pedagogy of lecture and textbook lessons, the course focused on "hands-on" discovery, as student groups performed lab experiments to study a series of everyday phenomena: soap bubbles, light waves, electrical circuits. The students worked with familiar materials to learn about the ways basic physical principles affect their daily lives--and can be observed and tested without elaborate equipment.  At the time a pioneering venture in curiosity-driven, experiential learning, the course continues to be the most popular elective in the U-M Physics curriculum.  

And Orr himself continues to be an extraordinarily innovative teacher. Honored in 2012 with an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship [2], his creative and committed instruction has also been acknowledged with a range of teaching awards, including the Provost's Teaching Innovation Prize (TIP) [3], a Rackham Graduate Student Mentoring Award, and the Harold R. Johnson Diversity Service Award.

While Orr's teaching continues to develop with every new course and semester, students repeatedly return to the fundamentals--instructor passion and student engagement--in their praise of his teaching.  They describe Orr as encouraging students to "actively think about the material instead of receiving it passively." They attest that he "demonstrates genuine concern for fostering a love of learning and discovery of new ideas for all students." And they praise his creation of a "learning environment . . . that prepares future physicists for the road ahead and opens all students to what 'real' science and physics is all about."

Orr is particularly praised by his students and colleagues for introducing "computational physics" into the introductory Physics curriculum. This phrase might not mean a lot to teachers in other fields, but it's easy to recognize what Orr's goals for students have been in his computational physics courses:

• engaging talented students early in their college years through exciting, complex tasks;
• allowing students to approach problems in the field in the same ways professional practitioners do;
• connecting the classic concepts in the field to a changing technological world.

These are learning goals that creative teachers in any discipline can recognize and appreciate.  

To learn about other excellent U-M teachers, click on the "Friday Profile" tag below.