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In the late 1990s, the physics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a problem. The department was responsible for teaching the two required physics courses that are part of the General Institute Requirements (GIRs), MIT's core curriculum—Physics I (mechanics, or in MIT parlance, 8.01) and Physics II (electricity and magnetism, 8.02)—and the failure rate in both was dismal. Often as many as 15 percent of the students didn't pass mechanics on their first try, and 10 percent didn't get through electricity and magnetism. The department head, Marc Kastner (now dean of the School of Science at MIT), and the associate department head for education, Thomas Greytak, were under pressure from the senior administration, as well as faculty in other departments, to fix the problem.
Lori Breslow has been the director of the Teaching and Learning Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since its inception in 1997. She is also a senior lecturer in the MIT Sloan School of Management. She is married to John Belcher, a physics professor at MIT and the principal architect of the TEAL initiative.
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