Ben Lear receives Eisenhower Award for Distinguished Teaching
Ben Lear, professor of chemistry in the Eberly College of Science, is one of two Penn State faculty to receive the 2026 Milton S. Eisenhower Award for Distinguished Teaching. he award recognizes excellence in teaching and student support among tenured faculty who have been employed full time for at least five years with undergraduate teaching as a major portion of their duties. Milton S. Eisenhower, brother of former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, served as president of Penn State from 1950 to 1956.
Lear builds his teaching philosophy on three principles: Confusion is the first step to learning; learning is an active process; and it also is a targeted activity.
He said the greatest learning leaps happen when students are challenged to think differently and upset what they perceive they already know. Confused students naturally want clarification and resolution and that path yields the greatest learning rewards, he said.
He tasks his students with actively applying what they’re learning in the classroom.
“Effective teaching recognizes that there is simply no other way to learn than by doing,” Lear said. “One cannot assimilate new models for the world passively. Instead, learners must confront these models. They must struggle with them, challenge them and ultimately decide if they wish to assimilate them into their worldview.”
He said active learning is done by first identifying what needs to be learned and then participating in activities that strengthen that knowledge.
“Working from these three beliefs, my philosophy is that a teacher’s role is to mentor students in their journey from confusion to understanding,” Lear said. “A teacher should help students recognize and navigate the stages of learning, providing them with ample guided and curated opportunities to practice their learning.”
Active learning is done through structured assignments completed outside the classroom followed up by in-class activities that strengthen these concepts. Lear said he asks large-scale and open-ended questions that challenge students’ beliefs and guide them to new understandings. Often, they’re creating, consuming and critiquing data visualizations.
He supplements these lessons with classroom activities, discussions during office hours, written or video tutorials and design or technical challenges. He has a YouTube channel, a Wiki page and is creating a book on using Python coding for chemistry. AI (artificial intelligence) supplements his course on data visualization.
His chemistry courses also feature demonstrations followed by peer student discussions. A lesson on the behavior of gasses begins with a calculation on the speed bromine travels, followed by a demonstration of the gas moving at 500 miles per hour.
Students called Lear a dynamic educator who encouraged them to view concepts from several angles. They said that this proved useful as they enrolled in more advanced courses such as organic and biochemistry.
“Beyond the fantastic course structure and in-depth material, what set Lear apart is the effort he made to bring the real world into the classroom,” a former student said. “From in-class demonstrations using magnets to illustrate the paramagnetic properties of elements to coating pennies in silver to highlight double displacement reactions, every lecture and recitation felt engaging and exciting. Beyond being an interesting spectacle, these demonstrations allowed us to ‘see’ the physical impacts of the properties and reactions we were learning.”