I keep meaning to post about this — the PhysTEC project has created a short (5 minute) video on physics teaching as a great career option. They’re suggesting that departments post this on their websites to promote careers in teaching physics.

It’s a nicely done little video, and not a bad idea to raise awareness of teaching as a profession, as well as to show students that the department supports future teachers.  What do others think?

Students work with a Learning Assistant (middle) in physics tutorials

I’m happy to announce that one of the fruits of my labors this summer — a module on Teaching with Learning Assistants at Carleton College’s Science Education Resource Center has now been published!

From the site:

Learning Assistants are talented undergraduate students, primarily in mathematics and the sciences, chosen for their broad interest in teaching and prepared to provide support for student learning in interactive classroom environments. Primarily used in group work, Learning Assistants are specifically prepared to focus on student ideas and facilitate group conversations and conceptual understanding. Learning Assistants are chosen from the top students who took the course in previous semesters, and receive a stipend or class credit for their assistance.

I give data to support the use of LAs, some information on how they are prepared to work with students, and detailed suggestions for what types of activities are best to use with LAs.  And even better, I interviewed faculty to write five detailed case-studies of the use of LAs in the classroom, so you can see how this really plays out in practice.

This is a valuable resource, and one that I’m proud of.  Check it out.

SERC has a lot of great modules on innovative teaching techniques.  If you don’t know of them, take a look around.

For all you nice physicists who are hitting the blog because of the shout-out in the AAPT e-NNOUNCER, just scroll down three blog posts to find my listing of all my posts from AAPT.

I welcome guest posts about sessions that I didn’t make it to! Just drop me a note at stephanie (at) sciencegeekgirl (dot) com.

Pardon the curse-word, but I just had to share this wonderful little piece from the Onion.

And since I would otherwise get taken to task for “taking myself too seriously” I won’t even make any sort of meta-comments on student motivation or other things that we education-types worry about. What’s the point?  It’s just funny.  Warning — the language in this clip isn’t work-friendly.

In The Know: Are Tests Biased Against Students Who Don’t Give A Shit?

I was excited to see this recent posting from my institution, CU Boulder. If you’re a teacher looking to teach climate change in the classroom, a group of scientists, science education researchers, and middle and high-school teachers have developed and refined a set of problem-based lessons:

Visit them at LearnMoreAboutClimate.colorado.edu

They say:

The result is a set of model lessons that focus on the following single driving questions:

• Evidence of Climate Change — How would we know if Colorado’s climate is changing and how will it affect me?
• Mountain Pine Beetles — Why are our forests dying?
• Zoo Poo — Does burning poo at the Denver Zoo reduce CO2?
• Modeling Climate — What makes you hot?

For those of you who wanted them all in one place (and I’m one of those people) here are all the posts that I wrote from the recent Physics Teacher AAPT/PERC physics teacher conferences:

1. Facing Facebook:  Social media in and out of the classroom
2. The Magic of the Middle Division: Changing Classroom Norms
3. Students’ understanding of energy:  Acting out our thinking
4. Students playing the “classroom” game can give silly answers
5. Out of one, many:  Five researchers analyze the same student video
6. Do students learn better with peer instruction?  Does it last?
7. Common challenges in using clickers
8. Effective use of technology in physics education
9. Some memorable quotes from AAPT
10. Student reasoning in tutorials

Enjoy!

Your students are already using tools like Facebook and Twitter. In fact, they’re often using them when you’d rather they’d be doing something else (like paying attention in class). How can we turn the potential obstacles of Web 2.0 and social media into an opportunity for effective teaching and learning?

I recently gave an overview talk at the American Association of Physics Teachers, sharing some techniques instructors are using for communicating with their students and each other, including class blogs, real-time aggregated conversations in class, tweeted answers to student questions, dedicated YouTube channels, wiki-based class contracts, and more. I did a lot of research for this talk, and wanted to share the fruits of my labor on this blog. I argued that by using these tools, rather than ignoring them, we can help students gain social media literacy skills. Thus, we may choose to leverage social media to promote conversation about things that we care about, using platforms that students find familiar and fun.

Below is the Prezi that accompanied this presentation.  I also recommend you check out the Diigo list of social media links that I made for the presentation — here you’ll find examples of class blogs, research articles on social media, and more. It’s a really useful list.

I wrote out the salient points from the presentation in my other blog at the Active Class.  I cover how students are using social media, strategies that instructors use to combat digital distraction in class, and then how they are using it to promote student/student collaboration, student/teacher communication, and their own professional learning.

And to end the presentation, I quoth:

If you want your students to tweet you well, then you need to tweet them well

Model good behavior in these forums, and participate in them. Don’t ask your students to do something that you’re not willing to engage in yourself.

Again, check out the Diigo list of social media links!

I’m finally getting a chance to finish my blog posts from the summer meeting of AAPT.  There’s just one more talk that I wanted to share with any of you who couldn’t be there – another delightful presentation from Corinne Manogue of Oregon State University.  Corinne is a colleague, we’ve both been working on creating new activities for use in physics courses beyond the introductory courses, though I’ve been focusing on the junior years and she’s firmly planted in the sophomore level.  Still, I’ve used many of her activities from the sophomore level to enhance our junior course, and I just find her approach inspiring.  You can access many of her developed activities at the Paradigms Wiki.

In her talk, she talked about her area of expertise – the middle division – and shared some of her insights about classroom norms, and how we can be more thoughtful and deliberate about showing students what we want them to do in our classes.  That description barely does justice to the gentle revolution that she advocated for our physics classrooms.  “I’m going to show you ways to implement things that you already know, in new ways,” she promised.

We have certain expectations of a situation, depending on what we see around us, she reminded us.  For instance, if we walk into a restaurant that has a menu on the wall, we know we’ll pay first, eat with our hands, and then leave.  If the restaurant has a printed menu, we know we’ll first get our food, eat with a knife and fork, and pay after we eat.

Similarly, we set up classroom norms from the start.  And it’s important that those classroom norms make everyone feel comfortable – women, minorities, shy white men, engineers – everyone!  In particular, when creating an interactive classroom, start out right.

1.  Don’t grade. If you want them to learn from an interactive technique, don’t grade it if you want them to learn from it.  This sets the stage that this is a low-stakes activity.

2.  Expect everyone to participate. If you’re not grading it, the expectation of participation still needs to be made clear, and made clear from the very first day.

3.  Don’t make them look foolish. Don’t expect them to do anything that you won’t model.  At some point early in the semester, she says, she gets up on the table during class.  In fact, she looks for any excuse to stand on a table, because it looks silly, and sets a new norm.

4.  Make it OK to make mistakes. She uses small whiteboards in her classes, where students can work through an answer to a question she poses.  These help get everyone involved, and nobody is left out.  However, students are a bit intimidated to begin with, not wanting to put something wrong on the whiteboard.  So, the first few times she does it, she doesn’t ask a student to explain why their answer is wrong to the entire class – that’s humiliating. Instead, what she does it to start with showing lots of student answers to the whole class, and talk as a group about which one is correct, and decide what’s productive about the different answers.  Later in the course, students are more comfortable and she asks students to stand up and show their answer, and defend it.  But early on, she clearly sets the norm that it’s OK to make mistakes, and that this is a classroom where ideas can be discussed productively.

What are our goals in the middle division, she asks?  We want students to move away from using problem templates, to use advanccorred notation, to break up complicated problems into smaller pieces, to be more confident in their problem solving ability and to reflect on their solutions and use their judgement as to their reasonableness.  In sum, we want them to move from being a novice to an expert.  And our teaching strategies have to reflect those goals.  Lecture isn’t a bad thing – it has value.  It paints the big picture, covers a lot of material, models good speaking and problem solving skills, and can control just what students get out of class and the questions that they ask.

But activities, like the ones on her wiki, have a different effect.  Students get to practice something, see how it works in depth, and control their own questions.

If they can get it from lecture, she says, then lecture.  If they can’t get it from the lecture, though, we often make the mistake of putting it into the homework instead.  Students work on it, and get stuck, and the good ones come to talk to you, and “you have a wonderful conversation about that difficulty, and they then share the answers with the next student, who shares it with the next one” and so on.  That doesn’t actually help them achieve your goals for class.  Instead, she does activities in class.

As an example, she showed us part of her Acting Out Current Densities activity.

She chose about 10 physicists from the audience and asked them to come to the front of the room.   In true form, she stood on the table at the front.

Corinne -- on the table -- doing a similar activity with students

“You are all charged particles,” she said.  “I have a magnetic field meter, make it fluctuate.” The physicists, smiling abashedly, started to move around near her.

“Now make it nonzero, but not fluctuate,” she said.  After a bit of discussion, they moved in a circle around her.

“Make it read higher” she ordered.  They circled closer.

Now everybody’s on the same page, she said, and we’re all awake.  And this opens up the possibility for questions.  It changes the focus of the class, and allows you to really gauge what your students understand.

Why is an activity like this important for gauging understanding?  When we take the integral over knowledge, she said, we get the impression that everyone knows everything.  Socratic questioning lets us tap into the knowledge in the room.  On the other hand, when we take the integral over questions, as when people in the class ask questions during group work, we start to think that nobody knows anything.

So, I think the point that she was making was that we want to both use lecture (to frame) and activities (to involve), to tap students’ knowledge by asking them questions, and to tap their questions by providing them the space to do so.   That by setting the stage for both to happen productively, we can help many different students feel comfortable doing what is necessary for them to achieve the kinds of goals that we wish for them – a deeper understanding of physics, of problem solving, and of their own capacities.

A while back I wrote about Nin Andrews wonderful little book “Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum?”  This collection of poems based on real student notes to her physicist husband is a fun read — an interesting peek into the life of students from their point of view.  See my previous post to see the title poem (which I think is one of the best).

Here’s one, for example:

Dear Professor

I’m preparing for your exam

in Quantum

Which means I am waiting

for the nonzeroprobability

that my brilliance

will manifest on its own.

It’s bound to happen.

There’s just no telling when.

See Nin Andrews’ site for more, and a link to buy the book.

Got this gem from a recent issue of Science magazine…

Here’s a variation on the popular geeks who drink bar-room trivia contests.  This geek wanted to describe the evolution of drinks!  An evolutionary biologist, James Harriman, wondered whether new drinks arise by people adjusting old recipes to fit their tastes, giving rise to new “species” of cocktail in a sort of “taste-based natural selection”.

Geneticists have fancy software for making phylogenetic trees, showing how species branch out from one another genetically.  With a common ancestor of vodka, the program naturally sorted different drinks based on their ingredients (which would be the “species”, I guess).  You can get a poster of the cocktail evolutionary tree, which of course, doubles as a mixology guide.

And for those who haven’t discovered it yet, check out The Webtender This is a nice little algorithm for plugging in what you’ve got in your cupboard and finding out what you can make with it. You can also ask what you can make if you buy 1, 2, or 3 more ingredients.