Educational Change

Why we won’t teach your MOOC

May 3, 2013

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an open letter from San Jose State University (Philosophy Department) indicating why they refused to teach a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) offered through EdX.  It’s incredibly thoughtful and powerful, foretelling a future where university education is simply the facilitation of such pre-packaged courses by a glorified teaching assistant, [...]

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Envisioning & Implementing Effective Educational Programs

April 28, 2013

A very nice article about me was just published in the Spring issue of the Newsletter of the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics.  I think it’s a nice summary of what I’ve been focusing on in my career, and my philosophies of finding one’s path, so I am posting it here. Here [...]

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Clickers in the Social Sciences (#clicker series)

April 22, 2013

Clickers are a natural fit for use in the physical sciences, where there is typically one right, or “best” answer to a question, and common errors in conceptual understanding or reasoning can lead to a wrong answer choice.  But what about in other disciplines, such as the humanities and social sciences?  A nice recent article [...]

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Science and Story: How narratives can lift your lessons

March 20, 2013

I have an interesting guest post today on a subject that is dear to my heart — why narrative, or storytelling, is important in teaching science.  My former boss and mentor at the Exploratorium, Paul Doherty, always captivated teachers during his workshops by telling the most interesting stories about the history of science.  The crazy [...]

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Materials available: Active learning materials & #clicker workshops in sciences

January 13, 2013

Welcome to the new semester!  I am spreading the word about an extensive set of materials for research-based transformed courses in the sciences here at the University of Colorado at Boulder.  All materials are available to the public on a creative commons license. Please share widely (other bloggers and tweeps, help me out!) These materials [...]

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The First Day of Class: Getting students on board with active learning #physicsed

January 9, 2013

Instructors trying out active learning strategies (such as clickers) in the classroom for the first time (or the umpteenth time!) are often concerned about how to make sure that their students are on-board with these teaching techniques, so that they engage.  After all, says Doug Duncan (University of Colorado), it’s more work, so you better [...]

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Conceptual change about teaching

December 2, 2012

My main intellectual interest over the past few years is how to encourage instructors to try new teaching techniques, and how to support them in being effective in those attempts.  A recent article by Bailey and Nagamine in the American Journal of Physics addresses just this issue, from an interesting perspective.  As instructors, we often [...]

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Why don’t faculty change their teaching methods?

August 31, 2012

Instruction hasn’t changed much over the years.  Why is that?  One common reasoning is to blame the faculty — that they are not interested in trying new teaching methods. A new study just published by Henderson, Dancy, and Niewiadomska-Bugaj indicate that this isn’t the case.  Faculty are interested in trying more effective teaching strategies, and [...]

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Workshop: Engaging students with clickers “best practices”

April 10, 2012

Today I co-presented a workshop on clicker best-practices with i>clicker representative Dustin Jensen. Classroom response systems (“clickers”) offer a powerful way to increase student engagement by going beyond simple quizzes. They provide an opportunity to gather real-time feedback on student understanding. If you are new to clickers or need fresh ideas for using clickers in [...]

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Frank Oppenheimer lab setup at CU Boulder

March 21, 2012

I blogged earlier about the wonderful must-read book, “Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens,” about Frank Oppenheimer’s philosophy of science education and exploration, and his eventual founding of the best place on earth, the Exploratorium.  You can see another review of the book on the blog Bioephemera, and read the first chapter of the book here. Below [...]

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Physics for Future Presidents

March 18, 2012

Richard Muller gave one of the plenaries at the AAPT Winter Meeting, and it was one of the more useful sessions of the conference for me.  Richard Muller is the teacher of an influential course at UC Berkeley called Physics and Technology for Future Presidents: An Introduction to the Essential Physics Every World Leader Needs [...]

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Recent talk by Carl Wieman: How people learn

March 7, 2012

My old boss Carl Wieman (now in the White House office of science and technology) recently gave a talk at the Optical Society for America on Transforming STEM Education:  A Scientific Approach to Teaching and Learning. It has a nice side-by-side of video and slides.  Dr. Wieman discusses his personal motivation for investigating how people [...]

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Seeking the warm spot: My nonlinear career path in science writing and education

February 29, 2012

I was recently invited to write an article for the Agora blog on women and science on my career path.  The resulting article is on their blog, but I am cross-posting it here for y’all: ——— I’ve spent a lot of my life worrying about what to do for a job.  I’ve had so many [...]

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Peer Instruction Network: A way to connect to #clicker users

February 26, 2012

Peer instruction is a technique of asking students to discuss a question with their neighbors, voting, and then holding a whole class discussion of the answers.  Visit the Physics Education Research User’s Guide here to see more about Peer Instruction. A lot of research has shown that users of peer instruction often don’t use it [...]

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The effects of prison libraries

February 20, 2012

I’ve been a staunch advocate of education in prisons for quite a few years, though more through serendipity than a lifetime interest.  I was assigned to do an article on prisoner recidivism (ie., what helps keep them from going out of prison when they get out) for the now-defunct magazine Science & Spirit many years [...]

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Physicists seek to lose lecture as teaching tool

February 6, 2012

In case you missed it there was a piece on NPR on January 1, “Physicists seek to lose the lecture as teaching tool.” This is part of a series on education and education research that’s been ongoing, and extremely well reported, at American Radio Works.  They have a wide variety of episodes on online learning, [...]

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Free webinar on #clickers in K12 classrooms: Weds Feb 15th

February 5, 2012

I will be giving a webinar geared to K12 teachers next week, on Weds Feb 15th. See details below for registration. Make Clickers Work For You: A powerful tool for instruction and formative assessment in K12 classrooms Dr.Stephanie Chasteen Wednesday, February 15, 2012 6:30 PM EST We’ll show you how classroom response systems (“clickers”) offer [...]

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Clicker workshops at Berkeley: Writing questions and effective facilitation

February 5, 2012

I did a workshop at UC Berkeley last week on the effective use of clickers, co-sponsored by the Physics, Chemistry, and IT departments.  We did a two part series:  The first workshop was on writing effective clicker questions, and the second on effective facilitation of clickers in the classroom. The abstracts are below, and you [...]

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A great visual resource on learning goals

January 30, 2012

I wish I could embed this visual tool here so that you’d see how awesome it is and jump up and down in your seat like I did when I first saw it (at least, if you’re an edu-geek like me). But no, I can only provide you with a link and say go here. [...]

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Learn about research-based teaching: The PER User’s Guide

December 8, 2011

There are a ton of research-based techniques for teaching, and we hear about them in bits and pieces.  There are great websites on modeling, for example, or our CU-Boulder  materials for using clickers and peer instruction.  But where can we go to find everything all in one place? I’m pleased to help spread the word [...]

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