AY 375 Fall 2013: Twelfth Day Plan

Today we'll begin our broader pedagogical discussions and your Design-A-Section projects.

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Open the floor up for general questions and sharing about how sections are going. Some questions include:

• What did you do?
• How did you implement your activities?
• What worked?
• What didn't work?
• What would you do differently?
• How did you assess learning?
• Did you receive any unexpected questions/reactions/etc.?
• Did anything unexpected happen?
• What were you thinking about while you were running section? Any moments of panic?

A reminder on what Design-A-Section entails:

This project is meant to be a culmination of everything that we have learned together in Ay375. It is a means for you to develop a “significant learning experience” for your (possibly hypothetical) students, and will involve a mini-lecture, activity, and method of assessment that targets a particular topic and your learning objectives. At the beginning of December, you'll be given a ~15 minute presentation that showcases your work.

For homework last week, we asked you to consider some topics that you might want to develop a section around. Today, we want to spend a little time discussing this project and outlining the first milestone you'll work on this week.

When designing your section, your goal will be to create an “Integrated Section Design”, adopting a phrase from L. Dee Fink (links are provided on the supplemental page). The steps in designing an integrated section require you to (1) identify the situational factors, (2) formulate the learning goals, (3) design the feedback and assessment procedures, and (4) select the teaching/learning activities. These four components are all inter-related, and we'll consider each in turn.

Situational Factors - Size up the situation: Outside factors can influence your section. This could be as simple as “How many students typically attend section,” but can also include, for example, “What prior knowledge do my students have on the subject?” or “How does the professor of the course view this idea in terms of his/her overall course goals?” Students and professor expectations fall into the situational factors: “What are the students or the professor expecting from section?” The subject nature must be considered: “What is the nature of the subject (theoretical, practical, or a combination)?” These will influence all your future decisions.

Learning Goals - What do you want students to get out of the section? Perhaps you want to take a concept-centered approach: “I want students to learn about X, Y, and Z.” This is easy, natural, and obvious, but over-emphasizes the “remember” level of learning. Can we do better? Significant learning is more than just memorization, and in creating learner-centered sections and courses we should consider how we can teach to bring out different levels of learning such as application, synthesizing, and metacognitive skills (learning how to learn). Significant learning the the interaction of all these various kinds of learning. What is the key information your students need? What kinds of thinking do you want to encourage? Does this thinking require specific skills? What connections can be made with other material in the course or their everyday lives?

Feedback & Assessment Procedures - We have learned that feedback goes beyond the midterms and the final. We, in addition, want to assess the quality of student learning in each of our sections and lectures. We have learned to create feedback and assessment strategies that allow us to assess in-the-moment, while learning is taking place. There needs to be a discriminating criteria or standards that we strive for. Also, can we give the students opportunity for self-assessment? Consider your learning goals and determine one or two criteria that would distinguish exceptional achievement from poor performance. What standards do you have for each criterion?

Teaching/Learning Activities - We have argued throughout the course that active learning is the best way to learn for students, when active learning is defined as “involving students in doing things and thinking about the things they are doing.” As more-expert physics students, we have learned how to perform these activities ourselves, but some students need assistance and motivation to engage in this sort of active reflection and participation with the material. In class this could include group activities, debates, simulations, or dramatizations, to name a few. What sorts of activities will get your students engaged, so that they are “doing” something with the material? Even if you have a lecture component, how can your students be engaged?

We'll end with an example of poorly integrated sections.

Example: A GSI says he wants his students to “learn all the important concepts” and “learn how to think critically about astronomy.” THese are the learning goals. But when we observe his sections, we find that he spends his time lecturing almost exclusively (this is his “teaching/learning activity”). This creates a problem: His teaching/learning activity is not aligned with the learning goals. The students are not getting practice and feedback in learning how to think critically. When the GSI has to write a quiz for the section, he is fine to ask do-you-remember type questions, but can he ask critical thinking questions? If he does, the assessment part of section is properly connected to the learning goals, but not aligned with the teaching/learning activities. However, if he choses not to ask critical thinking questions, the teaching/learning activities are not consistent with the learning goals (though now consistent with the feedback and assessment). This section design is flawed!

To fix the section design and keep the learning goals as they are, he should re-structure his sections to allow more opportunities for students to engage in critical thinking tasks. With the practice and feedback, he can then assess the learning through quizzes, quizzes that can ask both conceptual and critical thinking questions.

Milestone 1

We want to create a “significant learning experience,” and this capstone project will get us doing just that. For the first milestone, you'll tackle five important questions. At the end of this step, you will have a draft for your Design-A-Section.

1. Step 1: What are the situational factors present?
   • What is expected from the students? From the professor? How many students?
   • How does your topic (and, once you have one, the specific activities) fit into the course goals?
   • Are there special challenges for this particular course?
2. Step 2: What do you want students to learn? What are your learning goals?
   • Think expansively, beyond “understand” or “remember”.
   • Suggestion: Try finishing the sentence “At the end of this section, I want my students to be able to …”
   • Suggestion: Use Bloom (Lecture X). Remember, be specific.
3. Step 3: What will the students have to do, to demonstrate that they have achieved the learning goals?
   • What can do you that will help students learn as well as give you a basis for assessing understanding?
   • Go beyond what Duncan (Lecture X) would frown upon (“Does everyone understand?”)
4. Step 4: What has to happen during section for students to do well on the feedback and assessment you have designed?
   • Think creatively for ways of involving students that will support your learning goals.
   • Suggestion: Consider active learning techniques to create richer learning environments (Lectures X and X).
5. Step 5: Determine whether all these components are integrated.
   • The material you come up with in Steps 1-4 should be consistent with and support each other.

- Screening of “A Private Universe”

- Discussion questions:

1. What were the main points of the video? Did they surprise you or have you had similar experiences in section?
   1. Students come with their own ideas and preconceptions of scientific material. They hold on to those preconceptions unless they are clearly addressed in class and shown to be incorrect (and even then some of their preconceptions remain). Hands-on activities can be helpful. Diagrams can be so easily misleading.
2. How does Hammer reframe the problem of misconceptions?
3. What is a conceptual resource? What is an epistemological resource?
4. What are some techniques that Hammer suggests to help students productively use resources (either conceptual or epistemological)?
5. Closer is stronger. Is that wrong? Is it bad if someone holds this belief, since it leads them astray when considering the seasons? How might Hammer's arguments reconcile this conundrum?
6. If you, like the teacher in the video, became aware of these misconceptions your students have, how would you address them?
   1. Make it an opportunity to engage your students in the scientific process, advancing a hypothesis and trying to prove/disprove it, showing how they can determine which resources are applicable to this situation and which are not.
7. How do we incorporate these exercises of metacognitive learning into a course that is already saturated with conceptual material?

1. Complete first part of Design-A-Section
2. Read “The Hidden Curriculum” by Reddish.
3. Final round to taping - ask if this week is ok (no midterm review).