AY 375 Fall 2013: Thirteenth Day Plan

Today we'll discuss the “hidden curriculum” of physics and astronomy courses and work on the Design-A-Section assignment.

1. Physics and astronomy courses seek to do more than teach content. They seek to teach a way of thinking but that is not always what is tested/taught.
2. Student expectations about scientific knowledge and how they are expected to approach scientific material may not be in line with the professor's. Therefore, it's important when designing a course to not take the hidden curriculum for granted, but rather to spell it out (for the professor at least) and use it to drive how the course is structured, assignments, assessment, etc.
3. In order to help change student expectations about scientific thinking and to change how they think about science, it is useful to help them become aware of their own thinking process. Schoenfeld's questions are one way of doing that when students are given problem-solving tasks.
4. A student's self-image can greatly affect their performance. To help students fight personal insecurities, gender threat, and racial threat, we can try to help them foster a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset about intelligence (i.e. intelligence is not an innate gift but something that needs to be developed and worked for).

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?

(20 min) Share in pairs what you have done thus far on your design-a-section assignment. Discuss the topic you've chosen, your learning objectives, and your activity ideas. Give your partner feedback on whether their activities and assessment techniques seem well-matched to their learning objectives.

(10 min) Class discussion and leftover questions, then cover the second milestone.

Second milestone:

1. Draft a set of notes for your mini lecture. Since the lecture component of this project is the one that is most novel to you, we want to make sure we can give you adequate feedback on the structure and organization of your lecture.
2. Choose the activity or activities for the remainder of the 50 minute section and start developing them in greater detail. For example, if you're planning on using a worksheet, start drafting it.
3. As you're developing the lecture and activity, think back to your learning objectives and refine them if necessary.

Discuss the following questions:

1. Class: What does Redish define as the “hidden curriculum”?
2. Small groups: He gives an example for a physics class, which is also appropriate for upper-level astronomy courses. What do you think the hidden curriculum should be for an introductory astronomy course?
3. Class: Redish identifies three stages of “knowing” when discussing student expectations of learning science: a received stage, a subjective stage, and a consciously constructivist stage. Which of these, if any, have you noticed among your students?
4. Small groups, class share: How can we help students transition from thinking of scientific knowledge as received vs. constructed?
5. Class: What did you find most shocking/revealing/surprising from Table 3.2? Do you expect the same trends might exist for your course? Why?
6. Small groups, class share: Redish talks about metacognition and an example of how to foster it in the classroom. Do you think that Schoenfeld's questions could be used in astronomy classrooms to help students become aware and control their thinking processes? Ideas of other ways to foster metacognition?
7. Class: What role do you think showmanship plays in a classroom? Is it superfluous, nice if it happens, necessary, or crucial?
8. Class: How can we help students who feel like they just can't do physics or math (for self-image reasons, including gender threat)?

1. Complete the second milestone of Design-A-Section.
2. Watch a Ted talk by Stuart Firestein on the role of ignorance in science and how it might be incorporated into the classroom: http://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_firestein_the_pursuit_of_ignorance.html
3. Final round of taping continues. This time meeting with Aaron or I is optional. You must fill out the “Second Section Video Recap” worksheet (it's been slightly tweaked) and hand it in next week.