AY 375 Fall 2013: Fourteenth Day Plan

Today we'll discuss

1. aa
2. bb

Have people pair up and share their lecture notes, section activity ideas, and questions with each other. Instructors will roam around and offer suggestions and comments.

Wrap up with instructors reminding everyone what happens in two weeks. 15 minute presentations which include statement of learning objectives and topic, 5-7 minute mini lecture, description of the activities you plan to do in section for the remainder of your 50 minutes. Students should hand in lesson plan, lecture notes, and any materials accompanying their planned activities.

Emphasize that learning objectives should be precise and that your lesson plan should refer back to these objectives.

Open the floor (path?) 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?

Francesca's notes from the talk:

1. The focus of science is what remains to be done. “Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.”
2. Models of science: puzzle, onion, iceberg > all take science to be a body of knowledge we're chipping away it, which slowly decreases with time
3. Question propagation: Knowledge generates ignorance. “Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating 10 more.” “Knowledge is a large subject. Ignorance is even larger.”
4. Science/scientists advance by learning to ask better/deeper questions, refining ignorance, going after higher-level ignorance.
5. “You get what you screen for.” The way science is taught is turning students away from science by making it more about facts than curiosity.
6. Evaluation vs. weeding: instead of assessing via regurgitation, we could try giving longer projects, involving feedback and editing, and our tests could include asking students not just to spout what they know but to formulate the next questions

Class will not meet next week. Prepare for Design-A-Section presentations, which will be given the next time we meet.