AY 375 - Fall 2013: Third Day Lesson Plan

Today's class will be used to discuss people's first sections, various teaching and lecturing styles, and some course logistics.

1. It is easier to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of others than of ourselves, so hopefully evaluating others' teaching will allow us to better evaluate ourselves.
2. No teacher is perfect. There is always room to grow and learn.
3. In planning your sections, put yourself in the shoes of your students and ask whether you would have been engaged in the activities you've developed. Would a demo have been more interesting if it was presented before or after it was explained? Would the group work activities push you to working with other students or would you have been able/tempted to do the work by yourself?

Remind them that this is something we intend to do every week and that everyone should come prepared to share about how their previous sections went.

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?

Write down on wiki when you're teaching section.

Students were required to watch (1) a lecture from Alex Filippenko's C10 (Introductory to Astronomy) lectures on white dwarfs, binaries, and introduction to supernova, and (2) a freshman physics lecture from Walter Lewin at MIT on the Doppler effect. The instructors provided a worksheet to be filled out. Instructors will check to make sure this assignment has been completed.

Class discussion:

• General impression of the two lectures?
• Likes and Dislikes?
• What techniques and elements of style did you find engaging?
• Thinking about your experience as a student, what are some more techniques that were helpful and not helpful (and why).

Notes on videos:

• Both have quirky personalities, use a fair amount of humor > element of style which can help keep students interested
• Both intersperse demos and real-science examples throughout lectures > helps keep students engaged although it's unclear whether they always help to deepen students' understanding of the material

Lewin

• Does not provide recap at beginning of lecture or summary at the end.
• Generally very good board work (amazing diagrams) but sometimes he wanders in terms of where on the board he writes.
• At one point, a demo clearly seems to fail and he just says “I tried”. In some cases, it may be in the best interest of time to abandon a demo that is not working. However, pre-testing of demos can help mitigate their possible failure (for example, if he'd noticed the Doppler effect demo was difficult to hear, he could have maybe taped it, and played back the sound slowed down so that it would be more obvious how the sound changed as the pipe was moving towards and away from the audience).
• Often uses demos or observations as examples of what he has just explained. In some cases, it might be nice to use the demos to engender questions that are then answered in the lecture.
• At one point he seems to create possible misconception that Doppler effect for sound and EM waves are somewhat different; he seems to say the Doppler effect only works if the source is moving but not the receiver, while for EM waves it doesn't matter.
• Does not take questions from class and he asks very few questions, so in-class assessment of student learning doesn't happen.

Filippenko

• Takes questions from students and asks think-pair-share questions to do some in-class assessment.
• Does recap at beginning of lecture, but it is maybe a little long (5 min).
• Expresses a lot of personal excitement
• Shows many pretty pictures sometimes but without enough explanation of what they are (no scales, descriptions on slides either)
• Openly admits analogy is not that great but gives it anyway (and with great confidence).
• Small demos hard to see on the video and from the back of the class.

Takeaways:

1. Look at strengths and weaknesses of others so that we can better evaluate ourselves. Did you find ways of assessing your students' learning? How did you engage your students with the material (style: humor, quirkiness, techniques: using demos or data to elicit questions)? Do your activities relate to your learning objectives?
2. These people have won awards, and even they make mistakes. No one is perfect. There is always room to grow and learn. Be patient with yourself as a teacher.
3. In planning and evaluating your teaching, it can be helpful to put yourself in the shoes of your students. Would have enjoyed/been engaged with what was happening in section? Just keep in mind that students also learn in different ways and so diversifying your teaching techniques is good.

Use this to transition to …

Talk about Ay375 assignments in general, particularly teaching logs and the writing assignments.

Now that sections have started, we will be devoting more time to allowing you to share your experiences with each other. This course is meant to help you improve as section leaders, and you will do that by sharing your successes and failures with each other. No amount of pedagogy literature can magically turn you into great teachers. You will become teachers by being in the classroom and sharing those experiences with each other.

Instructors: Powerpoint of some of the Ay375 assignments. When discussing extended teaching logs, mention that those teaching lab courses can talk to us if they have ideas for making these assignment topics more useful.

All this information can be found near the top of the Course Wiki.

1. Begin thinking about the longer teaching log prompts. You might start making some notes on the various topics to help you construct your longer entries.
2. Figure out who's section you'll be visiting between 9/12 and 9/18.