AY 375 Fall 2013: Eighth Day Plan

Today we'll be discussing effective demos, mid-semester evaluations, and begin our board work exercises.

1. Mid-semester evaluations are a great way to get a high density of feedback from your students, with plenty of time to implement their comments in your section.

First have students discuss in pairs how section went (5 min).

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?

(10 min) Question to the class: Have people tried administering demos in their classes? What sorts of things did you do? How effective do you think they were? What are the ups and downs of using demos? (10 min) The instructors will spend some time talking about how to effectively run demos and share some of the better demos that are available to them.

• Demo basics:
  • Demos are a great addition to a standard/dry worksheet.
  • Sometimes they actually do help elucidate concepts and students like doing “hands-on” experiments (this is a science class!).
  • As always, the EBRB is a great resource and has a page devoted to demos.
  • In addition, on a given topic's page in the EBRB, there should be listed any relevant demos.

• What makes a good demo?
  • Illustrating difficult physical concept(s)
  • Interactive: students can participate
  • A springboard to new topics
  • Straightforward: minimal risk of failure
  • Demo actually illustrates concept in question

• When demos go wrong:
  • Demos can and sometimes do FAIL!
  • Sometimes, especially in astronomy, they can confuse students more than help them or oversimplify a concept.
  • Materials may be missing or broken, so CHECK IN ADVANCE!

• Some of our favorite demos:
  • Remind everyone that most are written up in the EBRB and on the Resources handout (and wiki page)
  • Do bolded ones?
  • Keep going until a couple minutes before this chunk of class is supposed to be done
  1. Arc lamps: Put high voltage through tubes of gas and look through diffraction gratings to see spectral lines. On the EBRB Light Blackbodies Spectral Lines and the Doppler Effect page, “under Line spectroscopy and arc lamp activities”.
     • C10 already did this, this year.. Check if useful to describe for 10…?
     • Head GSIs will train GSIs
     • Students like this one
     • Make sure the stuff is there if your section is early in the day.
     • Test it yourself and make sure you can see lines so you can help your students better.
  2. Warping of Spacetime: A 2D analogy using stretchy black fabric and balls/weights. No worksheets exist in the EBRB for this one, but feel free to make one! We might do this one in Ay 300 later in the semester.
  3. Celestial sphere, phases of the moon, seasons, orbits: Styrofoam balls, a lamp or flashlight, people getting up and moving around. Many worksheets go with these kinds of demos and can be found on the Demos page of the EBRB or on the Celestial Sphere, Gravity and Orbits, and Earth/Moon/Sun System pages of the EBRB.
     1. Retrograde motion (Discuss pitfalls)
     2. Day & night on Earth (circle up around a lamp and groups of 3)
     3. Lunar phases (balls on a sticks around a lamp and groups of 3)
     4. Seasons (circle up around a lamp)
     5. Lunar rotation and orbit (i.e. tidal locking) (one person orbits another with the Moon's arms outstretched)
  4. Parallax with your finger (very simple, “close one eye then the other” kind of thing)
  5. Doppler shift of sound (whirling a buzzer on a string)
  6. Class H-R diagram (too long to do in Ay 300)
  7. Stating in words, stating in math, drawing, and acting out Kepler's and/or Newton's Laws (can be done with a worksheet, or just have students take notes as each group presents their law) (too long to do in Ay 300)
  8. Donut/bagel on a string (though I'm sure profs will do it in class)
  9. Jumping on a chair with balls being thrown (though I'm sure profs will do it in class)
  10. (Rayleigh) Scattering of Light: Fill a fish tank with water and a couple drops of milk and shine a flashlight through it to show scattering of blue light and transmission of red light. On the EBRB Light Blackbodies Spectral Lines and the Doppler Effect page there's a worksheet called “Emission, Absorption, Scattering, and Nebulae” and one called “Scattering Demo.”
  11. Planetary Nebulae (and Limb Brightening and Optical Depth): use a Hoberman sphere covered in Christmas lights to show how spherical radiating clouds can appear ring-like. On the EBRB's Stellar Evolution page, there's a worksheet called 'Limb Brightening: “Hoberman Planetary Nebula” Demo.'
  • Physics has some, but it's kind of a pain to check them out, but some are good for section and some are good for full lecture.

• These questions should cover things you want feedback on. Be explicit about what you want to know whenever possible.
• There should be room for some free response (e.g., if there's anything else not addressed here…)
• You should make sure you take some time to go over the results in a later session.
  • If you have quantitative questions, this might include averages, or distributions.
• You should make sure they are able to fill them out anonymously.

• NOTE: The Ay 375 eval is a little bit on the long side; we did this purposely since Ay 375 is such an amorphous class and should be tailored to what its students are interested in.
• Discuss the wisdom from past GSIs and Slater & Adams chapter 9:
  • Assigning a combination of “Informal Written Response” and “Check-box Questionaire”.
  • In addition, we've done two types of “Observation by a Critical Friend”, both a peer visit and a videotape.
  • Use different colored highlighters for positive and negative comments that merit further review.
  • Four categories of “course difficulties”:
    1. simple fixes
    2. fixes for next semester
    3. offsetting concerns
    4. issues without remedy
• Why do we do mid-semester evals
  • There is a department wide, official end of semester eval, but by then it's too late to fix things for your current students.
  • The point of student feedback at mid-semester is to allow you to adjust your section and teaching style as necessary to match your current students' demands.
  • However, take the responses with a grain of salt; Ay 10 student don't always know what's best for them!
• Mid-semester eval basics
  • They should be done about half-way through the semester (try to avoid right before or after an exam – this usually skews your results!); halfway through the semester is one week from today.
  • They should be anonymous (however you might want to ask for their section number so you can compare your multiple sections).
  • Sometimes this is done during the last 10 mins of a section, but you get less accurate responses this way since many students will rush through it just to leave early.
  • Consider doing it in the middle of section (maybe right after your initial lecture review/Q&A session).
  • The GSI will usually step out of the room during this time or at least turn their back to the class.
  • Have a student collect all of the evals and put them in an envelope. DO NOT open the envelope until way later (i.e. after you've left Evans and there are no students around you at all).
• Always be sure to give students way more than enough room to write. You don't want them to limit responses simply because they feel they don't have enough room. You might even consider printing the evals one-sided and make a note at the beginning of the eval saying that if the student needs more room to write that they should feel free to use the back of the page.
• Here's a ranked list of general topics that might be found on an eval (the last three are of the least importance by far with the last one being almost not worth putting on the list):
  1. Section structure (lecture review, Q&A, worksheets, demos, group work, etc.)
  2. GSI's skills (board skills, student interaction skills, lecture skills, etc.)
  3. Section content (which topics are covered and how long is spent on each)
  4. Stuff besides section or lecture (i.e. star parties you're at, your TALC, office hours, etc.)
  5. Course content (which topics are covered and how long is spent on each)
  6. Course structure (order of topics, demos during lecture, audience participation during lecture, grading, etc.)
  7. Prof's skills (board skills, student interaction skills, lecture skills, etc.)
• Types of questions:
  • Open ended (good because they allow students to discuss the things they feel most strongly about and students shouldn't feel constrained about what they can and cannot comment on). E.g.:
    1. Describe three things you like about this section.
    2. What does your GSI need to do less of in section?
    3. Put any additional comments.
  • Quick answer (very directed or short answer questions are good for students who don't want/can't write a lot and the answers can sometimes give a more quantitative evaluation than the free response questions). E.g.:
    1. On a scale of 1-5 (5 being great, 1 being horrible) rank the following.
    2. Give the section a letter grade.
    3. Circle MORE, LESS, or THE SAME for the amount of time (relative to the semester so far) we should spend on each item.
  • Humorous (but still informative). E.g.:
    1. Draw a face that best describes how you feel about this class.
  • Humorous (just for fun). E.g.:
    1. Make up an hilarious nickname for your GSI.
  • Humorous and/or totally random questions are good in moderation, they can break up the seriousness of the eval and show off your personality.
  • Put a variety of types of questions so that all types of students can give accurate feedback and you can get both qualitative and quasi-quantitative results.
• After the eval is filled out:
  • It's a good idea to read through them all twice: once to just read every answer and the second time to see if you can spot some trends and consistencies (based on the assumption that if a majority of students agrees on something, then it might actually be a valid point or an accurate assessment).

• We will ask you to compile a short summary report that includes:
  1. consistent comments
  2. averages/standard deviations/histograms for any quantitative questions
  3. any hilarious, unfairly mean, or really thoughtful comments
  4. a personal assessment of what you've learned and what you'll change (and when)
• Food for thought: In addition to turning it in to us for this class, the summary report could be sent to the Head GSI and/or prof (as opposed to having them read all of the evals). Most professors, however, do not request reports or copies, or even require that you pass out midsemester evaluations.
• Arguably the most important part of evals is responding to the criticisms (both positive and negative) publicly in front of the class and addressing at least some of their concerns (Slater & Adams call this 'closing the loop').
• Different profs have different opinions of students responses on the evals: some ignore them completely and assume that the students have no idea what's best for them, some ignore them because the prof teaches the way they teach and that's that and it won't change, and some actually read through them (or at least read their GSIs' summaries of the evals).
• Sample ones on the EBRB.
• Handout the eval handout?

This activity will be broken up over this class and the next class.

Start by reminding the students the point of this exercise:

This activity will be a little different than the activity we did at the beginning of the semester.

Randomly select someone to go to the board and answer a question from their students. The instructors will not tell you the question in advance to best simulate what you are experiencing in section and in midterm reviews. Each person will have around five minutes at the board. Feedback will be given after each.

1. Your third extended teaching log is due next week. Bring in a hard copy or email the copy to us by next Wednesday.
2. Next Wednesday is the utmost latest time you can turn in your section video taping worksheet.
3. We will be checking your smaller “teaching logs” next week, so bring in your lesson plans.