Teaching College Physics Wrap-up

Lessons from the first year of the revised course:

1. lay off the pedagogical jargon when possible- students find it irritating
2.  cover nuts and bolts of teaching ASAP
3. revise lab/discussion section structure?
4. Encourage TA-Professor synergy

Week 1 - How did it go?

Today was our first meeting for the Physics 495 class; Teaching College Physics. We went over some housekeeping items, discussed the reading, and ran a debate about active learning and lecturing in a Physics classroom.

Weeks 3 and 4 - Active Learning

Weeks 3 and 4 will cover active learning techniques such as lecture tutorials and think-pair-share questions. We want to make sure that we are giving our TAs "healthy alternatives" to straight lecturing. By supplying a variety of teaching methods, we can ensure that all TAs will find a technique suited to their personal teaching style. I describe below the lesson plan, which is loosely based on the CAE workshop: Center for Astronomy Education: Improving the College Introductory Astronomy and Space Science General Education Course Through Active Engagement: A Tier I (Introductory) Workshop

Weeks 1 and 2

We are starting now to put together a more detailed syllabus for our Teaching College Physics course in the fall. It will be a 10-week course (not enough, I know) which will meet once a week for 2 hours. In addition, we will host once a week "micro teaching sessions" which each student will be required to attend at least twice (once to watch, once to teach).

There will be a reading assignment every week, and we will discuss that reading assignment during the first ~30 minutes of every class.

Week 1 will be a motivation for the course as a whole, and Week 2 will cover the student perspective and different learning techniques.

To see how Week 1 went, click here!

Teaching College Physics - Syllabus

I wanted to share with the online community the syllabus we've come up with for our Physics 495 course ("Teaching College Physics"). It's still somewhat a work in progress, and I will certainly post updates about how each class goes once the academic year begins. But here are the topics we plan to cover in our 10 week course (45 students total, 3 TAs):

Creating a New Teacher Training Course

In the UCLA Physics and Astronomy Department, we require all incoming first year students to take a course called Physics 495 - Teaching College Physics. This course is meant to give new graduate students a crash course in teaching before their first days in front of a class of students. We are currently in the process of overhauling the class and creating a new syllabus from scratch. The goal is to implement interactive teaching techniques that promote active learning, discussion, and debate. We hope that the first year grads taking the class will pass that experience down to the undergraduate students they end up teaching.