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.




One challenge we face this year is that our incoming first-year class is made up of 45 students (3 from Astronomy and 42 from Physics). With three TAs for the class, it would be possible to split the students in to 3 groups of 15, which is much more manageable. However, the type of activities we would like to incorporate have been known to work with groups as large as 500!

Teaching Techniques:
Many of these teaching techniques are drawn from training given to TAs from the UCLA Office of Instructional Development (OID), as well as teaching workshops such as those given by the Center for Astronomy Education (CAE)

1. Think-Pair-Share
• Procedure - present a multiple choice question to the class. Ask the students to vote independently on what they think the answer is either by holding up a colored card or a number. Review the answers. If most (>80%) of the group got the question correct, move on. If most got the question wrong, ask if the students need any clarifications on the phrasing of the question and/or answers. If about half the class is right and half is wrong, ask each student to pick a partner, and convince their partner that their answer is correct. This way, the students will have to defend their choice. Ideally, the person with the correct answer will be able to convince the person with the wrong answer to change their response. In some cases, two partners who both start out with the wrong answer arrive at the correct answer through conversation and debate. After a couple of minutes, ask the students to vote again. Most students should now be showing the correct answer. 
2. Lecture Tutorials
• Procedure - lecture for a short amount of time in order to cover the necessary material for the class. Hand out activity sheets with a set of short straightforward questions. Have the students work in groups of 2-3 to answer these questions quickly. TA should walk through the classroom and answer any questions that might come up and to keep students on task. After a given length of time, stop the students (wherever they are), and review the materials. If students are getting questions wrong and panicking, guide them to your office hours. 
• Worksheets - these should reinforce the MAIN points of the class THAT DAY. Successful worksheets do not use memorization tests like "fill in the blank," rather, they test the understanding of the concept using ranking tasks. Click here to download an example from a CAE workshop. Note that the most important part of this worksheet is that it asks the student to defend their ranking - not just to write down random numbers or guess.
3. Student Debate
• This is a complex but interesting and fun way to get students to passionately engage with the material. The complexity lies in finding appropriate debate material in a field which is largely about facts and numbers. However, there are several examples out there. In a recent workshop on teaching astronomy through role-playing and debate, a group of graduate students and researchers pretended to be members of a lower-level astronomy class and participated in a debate about the demotion of the Pluto. We took on the roles of leading researchers of the time and played out several of the real life debates which took place. Each "student" had a name card in front of them with a brief description of their character and beliefs. In practice, a student in a classroom would take this information home and perhaps do some extra background research to familiarize themselves with the material. Another example from a class with Jean Luc Margot at UCLA was a debate about planet formation; core accretion vs. gravitational instability. The point of a debate is not to arrive at a final conclusion, even if one was reached in real life. The point of the debate is to have the students identify with a point of view, to get a foothold with the material even if it is not familiar to them.
4. Reaction to a Video
• This can be a part of the lecture part of the class, but it is important to engage those students who may be more visual learners. By showing part of a video, then asking the students to vote to make predictions about what will happen in the video based on what they've learned in class, you are targeting those students who may not be as interested in group work or filling out activity sheets. 

In the end, we will want to use a variety of teaching methods, including but not limited to the examples listed above. In this blog, I will keep track of the activities we may develop for the class, the syllabus, and eventually, the successes and failures we will encounter in implementing this new material in our Physics 495 course.

For more information on active learning, click here!