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

Teaching Physics 495 (UCLA's TA Training course) was extremely challenging this year. Students and teachers became frustrated with the "jargon" often associated with student centered teaching ("Think-Pair-Share","wait time","goal-oriented"). While I feel that this vocabulary is crucial to a complete understanding of good pedagogy, it felt contrived to many of the students in our class who had not encountered it before.

One improvement that was suggested by our students was to rearrange our syllabus. Many of them taught their first class before the first day of TA Training. They wanted us to start out with the "nuts and bolts" of lesson planning, grading, and content. Later in the course, once they master the basics, they would be ready to hear about pedagogical theory.

Many of the students in our class are actually excellent teachers already, despite having little to no formal training. One limitation for our teachers is the structure of our labs and discussion sections. For example, our discussion sections are non-mandatory, and are usually only 1-hr sessions. Many TA's (myself included) use this precious time to re-lecture and/or provide lecture material in a new way. There is very little time for things like "think pair share" questions, which can take ~10 minutes a piece. We also cannot assign homework for discussion sections, which makes it hard to have continuity between weeks. The labs, on the other hand, tend to be very long and complicated. Much of the TA's time is therefore taken up in the explanation of the mechanisms of the lab. Most of the questions asked during lab are about the operation of the lab equipment, and not about the content.

Finally, some of our students who enjoyed the training course and wanted to use our methods in their classes found themselves blocked by their professors. It became a point of contention between the student and the professor in some cases, and that's not what we want to see. It can be difficult to encourage a professor who has been teaching the same way for 20+ years to change their methods, but if the argument is made gently and coherently, it can be worth the effort.