I like to emphasize an interactive classroom centered on active student participation. Labs are an essential part of this, but I also strive to include active learning methods into lecture settings. As a student in practical education classes and a student teacher, I have learned about and implemented several well-researched methods for teaching physics and astronomy. I plan to use methods such as CAE Think-Pair-Share[2][7] for both multiple choice and open ended lecture questions, Cooperative Group Problem Solving[5][6] for more in depth analysis (getting at higher order Blooms verbs[1]), Just-in-Time Teaching[4], and Learning through Inquiry (e.g. [8]).
I also institute an assessment of prior knowledge at the beginning of my courses. Students learn by connecting new concepts to their prior knowledge. This is most effective when an expert (e.g. teacher) also provides a network or structure for the new material to be put into, all grounded by each student’s prior knowledge [3]. To help students assess their own understanding I plan to use student reflections on a weekly basis, these will be assessments that are not turned in, but will be 1-2minutes at the end of class dedicated to describing/conceptualizing/applying the enduring understanding of those class periods. I will assess students’ knowledge through graded homework assignments, with the possibility to redo questions for partial credit. In using these assessments I can also assess my own teaching and alter my methods or course schedule accordingly. I plan to keep improving upon my understanding of the current pedagogical methods, and to always improve my teaching with both feedback and assessment. My course development process involves backward design and a learner-centered classroom. With each class I plan, I think "Do my students need to learn this? Is this an important piece of information?".
I have learned strategies such as the ones described through my involvement in three different arenas of teaching: public outreach, taking education classes, and direct experience in the classroom.
My journey of teaching science to the public started as a freshman undergraduate at California State University, Fresno. Fresno State offers an innovative "Physics Outreach" program. The program is two-fold: a lecture portion in which students learn about how to teach basic physics concepts and a lab portion in which students go to different K-12 classrooms and teach. This program is 50%education majors and 50% physics majors. It helps future K-6 teachers get a handle on teaching physics and it helps physicists gather experience distilling concepts from their field. I took the course once, but participated in the Friday outreach events over all four of my years at Fresno State. This program facilitated my desire to be able to teach what I love, physics, to the public.
These outreach events showed me the stark contrast between standard lectures and an interactive experience. We had 5-year-olds lifting their teacher using a large plank of wood, laying on a classic bed of nails, using weights and a swiveling chair to explore angular momentum, and of course at the end everyone enjoyed some liquid nitrogen ice cream. I’ve had young children ask for my autograph after some of these events. I’ve witnessed firsthand children understanding physics concepts some college students didn’t. This is not at all a reflection of the students, but due to a difference in teaching method, we practiced active (and interactive) learning tailored for our audiences prior knowledge and what level of understanding we wanted to impart (e.g. higher vs lower order thinking on Bloom’s Taxonomy[1]).
As an undergraduate student, all of my college-level teaching experience came from individual and group tutoring. I worked as a physics tutor at the university’s learning center. This job was the first place where I was introduced to pedagogical research. Each semester my participation involved developmental workshops about teaching and tutoring, feedback from the staff of the learning center about my tutoring, personal reflections about my effectiveness, and the studying resources I created for physics tutees were assessed on a regular basis. After my first year as a tutor, I was asked to provide my own assessment of other tutors’ performances.
As a grad student at UW-Madison I have taken "Teaching Science and Engineering: The College Classroom" in the Education Department, "Teaching Physics in the College Classroom" in the Physics Department, "Data Visualization" in the Computer Science Department, and "Scientific Writing" in the Life Science Communications Department. Taking these courses allowed me to gain further insight into how students learn effectively. Due to these courses I have approached teaching with a much more calculated and thoughtful process.
I have had the opportunity at UW-Madison to be a teaching/lab assistant for introductory courses. In one of these courses, I led labs in which (professor created) groups of students explored data to find exoplanets. I mention "professor created" here to highlight how group creation using student surveys helps to create group dynamics where students who are not white and/or cis-het and/or male and/or STEM students feel comfortable in speaking. This hands-on classroom experience taught me much about the importance of collaborative, inquiry based, student-centered learning. There is substantial evidence that collaboration in many forms is an important factor in determining student success. For example, in a classroom setting I’ve seen that implementing think/pair/shares[7] allows students to think through their answers in a smaller, less intimidating setting and subsequently they are more likely to both engage with the question and then share their answer with the class.
At one point in my undergraduate program, I had three different tutoring jobs, all of them wholly different, catering to three separate divisions of the student population: athletes, STEM majors, and students from across campus enrolled in general education physics. This unique experience taught me that there is not an intrinsic difference in these three student subsets, but that the impact of my tutoring was solely determined by my own understanding of how students learn. I began to learn that I had to adapt my methods for every student and their prior knowledge.
Students and teachers are people. Everyone has a different background and a different experience that influences how they teach, how they learn, how they view the world and interact with it. My alma mater, Fresno State, is a primarily undergraduate state university, a Hispanic-Serving Institution, and an Asian American and Pacific Islander-Serving Institution. The campus tutoring center where I worked served a wide variety of students with diverse backgrounds and experiences. As my time tutoring at the campus center taught me, it is always important to assess individuals’ prior knowledge and to take into account students’ experiences, especially experiences different than mine. It has also shown me how essential it is to decentralize European norms and examples within my teaching. I strive to create a space in and outside of the classroom where students feel safe and valued.
Students who collaborate on work within a student affinity group engage more with the concepts and are more likely to succeed and stay within the field. To help collaboration between students of affinity groups, we need to create or facilitate the use of safe spaces. Some examples include: having a dedicated room for physics or astronomy undergraduates where they can work on classwork together; hosting office hours in a student space or a coffee shop as opposed to my office; appropriate intervention of any microaggressions within class or outside of class; creating collaborative lab/lecture groups where an affinity group would not be the minority.
During my time at UW-Madison, we, as graduate students, created a department-wide group called Madison Astronomers Promoting Lasting Equity in which we met once a month to discuss a DEI paper. The discussions involve creating active goals for how to improve equity within the department as informed by the papers. I have also been, since 2016, a member of an organization (Marginalized Identities of Wisconsin Strengthening Astronomy) dedicated to building professional contacts among those who identify as belonging to a marginalized group within astronomy. Finally, I am a member of Women in STEM and Education Research, dedicated to mentoring undergraduate women. These organizational ties reflect my deep, personal commitment to cultural competence, equity, and social justice within my discipline, and in the Academy as a whole.
[1]B. S. Bloom. “Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain." New York: David McKay Co Inc., 1956.
[2]Rica Sirbaugh French and Edward Prather. “Uncovering the unknown unknowns of peer instruction questions." In Physics Education Research Conference 2018, PER Conference, Washington, DC, August1-2 2018.
[3]Telle Hailikari, Nina Katajavuori, and Sari Lindblom-Ylänne. “The relevance of prior knowledge in learning and instructional design.” American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 72:113, 2008.
[4]R.R. Hake. “Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods: A six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses. American Journal of Physics." 66:64–74, 1998.
[5]P. Heller, R. Keith, and S. Anderson. “Teaching problem solving through cooperative grouping. part 1: Group versus individual problem solving. American Journal of Physics." 60(7):627–636, 1992.
[6]P. Heller and M. Hollabaugh. “Teaching problem solving through cooperative grouping. part 2:Designing problems and structuring groups. American Journal of Physics." 60(7):637–644, 1992.
[7]F. Lyman. “The responsive classroom discussion. In A. S. Anderson (Ed.)." Mainstreaming Digest (pp.109-113), 1981.
[8]Carl J. Wenning. “The levels of inquiry model of teaching science." J. Phys. Tchr. Educ. Online,6(2), 2011