Modern Physics (PHY 307) and Thermal Physics (PHY 410)

Also in my first year at Berry, I taught two upper level classes -- Modern Physics in Fall 2008 and Thermal Physics in Spring 2009. For the most part I taught these as lecture courses, as I was preparing both classes for the first time, and was not familiar enough with Active Learning techniques to prepare classes in that way. The only exceptions were that I did give online quizzes to ensure that students did the reading before class, and (since the classes had 7-8 students in them) asked questions of the students frequently in lecture to keep them engaged.

The students responded fairly positively to the Modern Physics class, though a number did say class time could have been used more effectively. Hopefully by incorporating some active learning techniques, class time activities will be more varied and at the same time more focused on students' difficulties. I haven't yet gotten course evaluations for the Thermal Physics course.

For this coming year, I'm teaching Modern Physics again, as well as a new Solid-State Physics course in the spring. Having read Todd's post about the success he had with worksheet activities in his Quantum Mechanics course (PHY 420), I plan to design and incorporate in-class worksheets to supplement (or replace) some of the lectures in both courses. Also, in the Modern Physics course, I can use my experience from last year to choose the lecture coverage more carefully to address the concepts students find most challenging.

There were some nice computer visualization-based materials described at the AAPT New Faculty Workshop last week, including Easy Java Simulations (EJS) and some tutorials on quantum mechanics (developed by Chandralekha Singh at the University of Pittsburgh) which make use of EJS. A couple of students from Modern Physics recommended more use of visualization in their course evaluations, so I plan to incorporate that. I'll also try to create (or borrow) some EJS simulations for solid-state physics.

Also at the New Faculty Workshop, a program for teaching upper-level physics at Oregon State, called "Paradigms in Physics", was described. Having looked at the website, there are some nice ideas for in-class activities which are useful for upper-level courses.

Finally, I'm aiming to create a lab portion of the Modern Physics course for Fall 2010; our department ordered equipment to use for those labs this summer. I plan to do in-class demo's using this equipment this fall. I want to use the "learning cycle" sequence (predict-observe-describe-explain) associated with the Interactive Lecture Demonstrations method as much as possible for these demos, to make sure that students confront their expectations/preconceptions and are engaged by the demos.