Taking over PHY 111/112 from Todd Timberlake

In my first year teaching at Berry, I was fortunate to inherit some useful active learning materials from Todd Timberlake for PHY 111/112, which is the algebra-based physics intro sequence taken mainly by pre-med and pre-vet students at Berry.

I used two main active learning techniques in the course, both continued from Todd's methods. The first required the students to take online reading quizzes to ensure that they came to class prepared. These were due at 8:00am the morning of each class. This is a form of "Just-in-Time Teaching", in that (in theory) looking at the responses to the students' quizzes could enable me to adjust the lecture's content in response to students' difficulties.

The second technique was to pose conceptual questions to the students during class, interspersed with mini-lectures, which the students answered using electronic "clickers". After answering individually, the students discussed the question in small groups and had an opportunity to revise their answer. This is an example of "Peer Instruction", popularized in physics instruction by Eric Mazur at Harvard.

I think the techniques benefited the students, but my implementation can definitely be improved for this coming year. During the first semester, my online quiz questions were too difficult (on average), leading to frustration by some students who were doing the reading but not getting the online quiz questions. I mostly corrected that during second semester, with better results. Also, with my long commute to Berry, I wasn't able to compile students' responses to online quizzes before class and use them to modify the emphasis in class. This year, I will have the questions due at 9:00pm the night before class. I also may use the "Interactive Learning Toolkit" software available from Mazur's website, rather than Berry's VikingWeb courseware. (VikingWeb unfortunately will not automatically compile question-by-question response data, and it takes ~45 minutes to do by hand for a class of 40 students.)

For the Peer Instruction, during the first semester, I often skipped the group discussion portion of the technique in an effort to cover more material in the class. I've learned since that this is the most important part of the technique. I corrected this during the second semester. However, there were other specific aspects of my technique that were not as effective as they could be, as I learned last week at the AAPT Workshop for New Physics Faculty (a very useful workshop). For example, it's been found that a time-limited period in which *pairs* of students attempt to "convince each other that they are correct" is much more effective than a more open-ended general discussion among three or four students, as I'd been doing.
There are other specific changes I'm going to make based on recommendations of the workshop as well.

On the whole, I think the Workshop, along with my experience last year, has motivated me to further change how I view my role as professor from "comprehensively explaining" in class to "creating a highly-functioning, thought-provoking environment, covering the most challenging parts of the material with expert guidance". I'm going to concentrate on improving my implementation of the Just-in-Time-Teaching and Peer Instruction this coming year, but will also incorporate some of the principles of Interactive Lecture Demonstrations in my classroom demonstrations.