Tag Archives: teaching techniques
A first-day AMA
To begin building my own credibility (and that of my TA) in the classroom this semester, we spent 15 minutes hosting an “Ask Us Anything” (as opposed to AMA==Ask Me Anything; inspired by Making the Most of Your First Day of Class). To avoid spending too much time having students write their questions on cards, […]
Why two-stage exams? UBC-centric evidence
At the 2016 CTLT Summer Institute, I co-facilitated the session on Assessment and Evaluation. Using the opportunity to advertise two-stage exams, I provided evidence for three main points: Students learn from them Students participate meaningfully Students like them The research I used to back these is all home-grown at UBC (of course, this isn’t an exhaustive […]
Paired teaching for faculty professional development in teaching
(In this post, I collect presentation materials related to my project studying paired teaching.) In my department, we’ve been pairing faculty together to teach courses. The main goal is to provide these faculty opportunity to develop their teaching. My job is to figure out: Are they learning about teaching? The short answer is: Yes, they are. […]
Participate in your own Learning Catalytics polls
Last term, instead of the UBC-standard iClickers, we used Learning Catalytics as our personal response system in the classroom. Joss Ives has detailed his workflow with the system, which involved three different devices (one to run the lecture slides, one to project the student view of Catalytics, and one to run the instructor side of […]
Developing my spielraum
This semester is my first as an instructor. Although I have a lot of experience as a Teaching Assistant in university physics classrooms, and even some (brief and low-responsibility) experience lecturing in front of a large class, being in full control of an entire classroom of students for the duration of a semester is an entirely […]
Thoughts towards maintaining a classroom culture
As I’m gearing up for the responsibility of teaching (or, more accurately, facilitating the learning of) 250 bright-eyed undergraduate university students, I’ve been consciously collecting wisdom that is applicable in the classroom. Some of these tips have already been useful in my preparation, and some will be useful in how I organize my work during […]
A guide to being a lecture TA
A new role for TAs In the flipped classrooms of reformed large enrolment first-year physics courses, as instantiated in Physics 100 and other courses at UBC, much of the typical monologue has been replaced with clicker questions and worksheets, making room for students to think and work with peers and the instructor and rendering the term […]
What TAs don’t realize they can do to help students in the classroom
Recently, I gave a talk to graduate students about a physics education project I worked on with Ido Roll. (Slides embedded in Appendix I below.) Briefly, the idea for the project was to evaluate which teaching assistant (TA) behaviours could be used to predict student engagement and learning in a first-year physics lab. Our main result was […]
From strings to science education 