Learning...

I'm in a class from the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, a session on flipping the classroom. For the second session, they did a lovely job of identifying a couple of very short, snappy discussions of valuable elements of a flipped classroom: just in time teaching and peer instruction. They asked us to prepare to teach the rest of the class about a topic we had been assigned (in preparation for a jigsaw, I suppose) and pose some questions before class - putting us in the position of students in a flipped classroom.

From the instructor's perspective, I've been learning a lot over the last sessions, and in preparation for the next couple of sessions. On one hand, I've been learning a lot about just in time teaching from a practitioner's perspective - the importance of posing questions that are central to the learning goals (it's easy to ask the wrong question...), how the answers to the questions can dominate the shape of the classroom session, and how if the question is good it can help illuminate misconceptions or areas that aren't clear and help pave the way for learning that feels relevant (I hope, this is from my perspective and not from the student's perspective).

We've been talking about how the fact that there is such a huge range in galaxy luminosities (over a factor of 10 million range in luminosity, or energy emitted by the galaxy) coupled with the huge range in distances to galaxies leads to the inevitable conclusion that in an image such as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (part of this is shown on the left), almost all the galaxies you see are among the brightest galaxies; there are many many thousands or millions of galaxies that should be in the image that are so faint that they are not detected, even in the deepest optical image ever taken. The pre-class activity was designed to work through an example of this effect, and we discussed this in class in response to that pre-class activity; we also have a homework designed to help towards internalizing this concept (and give the students a chance to use real data to determine and explore some of the relationships they are learning about).

This is encouraging - what is less encouraging is that I *still* talk too much in class, and I am becoming concerned that my approach to the course logical flow (which I took for what I thought were good reasons) may be making it harder for the students to navigate the course, because I've jumped around the book a lot (I wanted a galaxy evolution first approach, not a Milky Way first approach; perhaps more on this in a later post). I made an attempt to document better the flow of the course, but I feel like there is more I can do but I've not quite put my finger on it yet.

Engagement

Something wonderful happened in class. I am not sure why; perhaps it's because they've been thinking about the properties and motions of stars in galaxies for almost three weeks now, perhaps it's because we've explored the issue in depth using both Sparke and Gallagher (the very good course text) and Blanton and Moustakas (a splendid review). A contributing factor may be that I sat in a different spot, not near the board (we all sit around a conference table, and usually they're at the other end and I'm near the board, I moved to be away from the board and amongst them). It is goofy that sitting in a different spot might help change the atmosphere, but I think it might have? I also talked a lot less than usual, by design. I'm trying to talk as little as possible, but boy, I'm a blabbermouth.

The responses to the pre-class questions were excellent, and I had the chance to change what I thought we'd do in class to adapt to those questions - we talked about how to read papers for a while. Then we spent a good deal of time on a pre-class question that was done a little less well (perhaps because it was trying to connect concepts from different class sessions together, I think also because I worded it poorly), and in that activities students took the initiative, took risks by attempting unfamiliar problems, built on each others' answers, managed to synthesize concepts from different class sessions, and checked on their answers themselves (self-correcting).

NGC 5866, a lenticular galaxy (HST/NASA/ESA).

Then, we talked about lenticular galaxies. If you want to start a fight in a room full of astronomers who study galaxies, just ask one of them to tell you how lenticular galaxies form, stand back and watch the fireworks. They share a number of properties with spiral galaxies and elliptical galaxies, and I won't get into the details for fear of starting a fight about how they form.

Many of them identified in their responses to the pre-questions that they weren't sure how they formed, so we talked about it. How glorious it was! Someone said, 'well, they're faded spiral galaxies.' And someone else countered, 'but they've got larger bulges than spirals, they can't be faded spirals!' They were citing evidence, putting facts together, presenting contradictions, connecting them to other galaxy types, challenging (justifiably) the evidence cited by each other (and myself), posing to first order all the important questions of lenticular galaxy research. Everyone spoke today, some more than others, but everyone spoke.

Could well be the best teaching experience I've ever had. Makes the pain of preparing a flipped class feel like it's totally worth it.

Dealing with review papers

We've been studying the properties of galaxies, and the relationship between the distributions of stars (and dark matter) and the motions of those stars for a couple of weeks now. I assigned a pre-reading of half of a very good review paper (the Physical Properties and Environments of Nearby Galaxies) discussing this issue, knowing that this was a challenging pre-read (long, lots of information) but it is really good stuff, so I went with it anyway.

All students took longer than I had hoped for the pre-reading, and some of them took a factor of 5 longer than I hoped to read it. We talked about strategies for reading papers, and this is what they came up with (in no profound order):

• Lots of practice helps in reading papers, getting used to the format, jargon, parts you can skip, etc.
• Print out the paper, it's a lot easier than having it on the screen (and you can take notes/highlight)
• Get an idea of the overview of the paper via abstract and section headings
• figures are usually important
• Skip technical details/data, etc; you can pick it up later
• know what you're looking for in advance (it can even allow you to search for keywords, etc)
• make marginal notes

For non-native English speakers, we discussed also the importance of regular reading of non-technical literature and getting up to speed with jargon by reading simpler background material first.

Remote teaching

I had a trip to California last week for a workshop that I really had to go to. Knowing how hard it is to reschedule a class in a way that isn't unfair to at least someone, I decided to try an experiment - remote teaching.

We, and where I visited, have Polycom systems. So the thought was to use the polycom, me teaching from the conference room in California (which had a whiteboard, etc), and the students back in Michigan in our small conference room. We did two classes this way, both quite discussion orientated.

Well... it actually worked pretty well. Feedback was overall positive (I am likely to have to travel again for one class, and in a vote 8/10 students preferred us trying to polycom for the class I'd miss owing to travel rather than trying to reschedule). The interaction with the students was definitely less rich, and I was a lot less connected with the 'vibe' of the room, and couldn't listen easily into conversations to find out if things were on the right track or if there were problems/misconceptions, etc. But because the Polycom has such good sound and picture quality, and can zoom/pan, I was able to facilitate on the whiteboard in California, and the students could see that record reasonably clearly. I don't know if I'd want to be the only facilitator of a class without using something as reliable and clear as Polycom though.

Now, would I try this with an undergrad intro class? I don't think so - not unless there was a great 'hook' for me having to present from the remote location (e.g., I was at a telescope, and I'd have the class doing a tour of the telescope with me, for example) and there was someone in the classroom to facilitate there. But, as an option for more advanced classes, it might be worth considering.

What are my expectations?

I thought yesterday's class session would be a good time to check on the amount of pre-class work that the students put in to the pre-readings and pre-class homework, and to check on what kinds of notes they were taking (or planning to take) in class and what kind of processing they were expecting to do after class.

Now, these are graduate students, so they spent between 1.5 and 6(!) times more time than I expected on the pre-class work, with an average of about a factor of 4 more time than I thought. After significant amounts of discussion when we didn't quite talk the same language, it became clear that they didn't know what my expectations were for what/how much they should know.

Before term, I spent a lot of time (between 1.5 and 6 times more time than I should have?) on trying to be explicit with learning outcomes, and I thought being clear about what I wanted the students to be able to, and to know, on finishing this class. *And* I put sample oral exam final questions on the learning outcomes too, to give a sense of the kind of question that I wanted the students to be able to answer well. So all I needed to do was refer to that, right?

Very wrong. I realized that in a quest to make the learning outcomes and sample questions "rich", they were too vague and open-ended, and could be interpreted in almost any way; there were no reliable signals to the students about the level of knowledge/understanding/skills I wanted them to develop. Oops.

What was interesting after that was our collective struggle to figure out a way out of this mess. We had a jigsaw-format discussion (individuals listing the properties of spirals/ellipticals separately, separate spiral/elliptical groups discussing the properties of those galaxies separately, then splitting into spiral/elliptical mixed pairs to compare and contrast the properties of spirals and ellipticals, then a whole-class summary of that activity), where I tried to convey that the pre-reading is meant to give them the preparation they need for that kind of activity, but shouldn't be more in-depth than that. We also decided that they'd send their notes (or a summary of yesterday's main points) to me as part of the pre-class work for tomorrow. So we have a plan, at least...

What I'm curious about is if anyone has experience of how to communicate clearly and early performance expectations without it turning into something ridiculously fine-grained and micro-scale.

First day

I'm planning on doing this blog as a way for me to reflect as I start applying what I've learned about 'learner-centered' instructional techniques and methods.

I've never really been trained in teaching formally, but the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan has some awesome courses and workshops that inspired me to look into learner-centered teaching.

Today was the first day of the graduate galaxies class that I'm teaching this semester, and the goal of the class was to start practicing the skills of order of magnitude estimation (using this awesome resource). A big part of learning about galaxies (and order of magnitude) is having intuition about the scales that are typical of galaxies, how clustered they are, how much they vary in size, how dark matter is so much more extended than the visible component of galaxies, etc. So...  the students built a scale model (the scale is Milky Way = chocolate M+M). The image is one of the 5 group products (we also made the Sculptor Group, Cen A, Virgo [a lot of M+Ms died for that model] and a 'cosmic average' model [how many galaxies should be in that room]). My impression is that the activity went pretty well - I certainly learned a lot about relative scales, etc. and uncovered a couple of pieces of information about the Universe that I'm still a little surprised by (boy, galaxies are clustered!)

On reflection, I think that the activity would have gone better if I had included more specific preparation for this activity, and I talked too much during class; my goal for next time is substantially less talking, more listening and discussion-building.