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.