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.