Teacher + Education = Teacher Education
I just returned from a two-day conference in Austin, TX. For the record, it was fifty degrees warmer there, and in a good way.
The conference was sponsored by PTEC: the Physics Teacher Education Coalition, a joint effort of the American Physical Society, American Association of Physics Teachers, and National Science Foundation. PTEC has over 100 member institutions around the U.S, and they just recently opened up membership to national laboratories, so Michael and I arranged to have NSCL join. Over 150 science educators were in attendance at the 2008 meeting.
I'd like to express my appreciation for a well-run meeting. At two days, it was meaty enough and yet not so long that I got fatigued. The workshop sessions were 90 minutes long, which I found to be an ideal length. The average presenter quality was high. Most importantly, the subjects were interesting and relevant to my work! Kudos to PTEC.
(One caveat: I would have appreciated if the meeting had been held at a hotel nearer downtown rather than out by the airport, but that's a minor quibble.)
It was truly exciting to see all the student-activity-based pedagogies out there... wish I had been in one of those classrooms. Even so, I'm very glad to know that physics education is changing this way. While Ph.D.s and candidates may thrive in a lecture environment, the majority of students learn far more by doing things themselves. Workshop-type courses provide a research atmosphere where students get to hypothesize and discover physical truths with just a little guidance. This is especially important for future physics teachers (whom we badly need), because struggling with the answers helps them see the problem from the point of view of the schoolchild.
Besides picking up lots of useful ideas, I made some really useful contacts, gave a poster on PAN, and generally promoted the heck out of NSCL/JINA outreach. The other attendees, who were mostly physics educators or physics education researchers, seemed impressed by our programs. Awesome. I'll have more to report after I plug our effort at the Michigan Science Teachers Association meeting this Friday!
Operation of NSCL as a national user facility is supported by the Experimental Nuclear Physics Program of the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Comments
I'm supposed to "thrive"?
OK, I'm not a candidate yet, so maybe I'll learn to "thrive in a lecture environment" one of these days. At my stage of physics learning, we get the "struggling with the answers" bit from the homework--being assigned problems which aren't so common that they're worked-out examples in some other textbook. Depending on the class, lectures are either tour-de-forces of brilliance that are a pleasure to watch (but go by way too fast to participate in) or mind-numbing epochs of derivations. Maybe this is because I'm not a native physics person, but I would personally prefer frequent connections between the abstract formalism and the actual tangible physics stuff. Some people may be able to follow the lectures and understand perfectly, but even the theory-destined grad students I've talked to have not claimed to be proficient in translating formalism to physicality on the spot, as most instructors seem to do. This is one of the reasons I appreciate the multicolored diagrams in whiteboard markers in my E&M class. For some reason, that subject is very visual to me, and I have difficulty "seeing" what the formalism means.
I took the graduate math methods for physicists class in workshop format. I never believed it was possible to teach advanced physics in such a pedagogically sound way! In introductory university-level physics classes, many good teachers are experimenting with clickers to increase class participation. Still, the classes retain their lecture-homework-quiz-exam structure, and the labs are (in my experience) run nearly independently of the lectures. (A friend of mine, however, attended a smaller school where the professors taught the labs as well, although I don't recall whether they taught the lab-lecture combos.)
As an example of class formatting done pretty much right, I present a class called "Science Investigations for Educators"--as I understand it, the one science class that elementary education majors at my undergrad institution were required to take. The person teaching the class was one of those natural-born teachers (think Remus Lupin), and I was the TA for the lab portion one semester. The professor was forever bringing way cool demos to the lecture, which was a challenge, since my home department wasn't, in general, very interested in teaching physics in new and exciting ways. The lab was actually an integral part of the class, and the professor would actually adjust his lesson plans depending on how far we got in lab!