It is fairly well established now that the overview lecture before a final exam does absolutely nothing for students who have been keeping up with the class. In fact it tends to lead them into a false sense of confidence that may make further studying difficult. Yet every class i've TAed held multiple sessions where a pair of TAs tried to treat the entire 300-500 person class like a very large section. Nobody ends up doing much physics and many of the questions boil down to "Can you tell us what's on the exam?" (Since the professor was once a TA himself, he hasn't even discussed the exam with us.) If i were running the show, things would be done differently.
The Goal: The only way to learn physics is to do physics. We want to encourage students to form small groups and do problems together. We want to minimize getting stuck but encourage doing tricky problems. The experience should be made enjoyable so they can keep doing it for multiple hours without their brains locking up, which tends to happen around Hour 1 of a traditional review session.
The Space: I'm thinking a big open space, maybe a ballroom or open gallery, with lots of little tables seating no more than 6-8. There's plenty of space to walk between the tables in straight lines and the occasional double-sided whiteboard scattered throughout. Nearby, we'll need two or three smaller rooms (maybe seating 30-50?) set up for impromptu lectures. A central microphone might be nice if you want to announce something to a whole class, but it could easily become more annoying than useful.
The People: All intro physics sections will be invited with students coming and going as they please. We'll put each class in a different section of the room, but all TAs will be wandering around ready to answer any question from any section. The idea is when you do get stuck, we should minimize the time between raising your hand and the arrival of a TA. Professor attendance might be nice for a few hours, but optional.
The Problems: By this point in the class students have several past exams, practice exams and old homeworks to go over. They should be encouraged to bring study material but blank copies of these will be available on request. I've always thought the idea of making students make their own crib sheets was ridiculous, but it might be an effective learning tool if they could get TA guidance at a session like this.
The Tables: Small. I'm imagining round, but experiments with a group working at each end of a rectangular table might be worthwhile. All tables will have extra pencils, scratch paper and water bottles. Since its annoying to get stuck and hold your hand up until a TA arrives, we should have some sort of signal at the table. Maybe every table has a white flag on the end of a 3 ft dowel rod. If you get stuck, stick the flag in a little base on the table and move on to the next problem with both hands free until a TA arrives. (This is especially important for intro electromagnetism where the Right Hand Rule is so often employed.)
The Time: Ideally as long as possible, but you have limited TA availability. TA shifts shouldn't be more than 2-3 hours; they have exams too. If there is a true dead period with no classes before exams, then i would go mid-morning to dinner-time one day. If not, it will have to be a couple long evenings in a row.
The Food: Either lunch or dinner should be provided along with snacks. Pizza is traditional at study parties, but it makes your hands greasy. Maybe small burrito-like food that can be eaten with one hand? The trick is not to make everything wet or greasy while not tasting dry. On the tables there should be snacks like pretzels and non-greasy chips. Soda is known to be bad for concentration, but we want to keep students hydrated and not spill cups of water. I'm thinking water bottles on the tables which can be refilled at coolers of lemonade, kool-aid, iced tea, etc. If meal food is cost-prohibitive, hold the session near a restaurant/dining hall and focus on hydration.
Breakout Sections: Every class has certain subjects that always confuse a fair fraction of the students. Traditional review sessions typically focus on these, but many of the students who are stuck elsewhere are then bored. At my review session there would be an announcement like "Half hour lecture on two-slit diffraction in Breakout Room 1 in 15 minutes." Then the students who needed that review lecture would have time to wrap up the problem they were working on and their friends would know how long they would be gone. Of course in the actual lecture with a pared down class size, you'd revert back to section dynamics with a lot of peer interaction.
All this requires a lot more planning and expense than a traditional review session, but you only have to do one for the whole department and the students might actually learn something. A lot of this depends on certain resources being available at your school. I suspect this arrangement might work well for chemistry and engineering courses at least and might even be workable in miniature for midterm exam reviews. Maybe its worth developing some shared resources wherever i end up.
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Asking Stupid Questions
Its more or less mandatory at the start of an introductory physics class to say "In this class there are no stupid questions". If you don't give some reassurance that you won't judge them, some (most?) students will just clam up when they get confused. But the line has always bothered me. Of course there are stupid questions. Given a rudimentary understanding of the fundamentals, some questions just shouldn't need to be asked. The problem is if the students had a rudimentary understanding of the fundamentals, they wouldn't be taking the intro class. Dante Shepherd of Surviving the World said pretty much what i've always wanted to say here last week. I may have to borrow that line. Its just such an attention-grabber. At some point in my future life, i'm (hopefully) going to have to come up with my own lines. Here's some thoughts:
1. You aren't yet qualified to tell the difference between a stupid question and a profound question. But neither are the people sitting around you. So don't judge your classmates and don't worry about them judging you.
2. Some of the most profound questions you can ask have as their answer "That's a meaningless question." To ask a good meaningless question you have to synthesize a lot of material starting from a bad assumption. The world is a weird enough place that, frankly, if you don't make a bad assumption at some point in this class you're being too careful. And sometimes the only way to discover where you went wrong is to get to the end of a train of thought and ask a really stupid question.
3. I have asked more stupid questions in the past ten years than you can contemplate. And now i have a PhD, which makes me a certified smart person. Pretty much anyone at this university that you think is smart has gotten that way by asking stupid questions.
4. You are not yet the you the world will remember. You may go on to great feats of insight and knowledge, but you are not yet the person who is able to do those things. College is supposed to be the place where you become that person. If you want to let go of your stupid questions, let them out in the open. Otherwise they'll always be inside you. (This one may be too subtle to use on new freshmen)
5. Particularly in this class, there are a lot of questions that seem like they should be obvious but aren't. If you're afraid to ask a question, chances are so are the people around you. So do everyone a favor and ask it. The time we waste if it really is a stupid question will be much less than the class time i would waste trying to figure out why you're all confused.
1. You aren't yet qualified to tell the difference between a stupid question and a profound question. But neither are the people sitting around you. So don't judge your classmates and don't worry about them judging you.
2. Some of the most profound questions you can ask have as their answer "That's a meaningless question." To ask a good meaningless question you have to synthesize a lot of material starting from a bad assumption. The world is a weird enough place that, frankly, if you don't make a bad assumption at some point in this class you're being too careful. And sometimes the only way to discover where you went wrong is to get to the end of a train of thought and ask a really stupid question.
3. I have asked more stupid questions in the past ten years than you can contemplate. And now i have a PhD, which makes me a certified smart person. Pretty much anyone at this university that you think is smart has gotten that way by asking stupid questions.
4. You are not yet the you the world will remember. You may go on to great feats of insight and knowledge, but you are not yet the person who is able to do those things. College is supposed to be the place where you become that person. If you want to let go of your stupid questions, let them out in the open. Otherwise they'll always be inside you. (This one may be too subtle to use on new freshmen)
5. Particularly in this class, there are a lot of questions that seem like they should be obvious but aren't. If you're afraid to ask a question, chances are so are the people around you. So do everyone a favor and ask it. The time we waste if it really is a stupid question will be much less than the class time i would waste trying to figure out why you're all confused.
Monday, September 3, 2012
Education, Growth and Discipleship
I was recently reminded of an old study about peer instruction. I wish i had the reference, but i encountered the paper hanging up in a hallway. In
this study, a group of students were identified who didn't understand a
particularly difficult physics concept (something about angular momentum, i think). They were then taught this
concept using as much student-to-student interaction as possible. A few
weeks later, they were asked to teach some other students in a class
that was a few weeks behind them in the curriculum. They did this
surprisingly well, often better than the professors, because they
understood from experience where the confused students were going wrong.
However six months later, when asked to teach another group of
students the same concept, they did very poorly because (and this is
what blew me away) they had no idea how to think about the problem in
any way other than the right way. In the intervening months, they had
completely digested the new learning and now their natural thought
processes led them only to the correct answer.
The obvious moral of the story is that it pays to attack difficult learning experiences in groups so you can help each other over the subtle pitfalls the professors have forgotten. More interesting, i think, is the implication for how the learning process affects you. Within a few months of taking on new learning, students' brains had rewired so that they didn't have to think about the concepts anymore; they were 'obvious'. From these 'obvious' concepts could be built more challenging concepts which in turn became obvious. After a year or two of this, students begin to think in complicated ways; they are rewarded for thinking like a scientist. Let this go on long enough and the school will give you a diploma certifying that you are a scientist because what naturally comes to mind when you look at the world is a scientific mode of thinking.
I find this idea that you can, in a sense, change what you are by guided practice fascinating, and particularly so when applied to the task of 'becoming a better Christian'. Given the colossal failure of very eloquent professors in any sort of controlled study to teach difficult concepts without peer interaction, it seems that listening to sermons is probably not enough. (I am definitely not saying here that we should skip Biblical instruction any more than we should skip class.) The education research suggests that if we don't help each other work through real-world, messy problems we will learn at a glacial pace and often what we thought we learned will be wrong. Fortunately we have a fellowship of believers and a wide selection of temptations, moral choices and holy disciplines (prayer, giving, worship, etc.) to work through. Since the Church is very large, ideally we should form into smaller units of increasing closeness (say, denominations, congregations, small groups). If we've done this properly, we should see small groups of people in similar life stages rehearsing everything they've learned together, helping each other apply what they've learned to existing problems and bringing issues to the larger groups.
Okay, so no profound insight there. This more or less matches an existing practice that is observed to work well. (Aside: I wonder if there are churches where issues from the small groups get fed back into the larger assembly) But what have we actually learned and what does success look like? I sometimes get the impression that churches believe we would behave more like Jesus if we just knew more about Him; if we knew 'What Would Jesus Do' then we'd be all set. This seems unreasonable to me. I can't behave like Jesus when confronting overwhelming temptation any more than i can behave like Richard Feynman when confronting quantum field theory. Yes i have the Holy Spirit living in me, but in practice i can only behave like myself with small perturbations. Much better, i think, to go through the disciplines and difficulties set before me with a group of fellow believers to help me through the subtleties. In a few months or years i should find that i act more like Jesus because i am more like Jesus. Then i won't need to be constantly worried about 'What Would Jesus Do?'; it will be obvious.
The obvious moral of the story is that it pays to attack difficult learning experiences in groups so you can help each other over the subtle pitfalls the professors have forgotten. More interesting, i think, is the implication for how the learning process affects you. Within a few months of taking on new learning, students' brains had rewired so that they didn't have to think about the concepts anymore; they were 'obvious'. From these 'obvious' concepts could be built more challenging concepts which in turn became obvious. After a year or two of this, students begin to think in complicated ways; they are rewarded for thinking like a scientist. Let this go on long enough and the school will give you a diploma certifying that you are a scientist because what naturally comes to mind when you look at the world is a scientific mode of thinking.
I find this idea that you can, in a sense, change what you are by guided practice fascinating, and particularly so when applied to the task of 'becoming a better Christian'. Given the colossal failure of very eloquent professors in any sort of controlled study to teach difficult concepts without peer interaction, it seems that listening to sermons is probably not enough. (I am definitely not saying here that we should skip Biblical instruction any more than we should skip class.) The education research suggests that if we don't help each other work through real-world, messy problems we will learn at a glacial pace and often what we thought we learned will be wrong. Fortunately we have a fellowship of believers and a wide selection of temptations, moral choices and holy disciplines (prayer, giving, worship, etc.) to work through. Since the Church is very large, ideally we should form into smaller units of increasing closeness (say, denominations, congregations, small groups). If we've done this properly, we should see small groups of people in similar life stages rehearsing everything they've learned together, helping each other apply what they've learned to existing problems and bringing issues to the larger groups.
Okay, so no profound insight there. This more or less matches an existing practice that is observed to work well. (Aside: I wonder if there are churches where issues from the small groups get fed back into the larger assembly) But what have we actually learned and what does success look like? I sometimes get the impression that churches believe we would behave more like Jesus if we just knew more about Him; if we knew 'What Would Jesus Do' then we'd be all set. This seems unreasonable to me. I can't behave like Jesus when confronting overwhelming temptation any more than i can behave like Richard Feynman when confronting quantum field theory. Yes i have the Holy Spirit living in me, but in practice i can only behave like myself with small perturbations. Much better, i think, to go through the disciplines and difficulties set before me with a group of fellow believers to help me through the subtleties. In a few months or years i should find that i act more like Jesus because i am more like Jesus. Then i won't need to be constantly worried about 'What Would Jesus Do?'; it will be obvious.
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