Section 4.3 How to teach: Modifying the pedagogy.
¶The faculty drew from a variety of resources in developing interactive techniques. One of the co-PIs, for example, mentioned experiences at conferences that the department chair had encouraged attending:
I had been to one or two physics education conferences; I had been to one at RPI, this was at the suggestion of (the department chair) who thought I might be interested in such a thing...I didn't even know what the Socratic method was...I sort of viewed myself as an interested person, excited about education generally, and glad to know there were other people who were similarly excited and so I just was doing that because I thought it was good...
This faculty member characterized the planning process as open-ended:
We discussed all kinds of different things we might do like integrating labs and lecture, getting students more involved interactively, and that was something that I was already trying to do, because I had learned at these conferences, I knew about peer instruction and I had been intrigued by that and so I had tried to do that myself...
Although the content of the new courses had been specified and agreed upon by a unanimous faculty vote, those teaching the new courses were free to design instruction each in his or her own way. Some faculty, for example, viewed the two-hour time slots on Tuesdays and Thursdays as opportunities for extended laboratories while others saw these as times for integrating more small group activities and discussions. All, however, shared the commitment of creating a more interactive environment. A graduate student teaching assistant (TA) at the time described his impression of this innovative pedagogical approach:
This was really different in that you were teaching little chucks of lecture or little chunks that add to the material and then interspersing it with experiment or group work that got people to practice and use that so that they were able to go on, so that you were sure that they had a good understanding of it and that they had a chance to play around with the ideas before you introduced something new, so that was a totally new concept to me, one that I really liked and still like.
These experiences as a TA had had an impact on his current approach to teaching:
It had a dramatic impact on the way that I go about teaching; it's still my preferred method; anything that I can do associated with lab is always deeply connected with what I'm doing in class, so it all sort of flows together, much like the paradigms; I still use a lot of the techniques that I learned from and with the teachers in paradigms.
Some of the techniques he was still using were:
- Using small white boards to elicit student ideas and then sharing those with the class in developing a discussion about challenging mathematical topics
- Getting students to collect data using some piece of apparatus and then individually and often collectively trying to sort out what it is the data mean, what the data tell us about theory
- Getting students to do a significant chunk of what I call the ‘heavy lifting’ in derivations while we're in class, rather than me just telling them how it goes – giving them a start, having them do a piece that really gets them to think deeply about that difficult chunk and then pulling it back together
- A lot of synthesis of student ideas rather than just telling them, a kind of guided synthesis of students' ideas
Such techniques differ radically from a fifty-minute lecture, where the instructor stands before students seated silently in rows and presents information as clearly, concisely, and correctly as possible. The faculty recognized that shifting to an interactive environment would require changing more than their own and their students' behaviors, however; physical changes to the classroom also would be necessary.