Five years of teaching experience hardly seems sufficient to speak with much expertise. That said, I do believe one of the lessons I have learned is that I am most effective when I can help my students learn for themselves. I’ve had the privilege of teaching students from a variety of majors and precious few of them will wind up with careers as physics professors or researchers. Even within my own department, students pursue a wide variety of careers. What I have found to be true in my limited experience, so far, is that regardless of their choice of career, our classes can be highly effective at teaching students to think analytically and to solve problems on their own. The courses are also natural contexts for developing technical and computing skills. Regardless of their choice of career path, these are critically important tools that can stick with students long after they have forgotten the exact form of the Schr\u00f6dinger equation. I have attempted to weave into my classes techniques that emphasize these skills and help the students develop their own set of tools for problem solving and analytical thinking. It is certainly a work in progress, but I believe the goal is worth the effort.<\/p>\n
Over the last decade or so, there have been some tremendous innovations in methods of teaching physics, in particular, at the introductory level. My experience in Engineering Physics at ACU was fairly “traditional” in the sense of a lecture with somewhat limited dialogue between the students and the professor during class. At larger schools, e.g. Texas A&M, introductory physics has been considered something of a “weed-out” course for the engineering college and held in large lecture halls with hundreds of students and virtually no dialogue between students and professors. Schools such as the University of Colorado at Bolder have done research into methods to improve teaching in these courses, developing forms of what is often called “active learning.” When I began teaching, I had no formal instruction on these methods; but I had observed a few professors using these techniques in my postdoctoral appointment at Valparaiso University. Since I was building courses largely from scratch, I decided to experiment with some of the methods I had observed and adjust accordingly.<\/p>\n
The first lecture course I was assigned at Lamar was College Physics II in Fall 2015. Over the course of that semester, inspired by my observations of my Valpo mentor, Prof. Shirvel Stanislaus, I developed a set of PowerPoint lecture slides for each class meeting. I started with the PowerPoint outlines provided by the textbook publisher, which needed significant work to be ready for lecture but served as a decent base. The first iteration of slides was admittedly fairly rough; but by the end of my second offering of the course in Spring 2016, the slides were in much better shape. By student request, I started posting lecture slides on Blackboard (Lamar’s electronic course tool) ahead of time. On their own, students started printing off the slides, before coming to class, and using them as note-taking tools. This practice was simple but effective for students looking ahead, anticipating the lessons, and engaging the material early. Going forward, it was a no-brainer to continue this practice. I have subsequently developed full sets of PowerPoint lecture slides in each of my courses taught.<\/p>\n
One aspect on which I admit I am still torn is the medium through which to work quantitative example problems. In my first semesters teaching, I worked example problems entirely from the chalk board. Afterward, in College Physics II, I began to work out problems in animated PowerPoint slides. I expected it would allow me to work problems quicker. It turned out the opposite was true! Because I was now facing the students the entire time, I could quickly tell when students were confused and address questions. On the whole, this caused me work through the problems more slowly but, I think, more effectively. On the other hand, several students have commented that the formatting of the work in PowerPoint is not as easy to follow, due to space restrictions on the slides. During the move on-line in Spring 2020, I used a document camera to work out problems on paper; and several students commented that this was preferable to PowerPoint. In face-to-face meetings in Fall 2020, I plan to experiment with a document camera for working out the longer example problems. My hope is that it will maintain my ability to face<\/em> the students while working the problem and perhaps add in the improvement to how the work is organized. This aspect is obviously a work in progress.<\/p>\n Sample Lecture Slides<\/p>\n One of the common in-class active-learning techniques involves what we might simply call “discussion questions.” A typical scenario is posting a multiple-choice question to the students and giving time for discussion before voting or otherwise revealing the answer. As I prepared my first set of lecture slides in Fall 2015, I discovered that the textbook publisher provided a bank of these multiple-choice questions already in PowerPoint form. I was skeptical; but, as an experiment, I inserted a few of these questions into my first lectures. I posed a question and gave a minute or two for them to discuss it amongst themselves, before polling for answers. Honestly, I was shocked at how effective this simple practice was for generating discussion between the students and myself. Student feedback was also overwhelmingly positive; so, again, it was rather a no-brainer to continue and refine the practice.<\/p>\n I have implemented versions of this practice in College Physics II, both semesters of Engineering Physics, Electricity and Magnetism, and Classical Mechanics. In larger classes, e.g. Engineering Physics I, I typically have students sit in groups of 4-5 at individual tables or pods. This facilitates the peer-to-peer interaction very well, as they discuss the problem. I will typically pose the question, give the groups 1-2 minute to discuss it, and then poll each group for their answer. Usually, the class will coalesce around one or two of the options, in which case I have representative groups “defend” their answers to each other. I frequently play devil’s advocate, in particular if everyone seems to have answered correctly. I re-poll, as needed, to see if students switch their answers in one direction or another, before revealing the answer. These problems are especially effective for emphasizing the conceptual and qualitative aspects of the course. A typical class rhythm is a short introduction, followed by one or more discussion questions, ending with a longer problem emphasizing more of the quantitative aspects of the lesson. The peer-to-peer dialogue as well as the dialogue between myself and the students has enabled me to identify more precisely where misconceptions arise and address them more timely than waiting for mistakes on assignments.<\/p>\n In upper-level classes, enrollment is typically smaller, enabling discussion amongst the entire class. I use these tools to emphasize conceptual elements; but they also facilitate the longer, quantitative problems that arise in these more mathematically challenging courses. One particular use is to help students “step through” the process of solving a problem. For example, in Classical Mechanics, I may, first, pose the problem and, rather than have the students solve the problem all the way through, I may ask them to “set up” the equations of motion. After giving a minute or so to work on the problem, I will show a set of multiple-choice answers on the board and have students talk through which they would choose, based upon their work. After finishing this step, we can go on to the solution or another intermediate step. In this way, we have been able to maintain the interactive nature of the introductory courses without sacrificing the level of rigor necessary for the upper-level example problems.<\/p>\n Looking back, one important lesson I learned from this early experience is the importance of being willing to try different techniques. Had my skepticism kept me from branching beyond my comfort zone, I would have missed out on a significant improvement to my courses.<\/p>\n Throughout my first year at Lamar, a consistent request from my College Physics II students was to work more example problems during lecture. In thinking about ways to clear space to accommodate this request, I borrowed an idea from Prof. Stan Zygmunt, my Department Chair during my time at Valpo. Prof. Zygmunt had developed a set of lecture recordings for students to watch before coming to class, allowing him to devote most of his class time to example problems. Following this approach, I created a set of 10-20 minute pre-lecture recordings by taking the introductory lecture material from my slides, animating the text, and recording a voice narration over the slides in PowerPoint. I used Spring 2017 offering of College Physics II as the “pilot semester” for this tool. I posted the recordings to Blackboard for students to watch before coming to class. I devoted class time to a very brief summary, where needed; the interactive discussion questions; and a larger amount of example problems from the time freed up by the pre-lecture recordings. An added bonus was that the extra time enabled me to perform additional in-class demonstrations at various points during the semester. Throughout the pilot semester, I proactively polled students for feedback on the changes, and student response was overwhelmingly<\/em> positive. While my focus had primarily been on enabling extra example problems, unexpectedly, the extra in-class demonstrations proved even more popular. As another gauge of the effectiveness of the pre-lecture recordings, the Spring 2017 sections compared favorably to previous semesters. While this is obviously an imperfect metric, at the very least, there was no systematic decline in performance. It was fairly easy to decide that maintaining class performance while increasing student and professor enjoyment of the courses constituted a net win! I kept the change for the Fall 2017 offering of College Physics II.<\/p>\n Almost immediately this change paid off in a completely unexpected way. The start of the Fall 2017 semester at Lamar was dramatically interrupted by Hurricane Harvey, a massive storm, that slowly meandered its way along the Texas coast dumping historic amounts of rain on an already saturated Southeast Texas. Along with many other towns, Beaumont was flooded for days. The start of the semester was delayed and the first official week was moved online. Having the College Physics II lecture recordings already in place, was tremendously beneficial to the students and to myself; and the experience I had gained proved valuable to producing analogous recordings for my Fall 2017 Quantum Mechanics course, as well. While many students were flooded out, displaced, or otherwise terribly inconvenienced, the recordings allowed them to study and prepare on their own. While far from ideal, I saw some benefit to the students being able to take a measure of ownership of their learning. Needless to say the entire experience–traumatic as it was–would prove invaluable for surviving the unprecedented Spring 2020 semester.<\/p>\n Given the benefits I had seen to my College Physics II course, I decided to try pre-lecture recordings in my Engineering Physics I course when I moved to ACU in Fall 2018. Building both the PowerPoint slides and the lecture recordings from scratch–along with two other brand new preps–was (probably overly) ambitious; and I decided not to try recordings for my Electricity and Magnetism course, that semester. As they had for College Physics II, the pre-lecture recordings worked well for Engineering Physics I in Fall 2018. Student feedback was positive, albeit with no baseline for comparison of class averages; so I decided to continue using them in the Spring 2019 semester. Additionally, I created an analogous set of recordings for my Spring 2019 offering of Engineering Physics II.<\/p>\n In Fall 2019, for the first time, I decided to try a set of pre-lecture recordings for an upper-level courses, in this case, Classical Mechanics. I tried to be judicious and kept the recorded content primarily to introductory material, leaving more complicated mathematical derivations to face-to-face instruction. I was nervous about how effective the recordings would be; but student feedback was, again, positive. I now had examples from three distinct groups of students–non-majors, intro-level majors, and upper-level majors–indicating the pre-lecture recordings were helpful tools. It was enough evidence for me to implement them in my Electricity and Magnetism offering in Spring 2020.<\/p>\n I don’t need to tell you that the Spring 2020 semester was challenging. I cannot express how grateful I was that I had implemented this tool for my courses–including Electricity and Magnetism–from the start. As with Fall 2017 and Hurricane Harvey, the transition on-line for COVID-19 was still difficult; but it would have been so much more difficult without the recordings. They proved tremendously helpful to setting up our daily interactive sessions over Google Meet. One aspect that I did change was that to this point, I had been saving the recordings simply as PowerPoint files and posting them to my Google Drive for students to download (linked from my Canvas pages). With accessibility being more limited, I decided to export the PowerPoints to movie files that I could post to YouTube. I created a YouTube channel to host my videos and organized playlists for each of my classes. I then added these YouTube videos to Canvas Studio and embedded the videos directly into my Canvas course. It was a not a major change, but students did indicate that it made accessing the recordings easier. It also removes problems that could arise from version incompatibility, down the road.<\/p>\n Sample Lecture Recordings<\/p>\n\n
Discussion Questions<\/h3>\n
Pre-lecture Recordings<\/h3>\n