“Just Be Yourself”: Old Fart Edition

[Okay, so I am more like a mid-career fart, but compared to Melissa ...]

So. Great post, as usual, by Melissa, prompting this quick post, in an attempt to provide another perspective on the same questions. To the extent that we contradict each other, perhaps it serves to confuse you on a higher level, in keeping with the mission of this blog.

Teaching as performance: my first non-grad-school teaching gig was at Rice University where I taught 100+ students per session in two back-to-back sessions in a very large lecture hall for introductory physics. I used to be completely drained by the end of those two hours. And since then I have no illusions that I am performing when I am teaching. Not theater, but performance nonetheless. In my case, in my largish lecture classes, it can be an improvised, audience-participation-heavy reactive performance — with delivery of content, structured exercises, etc, all that but also a pretty conscious effort to catch the eye of the students, look for puzzlement, react to it, go with the flow of a particularly good question or an intriguing comment, or to realize that the material is not sinking in, for whatever reason, and to stop, and wonder why, and back up, and all that. It’s not something super-conscious on my behalf, but it’s how I find myself teaching. And if I am ever under the weather, or on Nyquil or something, the change in atmosphere in the class is palpable: The same notes, the same transparencies, and the class is a clunker. And if I’m in form, feeling good and chipper, I can take a couple of paragraphs of scrawled notes and make the class float for an hour. You might be thinking: Oh, that’s just who he is, an entertainer and a performer, so he’s being himself. I assure you that I used to be, and can still be, painfully shy, particularly in public. But it is true that who I am in public has shifted considerably since I started teaching (which happened when I was already past 30, so you might think that my personality would’ve been set). But who I am in class is a whole different creature, it seems.

I can’t be who I am not, so I’ve quit trying to emulate my remarkable colleagues. But I am still not just being myself. My best way of formulating this is to say that I’m trying my damndest to be my best self. Which is to say, performative. And authentically myself.

“Just Be Yourself”: Junior Faculty Edition

Scientiae this month is asking folks to write about people who have been role models and mentors, and those who have provided inspiration on the path to a scientific career. The timing of the question is interesting because I’ve finally given up trying to find exactly one person who will be an ideal mentor/role model for me. That person doesn’t exist. That’s not to say I haven’t found plenty of people who have been wonderfully helpful to me, and I have developed a network of a few particular individuals to whom I go for advice on different aspects of my professional life. But, I’ve been thinking more and more about the advice “just be yourself”, particularly as a junior faculty member.

I started considering this idea in January when Maryellen Weimer at the Teaching Professor wrote about developing a teaching persona. In particular, she argued that the advice to new faculty to “just be yourself” when teaching isn’t great advice:

“The ‘be yourself’ advice is right in the sense that you don’t want to be someone you aren’t. But it’s wrong because who you are in the classroom is something that must be created. It should be formed out of bits and pieces of your true identity…
The wisest advice I think for creating this teaching persona is to remember that although it’s about you, it really isn’t about you. The teaching persona you want to create is that one that connects with students—that motivates, inspires, guides, and helps them to learn.”

While the post contains a number of good points, I don’t like the idea of teaching as a performance art. I do spend time thinking about how to structure my classes to promote student learning and how to create a classroom climate that encourages all students to achieve to the best of their abilities. However, I don’t spend time consciously thinking about my classroom persona because I can’t teach or act in a way that doesn’t suit my personality. I try to just be myself in the classroom.

If I modify the excerpt above by replacing the concept of a teaching persona with the concept of a professional persona, the statement sounds more familiar to me:

The ‘be yourself’ advice is right in the sense that you don’t want to be someone you aren’t. But it’s wrong because who you are professionally is something that must be created. It should be formed out of bits and pieces of your true identity.
The wisest advice I think for creating this professional persona is to remember that although it’s about you, it really isn’t about you. The professional persona you want to create is that one that connects with students, colleagues, and other professionals.

Although I don’t try to be someone I’m not, in the broader professional context I don’t always feel that I can just be myself. So when do you think “just be yourself” is good advice? And when is it not?

Helping under-prepared students in introductory physics

Although every class presents its own challenges, I’ve found teaching introductory physics presents a unique set of issues associated with the diversity of preparation that students bring to the classroom.  Students arrive at college having taken a range of different high school physics and math courses with different levels of rigor, different amounts of lab work, and taught by high school teachers with varying familiarity of physics. At Carleton, there’s no introductory physics class solely for pre-meds, nor one class recommended for all future physics majors. We don’t offer an algebra-based introductory physics course, and we don’t encourage students who scored well on the AP to skip introductory physics. Nevertheless, in an attempt to ensure students don’t find themselves in courses where they are either overwhelmed or bored, we offer four different “flavors” of introductory mechanics: Physics 131 Newtonian Mechanics, Physics 132 Gravity and the Earth, Physics 141 Gravity and the Cosmos, and Physics 142 Matter and Interactions, which is based on the Chabay and Sherwood text of the same name.  Physics 141 and 142 are intended for students with a strong preparation in physics and math, and these courses revisit mechanics concepts in a context that differs from what students might have seen previously, while Physics 131 and 132 are intended for those students who haven’t had as much physics or aren’t as confident of their background.

Of the four flavors of introductory mechanics, I have only taught Physics 131 Newtonian Mechanics. This course is similar to the standard introductory mechanics course you might find at colleges across the country. It often includes a few students who have never taken physics in high school as well as a few students who have taken two years of physics in high school but for reasons of scheduling end up in 131, and there are a huge range of backgrounds in between. Designing the course to meet the needs of all these students is difficult.  I find myself particularly concerned about students who have a strong interest in physics, but struggle to keep up because of poor preparation from their previous high school physics and/or math classes. These under-prepared students are incredibly bright and did well in their high school coursework, but they come from high schools that did not offer a rigorous, comprehensive science and math curriculum, and as a result, they face more challenges than peers who arrived with better preparation.

In an effort to find ways to help underprepared students in introductory physics, I just read Teaching Unprepared Students: Strategies for Promoting Success and Retention in Higher Education by Kathleen Gabriel. Gabriel seems to work with students who are truly unprepared, some of whom must take remedial courses because they are not ready for college-level coursework. I haven’t found any Carleton students to be unprepared for college work, but as mentioned above, some students are under-prepared as compared to their peers. Reading Gabriel’s book, I took away three ideas for helping students, particularly under-prepared students, succeed in introductory physics.

1) Both teachers and students should be explicit about expectations, responsibilities, and goals for a course. Gabriel is a proponent of leaving no guideline, expectation, or justification unwritten. While I’m not confident that I can be as detailed as Gabriel suggests, the book certainly made me realize that the more that is unwritten (and Gabriel truly contends that these ideas must be written and not just conveyed verbally), the more you put under-prepared students at a disadvantage. Students benefit if they know both what is expected of them and why, as well as what they can (and cannot) expect of the instructor and why.

If faculty must be explicit in their discussions with students, Gabriel also contends that it is important to ask students to be explicit as well. Students need to identify why they are taking a course, what they want to get out of it, and how they will work to achieve those goals. According to Gabriel, faculty members who are trying to help struggling students shouldn’t accept student explanations that they will improve by “working harder” or “studying more.” Instead professors should ask the student to lay out concrete steps for how the student will approach the coursework and make use of additional support mechanisms. Clear, detailed communication, not just about course content but about other aspects of learning and teaching, is a critical component of helping under-prepared students succeed.

2)    Recognizing that learning styles vary, faculty should help students identify how to adapt their study strategies based on their learning preferences. Gabriel suggests faculty members have students take a learning styles inventory at the beginning of a course, and then talk with students about their learning styles. While using varied instructional approaches to address different learning styles is helpful, it’s not possible to create a classroom where all learning styles are engaged equally.  Students (particularly under-prepared students who are questioning their place in a course or the college environment as a whole) need to understand that the challenges they face in a particular course are not necessarily related to a lack of ability, but rather  may be due to a mismatch between their learning style and the instructor’s teaching style.   Gabriel notes that under-prepared students often struggle to find study strategies that complement their learning style preferences.

Prompted by the discussion in the book, I explored the on-line Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire by Solomon and Felder. This website produces an overview of learning styles when it returns the questionnaire results, and is a website to which I would be comfortable sending my students. Through the learning styles inventory website, I stumbled upon Richard Felder’s 1993 article from the Journal of College Science Teaching, “Reaching the Second Tier: Learning and Teaching Styles in College Science Education.” I found it provided relevant suggestions about how to address varied learning styles in the science classroom and an interesting discussion of how the strengths of different types of learners correspond to students bringing different strengths to the science profession  (i.e. theorist/experimentalist, discipline-based/interdisciplinary).

3)     Under-prepared students are more likely to find success in a learner-centered classroom that includes a variety of activities and approaches than in a traditional instructor-centered classroom, where lectures are the norm. For those who follow the physics education literature, it comes as no surprise that students do better in a classroom where they are expected to actively engage with the material and participate in activities during class, but for under-prepared students this is especially true.  However, in light of the above learning styles inventory, it also became clear to me that reflective learners may appreciate a different kind of opportunity for in-class engagement than active learners.

Additionally, Gabriel stresses the importance of including a variety of formative assessments, activities, and feedback beginning early in the course to allow students to evaluate their understanding before any formal assessment, such as a quiz or exam, is administered.  In my introductory physics classes, I tend to assume that pre-class warm-up questions, in-class problem solving, and homework problem sets provide students sufficient opportunities to assess whether they are understanding the material, but based on Gabriel’s book, I think I might have to re-examine my assumption and offer students more varied opportunities to assess their understanding. Gabriel provides some good ideas for doing this, as well as suggestions for getting students who are not doing well on the formative assessments to come for help  She points out that formative assessment is a way to help students build confidence while evaluating their performance in a low-risk manner.

I’d recommend Gabriel’s book as it is a quick read that has some concrete ideas for the classroom. I’d also be interested in hearing what tricks of the trade others use in their introductory classes to help even the playing field for students with varied preparation.

Teaching evaluations

About a month ago, Chad and Moshe talked about student evaluations of teaching, and I kept meaning to comment. I’ll leave out the excuses for the delay –  here goes, finally.

Carleton doesn’t do evaluations. That’s right, a school that prides itself on its committment to teaching, and rightly so, not only does not evaluate you based on the numbers from the bubble-sheet activity (where students fill out an evaluation on some numerical scale about the quality of your teaching — an activity that seemingly every other school enacts) at the end of the course, it doesn’t even require you to go through the exercise.

Don’t get me wrong, we are told often about how good it would be for us if we evaluated our classes, and are periodically sent pointers to good evaluation formats, but there’s no requirement to do this at the end of every term.

The motivation? Well, it’s not up to me to defend or explain Carleton’s philosophy here, but I’ll tell you why I don’t do the standard evaluations, and what I do instead. I am interested in improving my teaching, and/or adjusting my course depending on the students in *that* course and as soon as possible. As with any decent teacher, and particularly those privileged to have small classes with students relatively meta-aware of their learning, I am always ‘listening’ to student reactions and tuning my presentation to best benefit them (and my agenda). Those bubble-sheet exercises add not an iota to my understanding of what’s going on.

The only formal evaluation I ask for are short ‘minute papers’: What worked and what didn’t in this class? Or ‘What did you get out of this class/chapter/section, and what’s still unclear?’ ‘What’s one thing you would change and one thing you would leave unchanged about _____?’ where ____ could be the particular class, the structure of the course, or something else. And I often hop up on the desk at mid-term or end of term and ask them to fire away with suggestions about things to change. I’ve learned a lot from these short evaluations over the years, particularly from the verbal sessions (which only work if the students trust you and are engaged with their learning. But if those two things aren’t true, you’ve got far deeper problems, I think). And strongly recommend doing something very similar.

Don’t get me wrong, Carleton does do a very formal evaluation of teaching for your tenure review process as well as for the mid-tenure-clock review. Those are equally verbal (perhaps a note on that another time or if requested). I found nothing in that review that I hadn’t learned through my much more casual –but much more informative than bubble-sheets — process already.

Evaluating lab work–let me count the ways

Prompted by Chad’s lament over at Uncertain Principles about grading lab write-ups , I’ve been considering the various approaches used to evaluate student work in curricular physics labs. Ideally, during their time as a physics major, students will have their lab work evaluated in different ways both within a particular course and throughout the curriculum so that they can acquire and refine a variety of skills. I came up with a list of ten evaluation methods that I have seen employed, and I jotted down a few of the benefits and drawbacks that come to mind for each of these approaches.

1. Full lab write-up: This is the traditional lab write-up complete with abstract and the usual introduction, methods, results and discussion sections.

Pro
Students practice written communication skills.
Students get experience integrating quantitative analysis, visual representation of data, and conceptual understanding into a single written product.
If students continue in graduate school, this prepares them for academic science writing.

Con
Formal lab write-ups are time consuming both for the student to write and the instructor to grade.
If serious problems occur in the lab or the results are ambiguous, writing up a particular lab can be frustrating for students.  (To avoid this, I sometimes let students choose which lab they will write up.)

2. Patchwork lab write-up: Any given week, students are asked to write one portion of what would be a full lab write-up for the lab that week. One week a student might write an abstract, another week the methods section, another week the discussion, etc.

Pro
Students practice written communication skills.
Students and instructors can focus on one portion of a lab write-up, and have a more in-depth discussion about the important aspects of this portion of a full write-up.
Patchwork lab write-ups are less time consuming for both students to write and instructors to grade than a full write-up.

Con
Without the associated context of the whole write-up, students can find it difficult to write in an authentic manner the one section that is the focus any given week.
If a student has a significant conceptual gap in some aspect of the lab work, it is not always possible to determine that from one piece of a write-up.

3. Group lab write-up: This is a traditional lab write-up but instead of having each individual write up a lab, a lab group works together to produce a full write-up.

Pro
Group lab write-ups promote student interaction and peer instruction.
When it works well, this approach encourages collaboration and peer editing/revising.

Con
When it doesn’t work well, the instructor gets a disjointed write-up that has been written by three different individuals who didn’t consult with each other. It isn’t a cohesive document or a collaborative experience for the students, and the instructor isn’t sure how much each student put into the write-up and how much they got out of the lab.

4. Memo: This works particularly well in introductory labs. Students are given a context for the lab activity, and then asked as a group to write a brief memo about their results for an audience that is appropriate based on the context given. The memo is written before the end of lab; the instructor reads the memo and asks the students questions based on the memo.

Pro
Students practice both oral and written communication.
Students are introduced to the idea of tailoring their writing to a particular genre/audience.

Con
Because of the brief nature of both the written work and the questioning, this method of evaluation lacks the depth of engagement of some of the approaches.
Students can have difficulty adjusting appropriately for the audience/context given and the rest of the exercise suffers as a result.

5. Written questionnaire: Instructor passes out a worksheet with questions that the students must answer and turn in at the end of lab along with the data that they have collected

Pro
This approach focuses student attention on a few key concepts/aspects of lab and effectively probes student understanding of those concepts.
These questionnaires demand less time of students and instructors than full write-ups.

Con
This method of evaluation provides more limited practice with writing skills.
Students may hone in only on aspects of the lab related to the worksheet, and not invest themselves in the broader lab experience.

6. Oral presentation as a group: Students present their work in a chalk talk and/or powerpoint talk with time for questioning by the instructor.

Pro
Students practice oral presentation skills and thinking on their feet.
Through questioning, instructors can probe student understanding deeply and provide immediate feedback to students.
Students work as a team.

Con
The presentations can take up a significant amount of class time.
A misconception by one student is more likely to go undiscovered by the instructor.
The instructor must be particularly sensitive to issues of student confidence and group dynamics to ensure all students benefit from the experience.

7. Individual oral presentation: Same as above, but each student gives his or her own presentation.

Pro
This approach has many of the same benefits as the group presentation, but a student must take complete responsibility for a presentation.
The instructor gains a clear understanding of what a student does and does not understand, and can provide personalized feedback.

Con
Individual presentations take up even more class time than group presentations.
This approach places a significant workload on the individual students.

8. Hallway talk: Students walk the hallways with the instructor, informally describing what they did, what results they got, and answering questions from the instructor.

Pro
This approach allows for an easy back and forth discussion in a more comfortable setting than the formal oral presentation.
Students practice oral presentation skills in a different context.

Con
Because of the informal nature, students don’t always invest as much time in thinking about how to present their results.
Students don’t get practice in the visual presentation of data in the same way that they do for an oral presentation or a formal write-up.

9. Lab notebook: Students keep meaningful lab notebooks, complete with lab objectives, data collected, analysis, results, and discussion, and these are turned in weekly for evaluation by the lab instructor.

Pro
Students practice good habits of data collection and record keeping.
This approach keeps students’ minds turned on during the entire lab period, and prevents students from thoughtlessly collecting reams and reams of data to be presented later.
The instructor gets a unique perspective into students’ thinking about their work in a manner that isn’t possible with polished final products.

Con
This approach doesn’t provide students with a summative experience for the lab.
For the instructor, lab notebooks can be tedious to grade.

10. Instructor choice presentation from lab notebook: In order to facilitate students keeping good lab notebooks, towards the end of the term the instructor has students give an oral presentation on one of the labs from earlier in the term. The instructor picks the lab on the spot, and the student must give an impromptu presentation based on the notes that he or she has in the lab notebook. (It might be good to give students a trial run early in the term so they recognize whether or not they have sufficient notes in their notebook.)

Pro
Students practice oral communication skills and thinking on their feet
This approach provides students with a real motivation to keep good lab notes.

Con
If students do not keep a clear lab notebook and are unable to provide an informed presentation, the instructor doesn’t get a good sense of students’ understanding of the physics.

What methods of evaluating labs do you favor? Why? What methods of evaluating labs did you appreciate most when you were a student? What else would you add to the lists above?