Tennessee Teaching and Learning Center Eric Mazur on new interactive teaching techniques In 1990, after seven years of teaching at Harvard, Eric Mazur, now Balkanski professor of physics and applied physics, was delivering clear, polished lectures and demonstrations and getting high student evaluations for his introductory Physics 11 course, populated mainly by premed and engineering students who were successfully solving complicated problems. Then he discovered that his success as a teacher “was a complete illusion, a house of cards.” The epiphany came via an article in the American Journal of Physics by Arizona State professor David Hestenes. He had devised a very simple test, couched in everyday language, to check students’ understanding of one of the most fundamental concepts of physics—force—and had administered it to thousands of undergraduates in the southwestern United States. Mazur tried the test on his own students. Some soul-searching followed. Serendipity provided the breakthrough he needed. “Here’s what happened,” he continues. “It’s not easy.
Pragmatic Education | *Ideas are the currency of the 21st century* Center for Teaching | Vanderbilt University The Peer Instruction Method Peer Instruction Problems:Introduction to the Method Making Your Lecture More Interactive The Peer Instruction technique is a method created by Eric Mazur to help make lectures more interactive and to get students intellectually engaged with what is going on. In this method, The instructor presents students with a qualitative (usually multiple choice) question that is carefully constructed to engage student difficulties with fundamental concepts. This method, besides having the advantage of engaging the student and making the lecture more interesting to the student, has the tremendous importance of giving the instructor significant feedback about where the class is and what it knows. For more information, see Peer Instruction, Eric Mazur (Prentice Hall) Teaching Physics with the Physics Suite, Edward F. Ways of Collecting Student Responses You can collect student responses in a variety of ways. Electronic Remote Answering Devices (RADs) are now conveniently and cheaply available.
David Didau: The Learning Spy | Brain food for the thinking teacher Centre for Learning and Teaching Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine - Summer Institute Register for a reduced rate on or before May 27th, 2014 For further information, please contact: Beth Slade, Program Coordinator Continuing Professional Development tel (902) 494-1560 fax (902) 494-1479 email: facdev@dal.ca The Ultimate STEM Guide for Kids: 239 Cool Sites Center for Teaching and Learning Helping Students Write Better Lab Reports One of the messages of the Writing Across the Curriculum movement is that writing skills can be developed in any course and that often the best place to start is with current assignments that involve writing. That’s where chemists Gragson and Hagen started. They were disappointed in the quality of student writing in their “journal-style” lab reports. They undertook a major redesign of the lab report assignment, guided by three principles they believed would improve the quality of those reports. For the first experiment, each student wrote an abstract and a materials and methods section according to the formal journal-style lab report protocols. To help students understand the writing demands of this kind of lab report, the authors prepared an Integrated Writing Guide that included a sample lab report. The review and revision process used the Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) model, which includes writing, calibration, peer review, self-assessment, and then revision. Reference: Gragson, D.
CTLS - Center for Teaching, Learning and Scholarship The CTLS is a multifaceted resource to assist faculty, staff, administrators, and students in their integration of innovative teaching and learning techniques, and the scholarship of teaching within the University's Christian environment. The CTLS supports the University's distinctive mission of "For God, for learning, forever" by providing general instructional and assessment design assistance, and promoting a climate for faculty, staff, administrators, and students in their pursuit of lifelong learning. The CTLS currently operates with one full-time staff member. Most faculty choose to teach because of a love of knowledge, a love of students, and an innate need to transfer their knowledge to students. A positive consequence of nurturing faculty is to focus their attention on teaching the "whole person." The CTLS Director, Assistant Provost Nancy Biggio, is available for individual consultations with faculty to discuss teaching techniques, course development, and tenure and promotion.
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