My tweeps are coming with me

[Note: this post began as a comment I left on a post by Maria Anderson (@busynessgirl on twitter). She announced she’s heading to a new job. I recently did that, too…]

As I announced recently, I’m leaving UBC and Vancouver for a new position at the University of California, San Diego. Amongst the hundreds of joys, sorrows, thrills and frustrations of leaving one community and joining another, twitter is playing an important part for me.

Yes, this is another post recommending you get on twitter if you’re not there yet. And if you are there, here’s another reason why that was a good choice.

One of the things that is making this move easier, and harder, is twitter. I already chat regularly with dozens of colleagues around the country that I’ve never met in person. I’m not leaving them behind when I move. They’re only an arm’s length away in Tweetdeck on my laptop and hootsuite on my phone. That’s only as far away as they’ve ever been.

There are lots of people I know, I like, I [gulp] love in real life, here in Vancouver, that I’ll continue to work with, laugh with, #happytears with, and occasionally #damnsomethinginmyeye with via Twitter.

It’s comforting that my followers and followings are coming with me. I waved goodbye to a few colleagues yesterday and felt almost no twinge of sadness because I chat with them almost every day on twitter.

Of course, getting together with colleagues and friends is important. We’re social animals, we need that interaction. I’m not suggesting I don’t value that or crave that. I am suggesting that twitter softens the gash of leaving your community.

It’s funny but I felt bad, almost guilty, during the time between applying for the job and getting it because I couldn’t share my job-getting experiences with my Twitter community. You know, confidentiality of who’s applying for jobs, not wanting to reveal any info that might come back later. And honestly, not wanting to reveal going after a job and then not getting it. I’m so used to sharing my professional and personal adventures, I felt bad hiding the thrill of emailing my CV, or how nervous I was just before the interview, or the adrenaline rush when it was over.

It was such a relief to finally share my news.

There you have it:

Reason #781 for being on twitter: Your followers and followings come with you when you move.

(Image: adapted from Boxes by james.thompson on flickr (CC). I added the twitter logos, myself.)

Posted in social media | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

A Tale of Two Comets: Evidence-Based Teaching in Action

Comet McNaught

Comet McNaught wow'd observers in the Southern Hemisphere in 2007. (Image by chrs_snll on flickr CC)

We often hear about “evidence-based teaching and learning.” In fact, it’s a pillar of the approach to course development and transformation that we follow in the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative.

It’s a daunting phrase, though, “evidence-based teaching and learning.” It sounds like I have to find original research in a peer-reviewed article, read and assimilate the academic prose, and find a way to apply that in my classroom. Does a typical university instructor have the time or motivation? Not likely.

It doesn’t have to be like that, though. There are quicker, easier analyses and subsequent modifications of materials that, in my opinion, qualify as evidence-based teaching. Let me share with you an example from an introductory, general-ed “Astro 101” astronomy course. First, a bit of astronomy.

Comets and their tails

Comets are dusty snowballs of water ice and other material left over from the formation of the Solar System. The comets we celebrate, like Comet Halley, travel along highly-elongated, elliptical orbits that extend from the hot, intense region near the Sun to the cold, outer-regions of the Solar System.

Comet's tail

A comet's tails point away from the Sun. The comet is orbiting clockwise in this diagram so the yellow dust tail trails slightly behind the blue ion tail.

As comets approach the Sun, like Comet Halley does every 76 years, the comet’s nucleus warms up. The ice turns to gas which creates a sometimes-spectacular tail. The tail grows larger and larger, streaming out behind the comet until it rounds the Sun and begins to head back out into the Solar System. That’s when something interesting happens. Well, another interesting thing, that is. You may think the comet’s tail streams out behind like the exhaust trail (the contrail) of an airplane but once the comet rounds the Sun, the tail swings around ahead of the comet. Yes, the nucleus follows the tail. That’s because the tail is blown outward by the solar wind so that the tail of a comet always points away from the Sun. (Well, there are actually 2 tails. The ion tail is strongly influenced by the solar wind – it’s the one blown directly away from the Sun. A dust trail also interacts gravitationally with the Sun, causing it to curl out behind the ion tail.)

Teaching and learning

It’s not what you’d expect, the tail wagging the dog. And that’s make it a great opportunity for peer instruction and follow-up summative assessment.

Last December, the course’s instructor and I sat down to write the final exam. We could have used a multiple-choice question

The ion tail of a comet always…
A) points away from the Sun
B) trails behind the comet
C) D) E) [other distractors]

Or perhaps a more graphical version, like this one from the ClassAction collection of concept questions:

Comet Trajectories concept question from ClassAction

A concept question about the shape of a comet's tail from the ClassAction collection at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. The correct answer is C, by the way.

Both of these questions are highly-susceptible to success-by-recognition where the student doesn’t really know the answer until s/he recognizes it in the options. “What do comets’ tails do again? Oh right, they point away from the Sun.”

Instead, we decided on a question that better assessed their grasp of how comet tails behave. The cost is, this question is more difficult to mark:

Assessment

Oh, the question was marked out of 2, 1 pt for each tail pointing away from the Sun. That’s not the kind of assessment I mean, though. I’m talking about the assessment that goes into evidence-based teaching and learning. How did the students respond to this question? What it a good test of their understanding?

I went through the stack of N=63 exams and sorted them into categories. It wasn’t hard to come up with those categories, it was pretty obvious after the first 10 papers.

  • 46 students: tails of equal lengths pointing away from the Sun. Yep, 2 out of 2.
  • 5 students: tails of equal lengths pointing away from the Sun with guidelines. Nice touch, reinforcing why you drew the tails the way you did. 2 out of 2. And some good karma in case you need the benefit of the doubt later on the exam.
  • 3 students: drew ion tail correctly and dust tail mostly correct. Good karma for adding extra detail, though the dust trail is too much traily-behindy. Be careful, kids, when you write more than is asked for – you could lose marks.
  • 1 student: tails with (correctly) unequal lengths pointing away from the Sun. Oh, very good! Maybe 3 out of 2 for this answer!
  • 8 students: various incorrect answers. I like this first one (“Oh, geez, there’s something about pointing and the Sun, isn’t there? Ummm…”)

Evidence-based teaching

It’s clear that the vast majority of students grasp the concept that a comet’s tail points away from the Sun. Terrific!

So why are we wasting this question on such an obvious bit information, then? Let me put that another way:  These students are evidently, and I mean evidently, capable of learning more about comets. We thought this <ghost> “Oooooo, watch oouuttt! Comet tails point awaaaaayyyy from the Suuuun…” </ghost> concept would be difficult enough. Nope, yhey surprised us. So let’s crank it up next year. Let’s explore the difference between the ion and dust tails. And that the length of the tail changes as the comet approaches and recedes from the Sun. Next year, the answer that gets full marks will be the one with

  • 2 tails at each position,
  • the ion tail pointing away from the Sun,
  • the dust tail lagging slightly behind the ion tail,
  • short tails at the far location, large tails at the close location

That’s evidence-based teaching and learning. Find out what they know and then react by building on it and leveraging it to explore the concept deeper (or shallower, depending on the evidence.) It’s not difficult. It doesn’t require poring over Tables of Contents, even in the excellent Astronomy Education Review. All it requires is small amount of data collection, analysis and ability to use the information. Hey, those are all qualities of a good scientist, aren’t they?

Posted in astro 101, peer instruction, teaching | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Situated Learning

[I wrote this review of situated learning, also known as situated cognition, in 2009 for the internal communications discussion board we use in the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative. I go back to it often enough, mostly to find the reference for the amazing paper by James Paul Gee, that I’m reposting here.]

We’ve all seen it, and probably done it, too. An instructor has a really interesting problem to tackle in a course, a problem that synthesizes many concepts. So the instructor carefully presents each concept, one after another, building anticipation and excitement for the big day when everything comes together. And when the big day arrives, a month into the term, the students don’t seem to get it. “But we just spent a month getting ready for this! Why aren’t you excited? Can’t you remember concepts A, B, C, D, E, F and G?”

Uh, no. The problem is, concepts A thru G were presented without any context. They are disembodied or decontextualized knowledge.  There’s no scaffolding, no motivation to grab the students’ attention. The promise of excitement a month from now isn’t enough. As this is a scenario I’m facing, I needed some research to support my argument for change. At Carl’s suggestions, with great help from Wendy Adams (CU Boulder), I put together a brief summary of what we know about the failures of decontextualized knowledge, or better yet, the profound benefits of situated cognition.

For thousands of years, novices have become experts through apprenticeship: the master trains the novice, not just with reading assignments and homework, but by teaching the craft in situ. The novice accumulates the craft’s concepts as needed. The novice learns simultaneously, both the knowledge and how to use it. As Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989) write,

by ignoring the situated nature of cognition, education defeats its own goal of providing usable, robust knowledge.

This paper is an excellent discussion. The authors describe two benefits to situated cognition:

  1. “Learning from dictionaries, like any method that tries to teach abstract concepts independently of authentic situations, overlooks the way understanding is developed through continued, situated use.” This echoes Chapter 3: Learning and Transfer of How People Learn. Teaching in context (and then in slightly different situations) increases the “flexibility” of students’ knowledge, aiding transfer.
  2. “[Students] need to be exposed to the use of a domain’s conceptual tools in authentic activity – to teachers acting as practitioners and using these tools in wrestling with problems of the world.” This one surprised me because it didn’t even occur to me and it’s probably more important than the first. Students in a situated learning environment get “enculturated” (Brown et al., 1989) into the practice of how to study the field, not just the field’s concepts.

Okay, great. But how do you do it? How do you “enculturate” your students? What kinds of activities or curricula work?

Mayer and Wittrock, in Chapter 13: Problem Solving of the Handbook of Educational Psychology (Winne and Alexander, 2006) describe a wide range of methods for teaching problem solving, many of which have a flavour of teaching and learning in context.

Donovan and Bransford in How Students Learn (2005), a follow-up to How People Learn, collect together a number of case studies about teaching and learning science.

Sabella and Redish (2007) give some advice for physics instruction, but the messages are much more general:

[C]onceptual knowledge is only one part of what students need to know in order to solve physics problems. They also need to know how and when to use that knowledge.

Finally, if you read only one more paper after Brown et al., read this fantastic how-to article by James Paul Gee. He studies literacy and he’s a (the?) video gaming guru. This article, “Learning by Design: good video games as learning machines” (2005) lists 13 principles that education should have. Each principle is matched to a video game where that skill or activity is best exemplified (they’re all long, role-playing games like Halo and Tomb Raider where you must accumulate skills to win). And for us, he kindly translates the principles into what educators need to do to incorporate these principles into our teaching, like

skills are best learned as strategies for carrying out meaningful functions that one wants and needs to carry out.

In conclusion, situated cognition (or situated learning) has benefits far beyond helping students hang concepts onto the scaffold in the right places. It introduces them to how experts in the field practice their craft.

References

J.S. Brown, A. Collins, and P. Duguid, “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning,” Educational Researcher 18, 32 (1989).

J.D. Bransford, A.L. Brown, R.R. Cocking (Eds.) How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. (National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2000).

R.E. Mayer and M.C. Wittrock, in Handbook of Educational Psychology (2nd ed.), edited by P.H. Winne and P.A. Alexander (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006), 287.

M.S. Donovan and J.D. Bransford (Eds.) How students learn: Science in the classroom. (National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2005).

M. Sabella and E.F. Redish, “Knowledge activation and organization in physics problem-solving,” Am. J. Phys. 75, 1017 (2007).

J.P. Gee, “Learning by Design: good video games as learning machines,” E-Learning 2, 5 (2005).

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to San Diego I go!

I have really exciting news: In August, I’ll be leaving UBC and Vancouver to take up the position as Associate Director of the Center for Teaching Development at UC San Diego! The new Director, Beth Simon, has gotten everyone fired up about learning how to be better instructors. There are faculty just aching for some support so I’m really excited about bringing the community together to share all our expertise. Social media is about to hit teaching and learning at UCSD in a BIG way!

This is a terrific opportunity for me and a natural progression on the career path I’m following. I think I’ll finally shake the imposter syndrome I’ve felt ever since I, with a Ph.D. in mathematics, became an “astronomer.”

There’s so much do right now, not the least of which is getting my house ready to sell. If you follow me on Twitter (I’m @polarisdotca), you may have seen my #homerenovation hashtag a lot lately. Yes, so much to do but so exciting!

Stay tuned. This is just the beginning of a really great adventure!

 

 

 

Posted in professional develpment, social media, teaching | Tagged , , , | 12 Comments

Workshop on Effective Peer Instruction in Biology

I’m really excited to be running another peer instruction workshop with my colleague Cynthia Heiner. This time, we’re tailoring the content of the clicker questions to biology, thanks to the input (and organization) of our CWSEI colleague, Bridgette Clarkston (@funnyfishes on Twitter). I’ll try to get the presentation into Slideshare. In the meantime, I made of poster [PDF] for the the 2012 CWSEI End-of-Year event that illustrates the clicker choreography we recommend.

Effective Peer Instruction in Biology
Using Clickers

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Presenters Peter Newbury and Cynthia Heiner
CWSEI Science Teaching and Learning Fellows
Time 9:00 – 9:30 am: Coffee and donuts
9:30 am – 12:30 pm: Workshop
12:30 – 1:00 pm: Lunch (provided), chance to mingle and ask questions
Location Biological Sciences Bldg, room 4223 (next to Zoology Main Office)
Workshop This workshop will emphasize best practices for introducing and running peer instruction with clickers. Everyone will have a chance to practice conducting a peer instruction episode, from presenting a question to reacting to the audience’s votes. We’ll talk about whether or not to award clicker marks and point you to resources for learning the technical side of using i>clickers: hardware, software and sync’ing with Vista. We’ll also briefly discuss what makes and effective clicker question and, if time allows, discuss tips for creating effective questions.
Audience This workshop will focus on teaching biology and is open to everyone interested in science education including (but not limited to) faculty, staff, post-docs, graduate students and upper-level undergraduate students.
Please register by Friday, May 11th by contacting Bridgette Clarkston. Please indicate if you’d like to attend the lunch and if you have any dietary restrictions.
Posted in clickers, peer instruction, professional develpment, teaching | Tagged , , | 2 Comments