Steve Koch Teaching

Mickey -- Thanks for the great insights! It's...

2009-09-02T11:22:15.938-06:00

Mickey -- Thanks for the great insights! It's good to hear from you both the pros and the cons, since I've been bogged down by the cons lately. It's a good argument that teaching at all levels would give me a better perspective of the department's teaching mission. I can accept or even embrace that. The way it was presented to me (sometimes aggressively) is that the purpose was for me to show competence at all levels. Looking at it that way it seems very inefficient, and silly. Why would we want to build a department full of people competent at all levels instead of full of people who excel at some levels? So, I like looking at it from your perspective better :) Also, I like your idea about allowing interested faculty to specialize and to use it as an opportunity to mentor the next generation. A key there is "interested," which implies not having set rules and instead leveraging each department member's individual talents in different ways.

Hi, Steve. This comment is directed at the footno...

2009-09-02T08:28:48.313-06:00

Hi, Steve.

This comment is directed at the footnote -- I would also say that there is no magic about "three" that should make it a rule. Instead, I suspect this was put into place as a measure of intolerance; that is, for people who don't want to teach a class, 3 is the max number before they become ugly about it. For people who do enjoy a certain course -- or for those like me who are lecturers and teach all the time -- there are pros and cons to teaching the same course a lot. The pros are more immediately obvious: easier prep, learning curve for teacher makes class more effective by 3 round. Cons are also obvious, most especially teacher burnout and lack of inventiveness because of reduced prep time. But one important pro that I think only happens over a longer haul by the same instructor teaching the same course is real innovation as the instructor becomes very familiar with the material. For me, this innovation doesn't happen until I reach a kind of "brown-out" phase where my comfort with teaching something comes up against my desire for things to be new and different. At that point, course material that I am frustrated by or bored with comes under attack!

One missing element to most college-level teaching, though, is professional development time. This semester, I've got a small faculty dev. grant giving me time off one class to "work on my web material" (which 95% of my classes are!). So I've really got time to think about what should be done, time to go into the literature and browse the web for lots of ideas, and time to create new stuff -- a luxury that's much harder to pull off during the course of a regular semester.

I imagine for you this is different -- you are tenure track so have multiple demands on your time. Rotating new profs through many of the core classes is a good idea for helping them develop an understanding of how the curriculum works to educate students in the major (or non-major in the case of electives). This method also provides (or should provide) some insight into what could be improved. But it is also effective to allow those interested to specialize in a course or level, especially if there are TAs to train; this sort of professional mentoring is extraordinarily useful for grad students bent on an academic life.

Yikes! This is what happens when I have time to work at home. My apologies for the rambling!

You're welcome. I've been noticing a few (say 3%)...

2009-03-04T01:01:00.000-07:00

You're welcome. I've been noticing a few (say 3%) of the students thriving on non-text JiTT assignments. For example today I gave them an alternate assignment of taking photographs using their diffraction gratings. Three students turned in really great photographs of spectra of the sun and fluorescent lights. This was out of about 50 that turned in an answer at all, and 150 in the entire class. Their grade is not at all affected by whether they do the assignment at all. 3% isn't a big hit rate, but on the other hand, I think those 3 students really learned a lot.

Just wanted to say thanks so much for the JITT lin...

2009-03-01T13:24:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to say thanks so much for the JITT link -- great stuff -- thinking about ways of using it in my own classes, but also in the some of the teacher training I do -- even if they don't use it electronically, the concept itself is advanced teaching and could be implemented in non-networking environments (with some good teacher control!)

I received a bunch of great comments on my
2008-12-31T16:21:00.000-07:00
I received a bunch of great comments on my friendfeed for this post. Thanks everyone! Here are some cool links that arose:

ONS on Wikipedia

ONS Undergraduate Challenge

Brent Friesen's innovations in u-grad chem lab, and his blog about it: OChemOnline.

Thanks, Shirley! For both instances of the course...

2008-12-30T13:37:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Shirley! For both instances of the course I've had a very good graduate TA who helps with mentoring during lab sessions. I think that is very valuable and works well. The were also free to provide written feedback on the wiki (actually anybody is), but they didn't.

I'm hesitant to require peer-grading, but I think I will encourage them to do so next year. I really like the idea of almuni of the course serving as TAs. I will look into how to accomplish that.

Overall, the scaling thing isn't a big issue for me now, I just wanted to point it out for others with larger classes. We don't expect many more physics majors soon.

Steve, this sounds like a great course! And the su...

2008-12-30T12:34:00.000-07:00

Steve, this sounds like a great course! And the summary you've written here is very useful. The scaling problem might be easily fixed by having a couple TAs - do most places stipulate that there should be 1 TA (or instructor) per 20 students or something similar? At any rate, now that you've taught the course for a few years, there are probably a number of students who would love to help by TA-ing. Feedback from the instructor is always coveted of course but the TAs would be able to give more frequent and more immediate feedback which is, as you said, incredibly valuable.