DRAFT!! Some
supplemental materials for TA workshop on teaching and learning:
A survey about the
workshop.
A " homework " problem on individual tutoring
methods.
An " exam " question on student preconceptions and
teaching styles.
A sample " context-rich"
problem with guidelines
and questions.
Some sample concept questions
(An excerpt of 9 questions from the Force Concept Inventory
is in a separate file)
Summer grad TA teaching workshop survey: (circle one answer, and then add
comments)
Thanks for helping us improve this workshop. Please continue
on the back t if you need more space!
1.) How much do you feel you learned about
teaching by attending this workshop? (Circle one)
A lot.................. a fair
amount...............something...............very little......................nothing
at all.
Please elaborate:
What specifically did you learn here that you didn't know before?
2.) How useful do
you feel this workshop has been in terms of helping you teach a more effective
recitation this fall? (Circle
one)
Very
useful...............useful.....................neutral.................not
very useful............Completely useless.
Please elaborate: In what specific ways was the workshop useful to you?
And, in what ways would you like to see it changed or improved?
3.) If we had a
followup workshop (e.g. in the early spring) like this one, to delve further
into issues of education research and effective teaching, would you be
interested in attending? (Circle one)
Most definitely.............probably.................neutral...............probably
not..................Definitely not
Please elaborate:
What would you like to see covered in a future workshop? Would you
prefer some other format (e.g. weekly or monthly meetings to talk about
teaching issues?) Why?
Summer TA teaching workshop homework YOUR NAME
_______________________________
You have office hours in the help room, and the freshmen in
second semester algebra-based physics are assigned the problem shown on the
right on a CAPA homework set.
A student calls you over and says she doesn't know what the
answer is.
a) How might you
respond to this student?
(Past the first thing you try, what you do may depend on how
the student responds to you. Feel free to "make up" a plausible student/scenario
here).
b) A senior
instructor for the course was lurking at the side of the room, listening in on
your conversation but not participating. Afterwards, she asks what made you
respond as you did?
How would you justify the pedagogical value of your approach
to this instructor?
Summer TA teaching workshop "exam". YOUR NAME
______________________________________
Suppose you TA assignment this year has a full section: 32
students in a cramped room. Near
the end of the course, the central topic of the week's homework is "2 slit
interference of light" (If you really know NOTHING about this topic right
now, you can instead consider the topic "the electric potential".)
a.) Speculate on (at
least) one preconception students might have about this material,
that would make problem solving difficult for them.
b) How might you go
about finding out what preconceptions your students really have about this
material?
c) What recitation technique would you choose to help your
students better understand this material? Why? (This is the meat of the
question - justify your choice) What might modify your decision?
Context rich example:
You are flying into Chicago when the pilot tells you that the plane can't land immediately
because of airport delays, and you will have to circle the airport. This is
standard operating procedure. She also tells you that the plane will maintain a
cruising speed of 400 mph at an altitude of 15,000 feet wile traveling in a
horizontal circle around the terminal.
To pass the time, you decide to figure out how far you are from the
airport. You notice (looking out the window) that to circle, the pilot
"banks" the plane so that the wings are oriented roughly 10 degrees
from horizontal. An article in your in-flight magazine explains that an
airplane can fly because the air exerts a force, called "lift", on
the wings. The lift is always perpendicular to the wing surface. The magazine
article also gives the weight of the 727 you're in as 100*10^3 pounds, and the
length of each wing as 150 feet. It gives no information on the thrust from the
engines or the drag on the airplane.
Questions you might ask yourself as a TA: Does the question
seem realistic? Is it likely to engage students? In what ways is this better
than a typical end-of-chapter question?
Does it encourage organized, logical problem solving strategy? Why? Is
it tedious? Is it a "trick"? What concepts/principles of physics does
it involve? What procedures are required? Is there a way of "dividing the
labor"? Is there any information missing? Anything superfluous? Is the
"unknown" target variable explicitly named?
Problems can be modifed from standard end-of chapter
examples, but need to be recast as a personal, motivated, and perhaps
ambiguous. It's easy to make group problems too complex. Below are some "challenge
guidelines" to think about: if you have more than a half dozen of them
checked off, the problem may be too much for an in-class problem. Start easy
and work your way up - students need to learn to work in groups, and organize
their problem solving strategies, it's not a "natural" skill for most
of them.
(All stolen from http://groups.physics.umn.edu/physed/,
which has much more for TA's!)
My own:
You're reading an article in the local paper about lightning
deaths in Colorado, when you run across an impressive "factoid": the
earth's surface has an average electric potential of a half million volts.
You're suddenly struck by a mental image of the earth as a gigantic spherical
capacitor! You start thinking about this and wonder - coud we make use of the
resulting stored electrostatic energy a a significant long term "energy
supply" for our electric needs?
or another one:
You get a summer job working at LASP (Cu's lab for
atmospheric and space physics). The group you're in will launch a rocket to
measure ozone depletion in the atmosphere - the rocket has been purchased, and
your project leader is designing a mass spectrometer (which can measure trace
elements) to fit into it. The
rocket will provide 30 seconds of full (constant) upwards acceleration, at
which point the fuel runs out. The
estimated total flight time from launch to landing is 5 minutes. Your spectromenter is a sensitive
instrument, it can't handle more than 4 or 5 g's without risk of breaking. Is
the experiment likely to work?
SAMPLE CONCEPT QUESTIONS:
A skier on frictionless snow
(so common in Colorado) is cruising gently along the flats, when she spots a
symmetrical dip.
She can go down and back up
the dip, or ski horizontally across a bridge.
Which path will get her to
the far side faster?
PINK: Bridge is faster
BLUE: Dip is faster
GREEN: Same
PURPLE: Not sure
A bundle of parallel rays
approaches the eye and some of the rays enter the eye's pupil, as shown
below. No other rays enter the
eye. What does the eye see?
PINK: A single point of
light, surrounded by blackness.
GREEN: A uniformly
illuminated wall of light, like a white wall.
BLUE: Many scattered points
of light, like stars in the night sky.
YELLOW: None of these.
In the 1600's, Otto Van
Güricke, a physicist in Magdeburg, fitted two hollow bronze hemispheres
together and removed the air from the resulting sphere with a pump. Two
eight-horse teams could not pull the spheres apart, even though the hemispheres
fell apart when air was re-admitted.
Suppose von Güricke had tied
both teams of horses to one side and bolted the other side to a heavy tree
trunk. In this case the tension in the rope would be...
PINK: twice
BLUE: exactly the same as
YELLOW: half
PURPLE: (not sure)
...what it was before
