Some thoughts about teaching (mostly addressed to my students).

Here are some points about my teaching style and the organization of the course to help you understand what I am doing in my courses.

I don't lecture much, here are some reasons why:

Suppose went to the track coach and said you wanted to learn how to pole vault. All of the following might be helpful but which do you think might be most useful in teaching you how to pole vault?

Watching a film about pole vaulting.
Reading a book about pole vaulting.
Having the coach describe to you how to pole vault.
Having the coach demonstrate how to pole vault.
You picking up the pole and practice trying to pole vault with the coach acting as an advisor, telling you what you are doing wrong.

The book is a better set of lecture notes than anything I can give you in class. In fact, the way most text books are created is that an instructor makes a very careful set of notes, corrects them over a couple semesters, adds problems and has it published. By the time I write something on the board and you copy it down, it is bound to have more mistakes than the book. The book can also give you many more examples than I can in the short class time we have together.

Suppose you were taking a literature class on Shakespeare and were studying Macbeth. It would be a pretty lousy class if all the instructor did was come to class and read Macbeth to you. You would get a lot more out of a class if you came having read the play and the instructor asked students in the class to react to questions about the play or had the students ask questions about parts they didn't understand. That's what I'm doing in class; I assume you have tried reading the text and class time is to be spent on me asking you questions and you asking me questions about the material, not me repeating what is in your book.

The education research literature shows that using collaborative group problem solving and other interactive methods in a physics class can raise the average scores by as much as 30% on standardized tests compared to classes taught with a straight lecture method. This has been verified at many schools, with many instructors, with many different class sizes and types of students. It is hard to argue with these facts...

Some comments about Labs.

Labs are often ahead of the course material. This is intentional. Education research shows that you learn a lot more if you see the physical problem before you read about the theory. If you think you know what is going to happen you often miss important aspects of what is really going on. So usually we will do the lab ahead of the course; normally only by a week or so if we are lucky. You are free, however, when writing your lab reports to look ahead in the book to see what the theory says.

Some labs use old equipment which increases the error of the results. This also is intentional. No experiment ever done in the history of science was/is100% accurate. One of the most important thing to learn about doing an experiment in science is to learn how to isolate the error inherent in the equipment from possible deviations of experimental results from theory. It is doubtful that you will disprove any laws of physics in the labs you do in my course. So the emphasis in these labs is in being able to estimate how much error you expect to have given the equipment or; under the best conditions with this equipment, what is the worst your answer could be off by?

The labs don't have a step by step set of instructions, which is also intentional. The object of the exercise is not to see if you can follow a recipe (that would be a cooking class). The directions are designed to make you think about what you are doing and so are purposely not too detailed (but if you get stuck be sure to ask the instructor- that is what we are here for).

Here are some references.

This is where I've gotten most of my ideas about teaching methods. This is only a partial list but includes at least one reference to most of the important people in the recent physics education research field and each one has further references. All of these can be found in the IUS library:

I. Halloun and D. Hestenes, 'The initial knowledge state of college physics students', Am. J. Phys. 53, (1985) p1043
L. McDermott, ìMillikan Lecture 1990: 'What we teach and what is learned: Closing the gap', Am. J. Phys. 63, (1991) p301.
D. Hestenes, M. Wells, and G. Swackhamer, 'Force Concept Inventory', Phys. Teach. 30, (1992) p 141.
P. Heller, R. Keith, S. Anderson, 'Teaching problem solving through cooperative grouping. Part 1&2' Am. J. Phys. 60, (1992) p 627.
D. Hestenes and M. Wells, 'A Mechanics Baseline Test', Phys. Teach.30, (1992) p 159.
R.J. Beichner, 'Testing student interpretation of kinematics graphs', Am. J. Phys. 62, (1994) p 750.
E. Mazur, 'Peer Instruction: A Userís Manual', Prentice Hall (1997).
A. B. Arons, 'Teaching Introductory Physics', John Wiley and Sons (1997).
D.R. Sokoloff and R.K. Thornton, 'Using Interactive Lecture Demonstrations to Create an Active Learning Environment', Phys.Teach. 35, (1997) p 340.
C. E. Swartz, T. Miner, 'Teaching Introductory Phyics; A Sourcebook', American Institute of Physics (1997).
R.R. Hake,'Interactive-engagement vs traditional methods: A six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses', Am. J. Phys., Jan. (1998 ) and on the Web at <http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake/index.html>; see also <http://www.aahe.org/hake.htm>.
D. Hestenes, 'Who needs physics education research!?', Am. J. Phys. 66, (1998) p465.
Karen Schilling 'Expectations in the classroom: Are they too low?' AAC&U Peer Review, Fall, 1998.