Giving Students What They Need
I began teaching the College Physics course in the late 1990s, and I taught my last College Physics lecture in December, 2022. Over that time, the way I taught changed dramatically.
I started as a pretty standard “chalk talk” lecturer. But, by the time I retired, I was leading classes in which students spent most of their time engaged in problem-solving practice.
Creating and teaching the course this way was much more work—but it was also much more effective. As I shifted my teaching, I found that the students that benefitted the most from this approach were the students at the lower end of my grade distribution. Their performance steadily improved, until, by the time I retired, out of a class of 500 students, 98-99% of my students would pass with a C or better.
Key Elements
- Keep it Active, Keep it Social
- Less is More
- Keep it Engaging
Keep it Active, Keep it Social
Here’s a video from one of my classes from a few years ago. Most of class time was spent with students working through problems, with periodic guidance from me, and regular help from student learning assistants. There were two key ideas here: Students were active, and they were social—both strategies proven to help student learning and retention.
Less Is More
What will your students remember from your course a few years down the road? Rather than try to squeeze everything in, focus on the key elements that you want your students to learn, and spend the time to be sure they can master these elements.
This means cutting topics. Even though I am co-author on a textbook for the College Physics course, I didn’t use all of the material in the text. My students were nearly all in the life sciences. Did they need a section on AC circuits? Nope. So we skipped that chapter, except for the bit on electrical safety. Rotational motion? Only a very brief introduction. But did they need fluids? Yes, they did—so I expanded my coverage here.
Here are two documents that spell out a day-by-day plan for the course, along with chapter numbers from Knight, Jones Field College Physics.
First semester course: Day-by-day outline
Second semester course: Day-by-day outline
Keep it Engaging
When you have students solve problems, keep your topics real, and keep them relatable.
My students were in the life sciences, and so I made the theme of the class applying physics concepts to the living world. Nearly every single example I did in class used real data, and most of them were applications to the living world.
Resources
Slide sets from General Physics I / General Physics II (coming soon)