Reflections on Teaching – Page 7

The machinery of very large courses

Well, a new semester has begun. Once again, my Physics 132 course is remote. Due to the unique challenges of this pandemic and remote learning, I am also completely in charge of the lab portion of the course for the first time this semester. This added responsibility, 14 lab sections and 11 TAs, plus my efforts to make the course as flexible as possible in response to the pandemic really has me reflecting on the machinery of very large courses.

This first week-and-a-half has been all about getting things moving. There really are so many pieces: the zoom schedule, the forum, the recordings, the lab manual, the homework, the TA schedule, the TA help sessions, getting all the TAs knowing what they need to do, then helping the 600 students understand it all! It really is like running a small company.

Personnel management should be a required thing for all graduate students.

Fishbone Root Cause Analysis Protocol

This document from the Minnesota Department of Education describes this interesting protocol which describes a procedure for really determining the fundamental causes of a problem (such as student struggle) under the assumption that treating the cause (as best as possible) is more effective than treating just the symptoms. The basic idea is to work to you find a “significant cause that can, in fact, be changed.”

I find this to be an interesting perspective to share when we consider the myriad of unique challenges that our students are facing during this time of COVID-19.

Reflecting on Remote Physics 132

I know the blog has been quiet lately. Like so many others, I have been learning how to juggle everything in this new reality. What time I have found to share with others online has been spent on the page of remote teaching resources I have been curating.

Well, now the semester has finished and I am doing my usual reflecting on how it went and what I can do better for the next round of remote learning in the Spring 2021 semester. A lot happened, so the thoughts are long, but here they are.

Jake Shechter Reflects on Job Searching

Jake Shechter was instrumental in developing the Physics 691G course and will finish his Ph.D. this summer.

As such, he was on the job market this past spring (pre-COVID-19). He was looking for a teaching position, either high school or higher-ed.

Below are his reflections on the job search. Hopefully, this will be helpful to others looking to begin the process in the near future

A great pair of posts thinking about the equity and impacts of remote teaching practices

A Reminder of Who is Hurt by Insisting that Students Share Images of their Personal Lives

You Probably Don’t Know Your Students as Well as You Think You Do (and That’s Okay, but You Still Have to Design for Their Success)

-Rebecca Barrett-Fox

Assume that your students are going to have a lot going on, that some of it will be unpredictable, and that none of it is your business to know–and yet you must design a remote course around it.
Rebecca Barrett-Fox

I stumbled on these during the semester and building my remote course. However, I did not have time at that moment to reflect on it here.

This is a really important article, I think. Particularly for those of us who teach large courses: the larger the course, the higher the larger variety of difficult situations your students are facing, and the harder it is to deal with them one-at-a-time. Thus, while such thinking should be standard practice, for large courses, the instructor MUST design in such a way to make the course as equitable as possible. In the remote-teaching world equity includes thinking about the home lives of yourself and your students and how those environments impact teaching and learning. Thinking about digital privacy is another factor that must be considered.

Trying to design a course around challenges that you don’t, and shouldn’t, know exist as well as around difficulties your students don’t know they have is tough, but something important to keep in mind as we plan for the possibility of remote in the fall.