United States

When best practices for teaching are applied to professional development, instructors are supported to challenge their inaccurate ideas about teaching and learning and reconstruct beliefs and teaching practices that have been shown to improve student learning outcomes. The Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) at Miami University engages learning communities, cohorts, and unstructured groups of personnel who teach in learner-centered programming centered on scholarly teaching. By making programming available to all ranks of faculty, graduate students, and staff, the CTE can support anyone who is interested, including non-tenure track faculty. This presentation will outline the principles, philosophy, and structure of CTE programming, particularly how community building and scholarly teaching are central to its operation.

AAPT WM 21

Supporting Instructors: Building Community and Excellence through Scholarly Teaching

scholarly teaching

learning communities

faculty development

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SEB Conference 2024

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AAPT® is a strong professional physics science society dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in physical science education.

Winter and Summer National Meetings:
These National Meetings, held each winter and summer, are opportunities for members, colleagues, and future physicists from around the world to:

- participate in physics workshops
- meet and greet other physics educators
- form networks nationally and locally
- engage exhibitors and learn about the latest physics resources
- discuss innovations in teaching methods
- share the results of research about teaching and learning.

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In January 2019, the Wright State University (WSU) faculty went on strike.&nbsp; This became the second longest strike in&nbsp;US higher education history.&nbsp;In Fall 2018, the administration proposed a contract that included suspending&nbsp;tenure protections, weakening&nbsp;job security for non-tenure track faculty, cancelling&nbsp;a workload agreement (which enabled quality classroom instruction), no raises, and eliminating&nbsp;the right to negotiate health care.&nbsp;The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) WSU faculty voted and, with 94% responding, 85% authorized a strike.&nbsp;After 20 days, a tentative agreement was reached.&nbsp; A new long-term contract was signed that reversed most of the negative terms and included maintaining the workload agreement, providing faculty raises, and maintaining the right to negotiate health care.&nbsp; Faculty concessions included not having salaries restored for the interval of the strike and degraded health insurance. Since the strike there has been a high turnover in administrators, including the President.

Wright State University Faculty Strike: 20 days in 2019

Regional institutions that serve local populations are ingrained in the culture and community in which they are located. Local and national views about education and politics surrounding education play a major role in how communities, internal and external, view teaching and learning. This can affect instruction, how resources are used, and how students view the practice of teaching. In 2016, Illinois and Chicago faced severe political and funding issues that threatened and impacted education and services throughout the state, sending strong messages about how education is valued. Despite challenges and ongoing resource needs, institutions are able to leverage the community of students and faculty to enact successful efforts. We provide some historical context around teaching and learning at Chicago State University and describe how community can come together, in the context of the Learning Assistant Model, to establish support for teachers (LAs and faculty), creating the best possible learning spaces.

Leveraging the community of students and faculty to support teachers

Most smartphones when placed in a simple $10 plastic viewer become incredibly capable devices for providing virtual reality (VR) experiences. Unfortunately, the learning curve is steep for creating smartphone-based VR content for physics using various software platforms. The Ohio State University led BuckeyeVR group created two free smartphone apps to help teachers create and deliver 3D content using student’s smartphones. Importantly these apps produce stereoscopic 3D content so that the visualization provides the viewer with a sense of depth perception. In this talk I will share the BuckeyeVR electric field app which provides VR views of electric field configurations. I will also describe the BuckeyeVR plotter that allows students and teachers to define and view vector fields, curves and surfaces. I will also briefly describe some of the education research we have done using these visualizations at Ohio State.

Smartphone-based Virtual Reality for physics with BuckeyeVR

In this session, participants will learn how to use various forms of technology to enhance their classroom instruction. The first is Zappar, this is a platform in which you can create your own augmented reality content.&nbsp; You will see some examples in how students have enhanced their instructional materials and you will learn how to do this yourself.&nbsp; Next is an augmented reality simulation utilizing merge cubes that you can download for free.&nbsp; You will learn how to use this simulation in your own classes.&nbsp; Finally, you will learn about how you can create an alternative to the typical back of the book assessment problems. Utilizing video games as a motivational tool you will learn how to not only still practice the content but also to enhance problem solving skills.&nbsp;

Adding Augmented Reality and Video Games to your Course

Most of the physics concepts taught in introductory courses seem very obvious to the teacher. However, the lack of physics "literacy" makes them often very difficult for some students. Simulations can be used to provide simple interactive models to&nbsp;elucidate these concepts. We will demonstrate several examples of how simulations can be used for this purpose.

The Value of Using Simulations to Clarify Simple Concepts

The Novel Observations in Mixed Reality (NOMR) project at the University of Washington applies modern virtual reality technology to teach experimental physics skills by simulating phenomena that do not exist in our universe. By exploring and characterizing unheard-of and Google-proof physical phenomena, students are able to practice experimental physics skills on a level playing field and in absence of a "right answer" to work toward or be judged against. These phenomena are designed with analogy to electrostatics, varying the number of charge types as well as the functional forms and relevant variables in the force laws governing the interactions between each pair of "charges." In this session we discuss the design of NOMR labs, their adaptation to remote usage in a sophomore-level experimental physics course, and initial research findings.

Teaching Experimentation With New Physics in Remote Virtual Reality Labs

&nbsp; Due to the rapidity of the transition to remote learning, instructors had to significantly — if not completely — change their instructional style on very short notice. In this presentation, we report on student experiences and reactions to the switch to emergency remote learning at two large, land-grant, research intensive universities. We aimed to explore how students have received and dealt with the shift to remote learning that began in March 2020, specifically in introductory physics and astronomy courses. To explore how students responded to these changes, we developed and administered a questionnaire gauging the impacts on students' motivation and interactions with their courses, peers, and instructors during the Summer 2020 semester. We also examined how student responses depended on various demographic factors.

Student Responses to Emergency Remote Learning in Introductory Physics

The ability to engage in evidence-based decision making is an important outcome of modern education. Over the past decade, we have developed and evaluated a lab curriculum, Inquiry for Student Thinking, Analytics, and Reasoning (iSTAR), which explicitly promotes essential reasoning abilities for scientific inquiry and critical thinking. All activities are grounded in a curricular framework based on operationally defined reasoning sub-skills; including controlling variables in multi-variable contexts, data analytics, and causal reasoning. Due to the pandemic, we have redeveloped the curriculum for synchronous online delivery, whereby students complete lab activities working in lab groups via Zoom breakout rooms. This talk will briefly showcase the curriculum, lessons learned for online delivery of labs, and impact on student outcomes with a comparison to data previously gathered in face-to-face settings.

Teaching Scientific Reasoning through Synchronous Online Physics Labs

Due to the current pandemic many changes were made in instruction of an introductory physics for life sciences. Among these changes were the implementation with an open-source textbook, using a standards-based grading system and using a hybrid class format where students are in class somedays, while working online other days. In order to evaluate student experience and learning student feedback will be obtained by administering open-ended surveys on these changes. The goal of open-ended surveys is to provide a space for students to comment on their behaviors, opinions, and understanding of these changes. The responses to the open-ended surveys will be analyzed to determine what the students think of the changes and follow-up studies will be conducted bases on the responses. This presentation will report on students’ experiences to these approaches.

Evaluating Perceptions of Teaching Changes in Physics for Life Sciences

Physics has greatly impacted society, both in solving problems and perpetuating harm. Yet we rarely train students to grapple with their responsibilities to society. The absence of classroom discussions about these impacts reinforces the idea that physics is removed from society. At Texas State University, we have designed and implemented units about ethics, science and society in a modern physics course, an observational astrophysics course, and a multi-disciplinary course focused on this topic. In each of these contexts, we have scaffolded student discussions around large-scale ethical issues related to STEM. In this talk, I will draw on my experiences participating in this work as an instructor and a researcher. I will use video data to highlight factors that enable student engagement, such as curriculum and pedagogy that elicit, push on, and validate student opinions, as well as limiting factors such as students’ perceived lack of agency in the physics community.

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Wright State University Faculty Strike: 20 days in 2019

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