If you’re a teacher — of physics, or any other physical science — and haven’t yet picked up a copy of Edward Redish’s Teaching Physics with the Physics Suite , I’m making a bid right now that you do so.
I finally read it — really read it — instead of just browsing through a chapter […]

Our most famous fluids tend to be transparent — air and water, for example. This makes it hard for us to imagine how fluids are moving as members of the general public, but also poses an interesting problem for budding engineers. They need to know how to make fluids do what they want […]

Today’s session is about using interactive lecture demonstrations to effectively improve your students’ understanding of concepts.
As I mentioned in my previous post, while students like demos, they don’t get the things we want them to get unless they predict the results of the experiement or somehow get involved. David Sokoloff showed how they have […]

This session is about how some institutions have sustained change in their courses, and what are the central features of changes that stick: Eugenia Etkina (Rutgers), Steven Pollock (CU Boulder), Charles Henderson (Western Michigan).

The NSF will provide money to create reforms, but individual institutions have to figure out how to make them stick. […]

This session is about the state of affairs regarding women in physics and how we can address it.
Well, no surprise, there’s still a big disparity between the number of men and women in physics — we lose women from physics at every major transition — from HS to college, college to graduate school — […]

Today’s session is all about using diagnosis, or assessment, in your teaching (”Designing a Diagnostic Learning Environment in the Pre-College Classroom”; Lezlie DeWater, Eleanor Close, and Hunter Close).
In the last post I talked about one way to elicit students ideas, using a video and brainstorm. This time, they gave us a bunch of pull-back […]

Our education research group here at University of Colorado had a visit and a very interesting talk by Sanjoy Mahajan, director of the teaching and learning laboratory at MIT and former physics professor, last semester. He focuses on understanding and improving students number sense, mostly through use of approximations and estimations. He’s a […]