NFE Reflections Griffith 2006-7
From CTLpedia
John Griffith
Faculty, Physics and Astronomy
Physical Science Department
Red Mountain Campus
Mesa Community College
(480) 654-7794
Email me
My Teaching Philosophy
During my thirteen years as a full-time faculty member, my teaching philosophy has evolved. As an instructor fresh out of graduate school, my strength was on subject matter. At that time, I was not really familiar with the community college or the community college student and, though I didn't realize it when I started, I had much to learn about being a teacher in the areas of classroom management and interacting with students. I feel I have grown and progressed in these areas, but I seek to improve even more. Everyday, I learn a little more about this craft we call teaching.
So, where am I now? What do I want students to get out of the classes they take with me? What skills and knowledge do I hope they have when they leave the institution? What are the barometers I use when making decisions about course content and management? I will address the last question first since it has the most concise answer. When deciding what goes into a course, how the course should be run, and even whether or not to change something about a course, I ask myself two questions:
1. Will this change help students to be more successful in this course?
2. Will this change help students be more successful in their later academic and workplace careers?
Only if, in my opinion, the answer to at least one of these questions is Yes is a change made. I talk to former students to find out what things about my courses proved useful to them, as well as what things did not. I talk to faculty in other departments and at other institutions to try and keep the things that are relevant and useful for students, and change those things that are not.
I put a lot of thought into the set of knowledge and skills I think are important for my students to gain by the end of the courses they take with me. Many of these things are spelled out for students along with the reasons I think they are important, in course syllabi, homework and laboratory information sheets, handouts, etc. I tend to be very open with my students about the things I do and why I do them. I believe that if a student knows the why behind something, they accept (or, at the very least, tolerate) it more easily. I guess I am what you might call a hard-nosed instructor. I tend to have a lot of guidelines in my classes, especially the calculus-based physics classes that are taken primarily by Engineering Transfer majors. Homework must be handed in by a certain time, lab books must be kept a certain way, graphing and programmable calculators are not allowed to be used on tests, and students must start solutions to problems on homework and tests with formulas supplied on formula sheets. These general formulas represent a subset of all of those contained in the text; all of the other formulas in the text (and others!) can be derived from this given subset. The main things that I hope students remember after taking my classes are
1. Physics can be fun and, indeed, understandable by all
2. Physics is a way of thinking.
Students want so badly for physics to be rearranging the symbols (if they really have to) in a single equation, plugging in numbers, and evaluating on a calculator. It takes a while to get students to move beyond this preconception, but I think over the course of a year, significant progress is made. I have very high expectations for my students, and I try to make sure that they know I am available to help and that I want them all to do well. I believe that students will rise (or fall) to the level of expectation placed on them and believe that it is possible to both have very high standards and be very supportive of students at the same time. I really think that science should be hands-on as well as minds-on, and hope that students leave my classes believing that the universe is understandable and science can be fun.
A somewhat recent focus has been to incorporate student study skill components into classes. This can be a hard sell and information lost (or not transferred) because students believe that since they have made it to this point in their academic careers, they must necessarily have these skills and there can be a tendency for students to only go through the motions during the activities. To address this issue, I have developed an activity for the first day of class that lets the students tell me that study skills are important by putting students into groups and having them brainstorm reasons a student might not be successful in a college course. In doing this activity, students typically come up with one or two responses to the effect of "a traumatic event or something beyond the student's control causes them to have to withdraw", usually one response that can be categorized as "the student is not able to handle the complexity of the material in the course", and then there are many, many responses that fall into the category of "the student has not developed or is not able to adapt study skills to be successful in the class". This activity is used as a springboard into the study skills activities that follow where I break students into groups and have them tell me what they are going to do to be successful in physics. I tell the students that I often have a student that comes to my office during the last week of the term to ask what they can do to pass the class; I tell the class that it is much better to have this discussion at the beginning of the course rather than at the end because there is time for them to implement the strategies they come up with. The lists of success strategies which students have come up with during these activities would help them be successful in any college course, not just physics.
Another recent goal I have developed for my classes is to explicitly introduce the scientific method and develop laboratory activities that mirror the major components of the scientific method. A few years ago, I realized that there was a lot of physics in my classes, but not much science. This made me uncomfortable, as my courses could potentially be the only science courses that a student takes. The concept of a scientific model is now discussed explicitly in the course, and I emphasize that what we are trying to do in the course is model the world in which we live. When I collected all of the lab experiments for the courses into a single lab manual, the experiments were modified to parallel the scientific method using what I call the PORE method. Students Predict what they think will happen in a given experiment, Observe what happens when they conduct the experiment, Reflect to describe similarities and differences between what was predicted and observed, and Extend the ideas and concepts from the lab to new situations by answering end of lab questions.
Problem solving, critical thinking, and conceptual understanding of physics topics are emphasized throughout the courses I teach. While it is difficult to measure the extent to which critical thinking skills are used by a student, some of the things that I do in class are designed specifically to have students use these skills and to keep them engaged in the course material. The first thing is that part of a student's total score in the course is attributed to structured, in-class participation. This participation has come in different forms over time. For many years, class participation was instituted in the form of drawing a student's name out of a cup and asking the particular student a relevant question rather than posing the question to the entire class and having only a few ever respond. There is a discussion between the class and me up front about the classroom needing to be a safe environment for learning to occur. Students get the participation points provided they participate regardless of correctness of their answer. (They do have to attempt an answer; "I don't know" doesn't count.) It is hoped that this kind of activity has students evaluate the information I give to them, as I give it to them.
More recently, student participation has been monitored and facilitated by using and electronic Personal Response System. Students are asked questions in formats that allow each individual to answer by pressing a key on an infrared transmitter. Two things are very useful about this kind of system, in my opinion. First, all student voices are now equal; students do not worry about responding incorrectly in front of peers and every student must answer. This gives students who take a little longer to process information and formulate an answer the time to do so without having heard the answer given by another student. Second, at the end of the answer period (usually a minute or less), students see an aggregate display of the responses from the class in the form of a histogram. I often ask students questions that, based on Physics Education Research, I know are likely to be answered incorrectly. Before I used this system, I think that a student who did not answer a question correctly could easily have believed they were the only one in the class who did not know the correct answer to the question, because an advanced student in the class would answer the question correctly very quickly. I use the feedback from the system to decide if the class is largely ready to go on to new information or if further discussion of the idea at hand is needed.
Another way I encourage critical thinking is that when solving problems at the board during lecture, I become a stenographer. When students give responses to questions I ask about a problem (usually in the form of "what do I put here?" or "how can I find this?"), I write what they tell me on the board even if what they tell me is incorrect. It is interesting that the simple act of an instructor writing something on the board is taken as carte blanche acknowledgement that it must be correct. I keep going with a solution until someone becomes so uncomfortable they finally say something. At this point, we enter into a discussion about what needs to be changed in the solution, the reasons it might have seemed correct to have given the original response, why that response was not correct, what the correct response is, and why it is correct. I do not generally tell students I become a stenographer up front, but they figure it out fairly quickly. They rapidly understand that each of them has to evaluate what is being written on the board as I will write things given by students that are not correct. I explain to the students that the mistakes that are made are the exact same mistakes they would make when working on alone or in small groups on homework and it is better to make these mistakes with 30 pairs of eyes checking the answer so that any concepts that need to be cleared up can be further discussed.
The focus on problem solving and conceptual understanding in my classes can certainly be seen by the number of homework problems that are assigned. I use a hybrid homework system where students are assigned ten problems weekly through an online homework service. These problems are due once a week, allowing students some flexibility in fitting the needed time with their schedules. To address the issue of providing useful feedback related to formatting and other expectations concerning problem solving on tests as well as addressing the issue of keeping students up to date with course material for lecture, I assign one problem from the text that I grade and return to the student on a daily basis. Forty percent of each test is made up of conceptual questions; the remaining sixty percent made up of textbook-like problems. Assessment begins by asking myself the question, "what do I really want my students to know about this unit?" That is, before crafting a question or problem, I decide on the learning outcome I want to measure. Then, the trick is devising an assessment that allows me to probe for that knowledge without convoluting the assessment with things that will distract a student from giving the information they truly know on the topic. Quantum mechanics tells us that it is impossible to make a measurement on a system without disturbing that system. While assessing students occurs on a macroscopic rather than microscopic level, it is certainly true that a poorly crafted question can obscure what a student really understands about a topic. I pay attention to this when trying to assess student learning about a particular topic.
To further stress the importance of conceptual understanding, when a student comes to me with a question about homework, the first thing that I ask them is to tell me what is going on in the problem. Early in the term, the student will likely start by referring to the formula sheet as they begin to formulate a response. I ask them to put the formula sheets to the side and ask them what concepts we have been discussing are applicable. Only after this discussion is a mathematical solution, including which relationships should be used and why, discussed.
In terms of communication skills, students must keep a detailed lab book during the first quarter of the course and produce formal reports (as a lab team) during the next two terms. These formal reports must be typewritten with typeset formulas. The goal here is to give students the opportunity to practice the written communication and teamwork skills that will be so helpful in their academic and professional careers.
Reflection on Scholarly Teaching and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
My first year of teaching, there was a veteran faculty member across the hall. This person had their curriculum down pat. All of it, homework assignments, projects, exams, lesson notes, which videos they needed when and where to get them -- everything, fit nicely into two filing cabinets. When the faculty member got to a new unit, they simply pulled assignments, homework solutions, one of five stored versions of the exam, and so forth out for use in the particular course. I was oft in my office working on lesson plans, laboratory exercises, developing worksheets, etc. long after the person across the hall had gone home for the day. I remember thinking to myself, "I will be glad when I am to the point that person is. Think of all the time I will save." Now, some years (more than I care to admit) later, I find that I hope I never get to that point. I think it is much better for my students for me to tinker with the ways I present material, the ways in which I ask the students to process the material, and the ways in which I assess student learning of the material in my classes.
For me, scholarly teaching or the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) is how we, as educators, can keep from reinventing the wheel. Talk to someone who has been in teaching for a number of years and they will tell you that this week's buzzword (whatever it happens to be; collaborative learning is an example of an educational buzzword) is exactly the same idea/philosophy as another curriculum, pedagogy, or educational philosophy was about 10-15 years ago.
Why is it we seem to reinvent teaching over a span of time that lasts about one career? In research and development arenas in the workplace, things may be refined but you don't see engineers/inventors reinventing the television every 20ish years. (Think of how little improvement there would be in televisions, as an example, if in order to improve it, engineers first had to invent it again.) What is the difference? One major difference is communcation throughout the discipline along with documentation. There exists a body of documented work (patents, research periodicals, best practices, etc.) from which new inventors and engineers draw to come up with new ideas. In education, we historically haven't done as good a job of documenting the implementation of new curriculum, along with data showing how our learners are impacted. The key, in my opinion, is in the latter part of the previous sentence. We must collect data to show how effective (or not) a curriculum is for a group of learners and then we must disseminate the data to a wider audience of our colleagues for their review.
For many years, professional growth for faculty has had a significant focus on attending meetings and conferences to receive information. It is just as important, if not more important, that faculty present the innovations we try in our classrooms (real or virtual). It seems to me that many faculty who try something new (it might be as simple as introducing a different activity in class to something as substantial as changing delivery styles or entire curricula) believe they have nothing to share because they seem to think "if I thought of it, then certainly everyone else has thought of it." Scholarship is defined (according to the all-knowing www.dictionary.com) as knowledge acquired from study and research in a particular field. Maybe it is the idea of research in the definition that causes two-year college (TYC) faculty to balk at the idea that they have as much to contribute to the SOTL as they do. For, at the two-year college, we don't do research--we teach. I submit, however, that TYC faculty do a great deal of "research" into the effectiveness of their teaching and that their classroom is their research lab.
Does SOTL happen only if one travels to a meeting or conference? I hope not. I think that a significant amount of scholarly teaching could result simply from discussions with peers within the department and colleagues around campus or throughout the district. These are the people who share many of the same learners as you have in your classes. As practices are refined and data is collected, however, it is important that the results be distributed to a wider audience through writing a paper for a journal, presenting at a discipline-specific meeting, or through some other means. Otherwise, your "wheel" is likely to be invented again by someone else later in time rather than refined and improved.
Some examples of activities that would allow a faculty member to participate in the SOTL include (this list is not meant to be all-inclusive):
- Talking about teaching with peers during a department meeting;
- Talking to your students and collecting feedback on a particular assessment, curriculum, or delivery style you have used in class;
- Reading a discipline-specific journal that focuses on teaching;
- Writing an article about teaching and/or learning for a journal;
- Attending a workshop or conference that is focused on teaching and learning;
- Presenting to a group of colleagues about some aspect of teaching and learning;
- Keeping a blog (that you share with others) of your efforts related to teaching and learning;
- Participating in a listserv that has a focus on teaching and learning in general or specific to your field.
Understanding of MCC Culture Gained through NFE
From what I can tell, the NFE program for this year was designed specifically for us "newbies" to learn about the culture at MCC. Certainly, there was time for socializing and talking about how classes and other parts of our job were going, but the first part of the program usually focused on a timely issue whether it be professional growth (EDP, MCLI grants, sabbatical opportunites), services for students (tutoring availability, honors program, scholarships), or more "nuts and bolts" kinds of things (FEP, committee assignments, governance).
One of the striking things that comes through from all of these presentations and discussions is the high degree of expectations that faculty place on one another. From my end of going through the rigorous application process, I could see some of this expectation. However, it is really clear to me from interacting with the group of faculty that has come in to MCC this year as well as with those who have presented to us, that the faculty here really is top notch...We have the cream of the crop.
Impact of NFE on my Approach to Teaching
"If you are dumb, surround yourself with smart people." -- Isaac Jaffe on Sports Night
What a tremendous amount I have learned from my colleagues participating in NFE and from those who presented to us during our NFE sessions. Through NFE, I have seen first-hand the innovative ideas that faculty at MCC have as well as the opportunities for growth and development within MCC and the MCCCD. It is easy to see why MCC and Maricopa have such outstanding reputations nationally. I will use many of the ideas and resources presented to us formally or passed along informally through communications with my peers.
One of the things that was very helpful to me, and gave me information that will continue to be helpful well beyond our time in NFE is done was when, during conversation, someone would ask, "What do you do when....?" The many varied perspectives from faculty in different disciplines allowed me to look at the topic or issue from a variety of different viewpoints. It might be helpful to have a part of each NFE session in future years to include time for, "What do you do when...?" and either solicit ideas from the group for future meetings or just leave it more freeform and improvisational (nice for the participants, tougher on the facilitator). The topics that came up during our sessions ranged from classroom management/instructor-student interactions to interactions with colleagues, travel policies, FEP policies and practices, etc.
Reflection on my Experience in the NFE Community
I very much enjoyed my experience with NFE and getting to know all of the talented individuals who are starting at MCC this year. I have learned so much from the others in the cohort that I will be able to use in classes and in the other aspects of my duties as a faculty member at MCC. It was nice to get to interact with individuals from different departments and also from different campuses. (I teach primarily at the Red Mountain Campus.) Jonelle was an excellent resource as our facilitator both during and outside of NFE sessions. I look forward to continuing in whatever role we come up with for mentors for the NFE group next year.
Oh yeah, the food was good too! =)
Reflection on My Future as a Member of the MCC Community
I am still looking for the proper mirror in which to see this particular reflection.
