recent posts
- Hello, World!
- At Play in the Classroom for Thirty-Five Years: Recollections and Recommendations for Keeping Our Spirits—and Our Students—Soaring
- Reaching every student in your General Education class
- Classroom Stories: Teaching Astronomy to Primarily Non-science Students in Group-setting Activities, by Sandi Brenner (Bryant University)
- JWST Carina Nebula
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Category: How-to
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By Stacy Palen Somehow or other, classroom architects in the 1960s, 1970s, and as far along as the 2010s did not get the memo that instructors would sometimes want students to work together on projects. It’s a mystery. Even in our two-year-old science building, the lecture halls are set up for presenting to large groups. This…
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By Stacy Palen As I mentioned in the last post, David Brooks recently collated several different studies of teaching and learning into an Op-Ed for the New York Times titled “Students Learn From People They Love.” Two paragraphs of this article particularly caught my attention; one about brain activity in a group, which I discussed in…
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By Stacy Palen David Brooks recently collated several different studies of teaching and learning into an Op-Ed for the New York Times titled “Students Learn From People They Love.” Two paragraphs of this article particularly caught my attention, one about in-person vs video teaching, and one about brain activity in a group. I’ll talk about each…
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By Stacy Palen The article from Nature Ecology & Evolution, How the Entire Scientific Community Can Confront Gender Bias in the Workplace, came across my screen recently, and it occurred to me that many astronomy professors might not see it… I find that while evidence of gender bias is well-documented, approaches to changing that bias are…
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Using Trade Books in an Introductory Physics Course By Colin Inglefield I regularly teach PHYS 1010: Elementary Physics, at Weber State University. I didn’t choose the course name; at your school, it might also be called Conceptual Physics or Descriptive Physics. Regardless, it is a physics course with no math prerequisite (and therefore very little math…
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By Stacy Palen In the last two posts, I explained what a rubric is and why they are useful. In the prior blog post, I explained how I use the first part of the rubric to guide me as I assess content knowledge in each question. In this post, I will explain how I use…
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By Stacy Palen There is a tension for every professor between giving detailed feedback and keeping up with the workload. I suppose it’s possible that there is a “unicorn” professor out there somewhere who never struggles with this, but I haven’t met them! Using a rubric can be helpful, because a rubric can add clarity…
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By Stacy Palen. I have a TON of math-phobic students in my classes. I teach at an open-enrollment university, where the majority of students test into Developmental Math. Many of these students have such poor math skills that they are enrolled in Math 0950, which begins with counting and the number line and culminates with…
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By Stacy Palen. Often, in-class questions are presented as a binary choice: “Does the star grow, or does it shrink?” I always couch these as, “How many of you think the star grows?" Wait for hands. "How many of you think it shrinks?" Wait for hands. "How many people think that 9:30 in the morning…
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By Stacy Palen. We often wish that students were more engaged in class. Sometimes we complain that students won’t ask questions, or that they won’t answer the ones we ask. This is a training problem: we have to train students to know what our expectations are. Think of it this way: expectations are different in…
Teaching Astronomy by Doing Astronomy 