Teaching
Teaching Philosophy
I believe that the main purpose of Physics courses is to prepare students to become critical consumers (and sometimes producers) of scientific information and to give them quantitative reasoning skills that they can apply wherever their careers take them. While Physics-specific content is obviously important, it is more important to me that students leave class understanding how physics is done. They must learn to think like scientists and to understand why scientists do the things they do. After all, it is rare for a physicist to walk into her office, take a textbook off her shelf, and start plugging numbers into the equations within. Real physicists do back-of-the-envelope calculations and make approximations; they construct models and design experiments to test them; they dig through piles of old journal papers for inspiration on how to attack the problem at hand. Gaining an understanding of this process is obviously indispensable for students who go on to pursue careers in science and engineering, but it is also invaluable for those who do not. By understanding the ideas and practices of science students can make fruitful contributions to important societal discussions such as climate change and health care, where scientific information is a crucial part of the debate.
As an educator, it is my responsibility to establish a safe, warm learning environment where students can learn to approach scientific questions like scientists do. I achieve this by emphasizing cooperative learning, where groups of 2-6 students work together on problems and present their solutions to the class step-by-step. Such active learning activities have been shown to improve student learning and give students practice in communicating scientific information, a crucial skill for anyone participating in scientific discourse. Cooperative learning activities are also a useful teaching tool because they give me immediate feedback. Not only can I verify that students are able to arrive at the correct answer, but I can also see how they obtained it and point out how a particular concept or technique ties into the broader context of physics and physics practice. It is always surprising to see how easily students can go through the motions to arrive at a correct answer but not understand why they did what they did. For this reason, I try to make problems that are more open-ended and exploratory and to challenge students with problems that require a thorough understanding of the relevant physics. The idea is to get them away from hunting for equations in their textbooks and to get them thinking more deeply about how the physics ties into solving problems in the real world. I find that working together on these more challenging questions not only improves learning outcomes but also promotes social bonding, expands students' support networks, and cultivates self-esteem.
In today's connected world, the learning environment extends beyond the classroom. As an instructor, it is up to me to make this possible and to help students when and where they need it, be it on campus or on the Internet. In the past, I have used social networking sites and video chat applications like Google+ Hangouts to hold office hours at nontraditional times when being physically present in my office was inconvenient. I find that students really appreciate being able to ask for help at the times that they are actually studying and doing homework (e.g., late in the evening). Of course, as an instructor I have other responsibilities and cannot be available to all students at all times. To remedy this, I find it useful to create online communities where students can help each other, thus reinforcing the cooperative spirit of the classroom. One platform that I find particularly useful is Piazza. Piazza works especially well because instead of using the usual forum format, where good content can get buried in a flood of posts, it allows only one “students' answer” that the class puts together cooperatively using a wiki-style interface. I find that this interface gives students a better idea of how real scientific collaborations work. It teaches them that science is done a little bit at a time, with each scientist filling in a little piece of the puzzle.
In order to successfully teach students to think of science as a practice and not just a collection of facts in a textbook, it is important to think across the curriculum. Making courses in scientific computing, electronics, and other technical skills mandatory is a good start, but the discussion of scientific practices needs to be a part of every course, so that students grow to see them as a cohesive set of tools with which to look at the world, instead of just another set of facts to cram for a test. One set of skills that is useful for all students and which can be easily incorporated into existing curricula is scientific computation. Not only is computation an indispensable skill for those students who go on to technical careers, but having an understanding of how scientists develop and use computer models is essential for students to make informed decisions in many of today's societal and political debates. During my time at Georgia Tech, I have collaborated with the Physics Education Research Group to implement a reformed introductory curriculum with a significant computational component. Even though the numerical methods we taught were not the most sophisticated, they provided students with a new set of tools with which to approach problems. Our internal assessment showed that students performed equally well on assignments involving computation as on standard homework problems, regardless of whether they had prior programming experience. While some students were initially flustered and complained that “This isn't physics!,” by the end of the semester the great majority had grown to see the value of computational thinking.
Another way to teach students about scientific practices is by bringing active research into the classroom. Nothing opens students' eyes to the relevance of what they are learning more than seeing that those same ideas are being used by practicing scientists doing cutting-edge research. Current research topics can be incorporated into courses in a variety of ways. For example, when I am teaching students about harmonic oscillators, I take the time to talk about my research on coupled, nonlinear oscillators and synchronization. I show them YouTube videos of how the synchronization of pedestrians' gaits caused the Millennium Bridge in London to oscillate and discuss how this type of resonance is different from what happened at the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State. I have also given my students science articles from the popular press and asked to discuss them using the material that they are currently learning. This forces students to think about the process that the scientists had to do to get to a particular result.
Of course, there is no better way for students to learn about scientific practices than by actually doing science. Not only does undergraduate research give students the opportunity to learn useful skills, it has also been shown to improve self-confidence and motivation and to lead to academic success. In order to be successful, undergraduate research projects must be carefully planned in such a way that they align with a student's availability and previous research experience. Students need to be given problems that challenge them, but also ones that they can accomplish. As in the classroom, it is important to foster a culture of collaboration where students feel like they are part of a team. Establishing a strong culture of mentorship within the research group is central to this goal. Research projects must also be aligned with students' interests. For this reason, it is important to have a research program that addresses important scientific questions from a variety of angles. This is particularly challenging since students may be interested in doing theoretical, computational, or experimental work. Some may argue that experimental work is too expensive and time consuming to be carried out by undergraduates. However, with a little creativity, significant experimental projects can be carried out cheaply and successfully.
By following the philosophy and ideas outlined above in my teaching, I hope to inspire students to see science not as a series of black boxes and disjointed facts but as a breathing, living collaborative enterprise. This knowledge will serve them well as they tackle the scientific and societal issues of the future, regardless of whether they follow a career in science or not.
© 2019 Daniel Borrero Echeverry | Last updated: 9-9-2019