AY 300 - Fall 2011: Fourth Day Lesson Plan

Today's class will discuss lesson plans, demos, and quiz questions.

• Review what makes an effective lesson plan.
• Touch on how to effectively administer demos.
• Discuss how to write quiz questions. What are the pitfalls?
• Chose Design-A-Demo partners.
• Practice board work.

The person on call for this week will share their section experience. Some questions include:

• What did you do?
• How did you implement your activities?
• What worked?
• What didn't work?
• What would you do differently?
• How did you assess learning?
• Did you receive any unexpected questions/reactions/etc.?
• Did anything unexpected happen?
• What were you thinking about while you were running section? Any moments of panic?

During this (and after), open the floor up for general questions and sharing about how sections are going. We will do this every week for the rest of the semester.

Transition to discussion of group work activities that were done in section.

(10 min) Get in groups and share your lesson plans with each other. Comment on whether learning objectives are specific, whether activities are well motivated, and if the assessment properly assesses the learning objectives.

(10 min) Discussion as a class: What is important for a lesson plan?

Some notes:

Here is a 12-step program for writing effective lesson plans. Here is the same content in handout form. Here is a lesson plan template.

1. Identify topics to cover.
   • Lecture meets for ~150 minutes a week, while discussion section meets only 50 minutes a week. You cannot be expected to recap a week's worth of material. Don't even try! Pick two, at most three, topics to cover during your 50 minutes. Encourage students to attend office hours if they have more questions.
2. Define the learning objectives of the section.
   • Ask yourself ``What do I want students to leave with at the end of our 50 minutes together?“ Be specific. Are these goals long-term (e.g., mastery of a skill) or short-term (e.g., recapping material)?
3. Determine what method and materials you will use to accomplish these goals.
   • Will you spend section having a classroom discussion, individualized problem solving, or group work? Will there be demonstrations? What materials will you need?
4. Think of a motivation or ``hook” to open the section with.
   • How will you get the student's attention? Flashy demos, hypothetical or real-world situations involving material from lecture, or an ungraded quiz of questions from past exams are good ways of getting students focused.
5. Write a draft of the discussion section. Including an opening hook, procedures, and closing.
   • Do not forget things such as conveying any administrative notes and allowing time for questions.
6. Add details and specific examples. Eliminate vague words like ``discuss,“ ``introduce,” or ``explain.“
   • HOW will you explain a particular topic? Give details. What will you write on the board to aid in your explanation? What prompts will you give to the class?
7. Criticize your timetable.
   • The average attention span is 10–15 minutes. Are you spending longer than this on a particular exercise? Break up your discussion section with demos, lecture work, group work, class discussions, etc. that last only 10 minutes or so.
8. Come up with a backup plan.
   • Wednesday lecture was canceled and students are not ready to discuss the material you had planned to cover. Or your students are so smart that you finish your discussion section in 30 minutes. What do you do now? Have backup plans.
9. Critique your lesson plan globally.
   • Look over your entire plan. Does it work to accomplish your learning objectives? If not, have your learning objectives changed or does your plan need revising?
10. Critique your lesson plan meticulously.
    • You should be able to write a sentence on how each part of your lesson plan goes to accomplishing your learning objectives. If you cannot, that may be alerting you to revise your learning objectives or to revise your plan.
11. Determine how you will assess the success of your discussion section.
    • Will you ask questions near the end of section to probe whether section was successful? Will you ask for written or oral feedback?
12. Repeat any of the above steps as necessary.

• Demo basics:
  • Demos are a great addition to a standard/dry worksheet.
  • Sometimes they actually do help elucidate concepts and students like doing “hands-on” experiments (this is a science class!).
  • As always, the EBRB is a great resource and has a page devoted to demos.
  • In addition, on a given topic's page in the EBRB, there should be listed any relevant demos.

• What makes a good demo?
  • Illustrating difficult physical concept(s)
  • Interactive: students can participate
  • A springboard to new topics
  • Straightforward: minimal risk of failure
  • Demo actually illustrates concept in question

• When demos go wrong:
  • Demos can and sometimes do FAIL!
  • Sometimes, especially in astronomy, they can confuse students more than help them or oversimplify a concept.
  • Materials may be missing or broken, so CHECK IN ADVANCE!

• Some of our favorite demos:
  • Remind everyone that most are written up in the EBRB and on the Resources handout (and wiki page)
  • Do bolded ones?
  • Keep going until a couple minutes before this chunk of class is supposed to be done
  1. Arc lamps: Put high voltage through tubes of gas and look through diffraction gratings to see spectral lines. On the EBRB Light Blackbodies Spectral Lines and the Doppler Effect page, “under Line spectroscopy and arc lamp activities”.
     • C10 already did this, this year.. Check if useful to describe for 10…?
     • Head GSIs will train GSIs
     • Students like this one
     • Make sure the stuff is there if your section is early in the day.
     • Test it yourself and make sure you can see lines so you can help your students better.
  2. Warping of Spacetime: A 2D analogy using stretchy black fabric and balls/weights. No worksheets exist in the EBRB for this one, but feel free to make one! We might do this one in Ay 300 later in the semester.
  3. Celestial sphere, phases of the moon, seasons, orbits: Styrofoam balls, a lamp or flashlight, people getting up and moving around. Many worksheets go with these kinds of demos and can be found on the Demos page of the EBRB or on the Celestial Sphere, Gravity and Orbits, and Earth/Moon/Sun System pages of the EBRB.
     1. Retrograde motion (Discuss pitfalls)
     2. Day & night on Earth (circle up around a lamp and groups of 3)
     3. Lunar phases (balls on a sticks around a lamp and groups of 3)
     4. Seasons (circle up around a lamp)
     5. Lunar rotation and orbit (i.e. tidal locking) (one person orbits another with the Moon's arms outstretched)
  4. Parallax with your finger (very simple, “close one eye then the other” kind of thing)
  5. Doppler shift of sound (whirling a buzzer on a string)
  6. Class H-R diagram (too long to do in Ay 300)
  7. Stating in words, stating in math, drawing, and acting out Kepler's and/or Newton's Laws (can be done with a worksheet, or just have students take notes as each group presents their law) (too long to do in Ay 300)
  8. Donut/bagel on a string (though I'm sure profs will do it in class)
  9. Jumping on a chair with balls being thrown (though I'm sure profs will do it in class)
  10. (Rayleigh) Scattering of Light: Fill a fish tank with water and a couple drops of milk and shine a flashlight through it to show scattering of blue light and transmission of red light. On the EBRB Light Blackbodies Spectral Lines and the Doppler Effect page there's a worksheet called “Emission, Absorption, Scattering, and Nebulae” and one called “Scattering Demo.”
  11. Planetary Nebulae (and Limb Brightening and Optical Depth): use a Hoberman sphere covered in Christmas lights to show how spherical radiating clouds can appear ring-like. On the EBRB's Stellar Evolution page, there's a worksheet called 'Limb Brightening: “Hoberman Planetary Nebula” Demo.'
  • Physics has some, but it's kind of a pain to check them out, but some are good for section and some are good for full lecture.
• Remind everyone that they're required to “Design a Demo”:
  • You are required to design a demo for the class you are teaching.
  • Hopefully the demo will be easy to construct so that we can get funds through Dexter for you to build the demonstration. If the demo is very expensive, you will only be required to write-up your idea for the EBRB so that the idea can be revisited later by future GSIs.

• Start by having them try to answer each other's questions in small groups, noting how long it takes (5 mins)
• Critique each other's questions for difficulty, specificity, length, appropriate level (10 mins)
• Discuss what we've come up with in large group (10 mins)

• We'll pass out a handout in a few minutes which summarizes pretty much all the points we're about to make.
• These points are valid for both quizzes and exams:
  • Test the material emphasized - Exams should reflect the fact that students should know the big concepts really well, as opposed to knowing a bunch of smaller concepts only peripherally.
  • Keep questions short and to the point - Students should spend the majority of their test time thinking and answering/writing, NOT reading.
  • Edit questions for clarity - Clear questions tend to be shorter and if anything is ambiguous it confuses and slows down students and makes it harder for you to grade it fairly. Have someone else take your exam to give some feedback. If you're taking an exam for someone else, be critical and think about possible ambiguities.
  • Don't write a long test - Keep it concise, to the point, and clear! The rule of thumb is your average student will take double or triple the time it takes a GSI to complete the exam. Also, 90% of your students should finish the exam completely in the allotted time.
• Quizzes vs. Homeworks
  • They're quite similar in their construction and type of questions.
  • The main difference is that quizzes should be shorter and have easier questions, since students have much less time to work on quizzes and must work on them alone.
• Quizzes are:
  • short
  • usually given in section
  • questions are of exam difficulty (i.e. easier than homework questions)
  • Not too in-depth or calculation-based. Some light calculation might be OK, but take care. (Not everyone will remember a calculator no matter how many times you remind them, and many people will be petrified of the idea of computing things on their own.)
  • usually only cover recent material (i.e. the past 2-3 weeks)
• Quizzes are used:
  • by the GSI to gauge each students' understanding of recent material individually (as opposed to homeworks which can be done in groups)
  • by the student to gauge their own understanding of recent material and get a feel for what a college level intro science course non-Scantron exam will look like and what level of understanding they are expected to have for the exams
  • by the prof to get a grade early in the semester that's more important than a single homework, but isn't the big production that an exam is (you might not have covered enough material for a full exam)
• What makes good ones?
  • not too long (both in length of individual questions and number of questions)
  • not too hard
  • not too easy (shoot for a variety of difficulties in questions)
  • relevant to recent material
  • varied in the types of questions (multiple choice, fill in the blank, calculation/mathematical, read a graph, free/paragraph response)
  • unambiguous with easy-to-read questions
  • not mathematically demanding - questions should probably not require a calculator and should definitely not include extensive tedious calculations
  • representative of same knowledge required for exams
  • gradable for partial credit (not simply binary right/wrong like Scantron exams)
  • specific about what you're looking for in free response type questions: Don't give students the opportunity to 'core-dump' for a problem, it wastes their time spewing forth useless information and makes your life tougher when you have to grade the mess.
  • quick to grade (this makes your life much easier and helps the grading be more fair for all of your students)
• Quizzes are meant to be relatively low stress (especially compared to full exams)
• Distribute the anonymized quiz questions
• Break into groups of 2-3 and critique the questions
• Come back together as a class and discuss a question or two from each group
• Hand out the handout.
• We will discuss grading these quizzes next week

(1 min) Explanation

(25 min = 5+5+5+5+5) Board Work Activities