AY 375 - Fall 2016: Sixth Day Lesson Plan

Remind them what to think about for section recap:

• What did you do?
• What worked?
• What didn't work? What would you do differently?
• How did you assess learning?
• Did anything unexpected happen?

• Group discussion of video and slides (Led by Carina)

Diffraction grating demo (10 min)

• Which way are the lines spaced?
• How many lines per mm?
• Wavelength dependence
• Width of Human Hair

Discussion on doing demos? Has anyone done demos and how did they turn out?

• 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 C10 favorite demos: see notes from Ay375 Fall 2013.

This is in particular relevant to the lab-based courses (Ay120, Python class) where most of the GSI interaction is in the form of office hours or emails to answer questions on assignments. These are also useful in TALC.

Group discussion - you've probably been doing this but making it more explicit:

• (5 min) General office hour/email experiences so far (if not yet discussed).
  • Have there been people coming?
  • What kind of questions have you been getting?
  • How are you handling them?
  • Specially for lab courses where the course is focused on implementation/execution, what kinds of questions have you been getting? Are they high level or very technical?
• (5 min) When you get questions from students on homework questions, how do/should you handle them?
  • General strategy: Identify where the confusion is and address it
    • Identifying the confusion: ask them to explain the problem to you as best as they can and see where they run into trouble
    • What kind of confusion is it: misunderstanding? unable to grasp what the goal of the task it? forget a step? math error?
    • Address the source of the confusion and have them attempt the problem again
  • In general, we want to push the question back to them, but in a different/leading way.
    • e.g. How do I find the location of the star in my data? How would you answer that
      • e.g. Where do you think it is? What did your brain just do to try to figure out where it is? How could I put that in mathematical/programming terms to implement it? (Basically what I've done is taken a higher level question, and thought of some lower level questions that can guide me to the answer)
  • Learning how to problem solve and get to the answer are skills we want to teach
  • We don't want the reason they did something to be: “The GSI told me to do it this way”
• (3 min) Debugging (specific to lab/python)
  • How to handle debugging issues? Ask for opinions
    • When do you help them?
    • Avoid spiral of debugging everyone's code
  • General rule for Astrolab: because the class does not explicitly prereq coding, especially at the beginning, help them debug but also use it to teach them how to debug (print statements, pdb, how to use IDEs, how to use Google)
• (2 min) When should you just give them the answer?
  • Things that do not really contribute to the learning objectives
    • Math errors: 1+1=3? (Exception: equations in wrong units)
    • Coding API questions (how do I make an array in numpy, what is the argument to do…)
    • Things that take a long time to figure out how to get, but don't have very much benefit to learning (examples?)

• These questions should cover things you want feedback on. Be explicit about what you want to know whenever possible.
• There should be room for some free response (e.g., if there's anything else not addressed here…)
• You should make sure you take some time to go over the results in a later session.
  • If you have quantitative questions, this might include averages, or distributions.
• You should make sure they are able to fill them out anonymously.

• NOTE: The Ay 375 eval is a little bit on the long side; we did this purposely since Ay 375 is such an amorphous class and should be tailored to what its students are interested in.
• Discuss the wisdom from past GSIs and Slater & Adams chapter 9:
  • Assigning a combination of “Informal Written Response” and “Check-box Questionaire”.
  • In addition, we've done two types of “Observation by a Critical Friend”, both a peer visit and a videotape.
  • Use different colored highlighters for positive and negative comments that merit further review.
  • Four categories of “course difficulties”:
    1. simple fixes
    2. fixes for next semester
    3. offsetting concerns
    4. issues without remedy
• Why do we do mid-semester evals
  • There is a department wide, official end of semester eval, but by then it's too late to fix things for your current students.
  • The point of student feedback at mid-semester is to allow you to adjust your section and teaching style as necessary to match your current students' demands.
  • However, take the responses with a grain of salt; Ay 10 student don't always know what's best for them!
• Mid-semester eval basics
  • They should be done about half-way through the semester (try to avoid right before or after an exam – this usually skews your results!); halfway through the semester is one week from today.
  • They should be anonymous (however you might want to ask for their section number so you can compare your multiple sections).
  • Sometimes this is done during the last 10 mins of a section, but you get less accurate responses this way since many students will rush through it just to leave early.
  • Consider doing it in the middle of section (maybe right after your initial lecture review/Q&A session).
  • The GSI will usually step out of the room during this time or at least turn their back to the class.
  • Have a student collect all of the evals and put them in an envelope. DO NOT open the envelope until way later (i.e. after you've left Evans and there are no students around you at all).
• Always be sure to give students way more than enough room to write. You don't want them to limit responses simply because they feel they don't have enough room. You might even consider printing the evals one-sided and make a note at the beginning of the eval saying that if the student needs more room to write that they should feel free to use the back of the page.
• Here's a ranked list of general topics that might be found on an eval (the last three are of the least importance by far with the last one being almost not worth putting on the list):
  1. Section structure (lecture review, Q&A, worksheets, demos, group work, etc.)
  2. GSI's skills (board skills, student interaction skills, lecture skills, etc.)
  3. Section content (which topics are covered and how long is spent on each)
  4. Stuff besides section or lecture (i.e. star parties you're at, your TALC, office hours, etc.)
  5. Course content (which topics are covered and how long is spent on each)
  6. Course structure (order of topics, demos during lecture, audience participation during lecture, grading, etc.)
  7. Prof's skills (board skills, student interaction skills, lecture skills, etc.)
• Types of questions:
  • Open ended (good because they allow students to discuss the things they feel most strongly about and students shouldn't feel constrained about what they can and cannot comment on). E.g.:
    1. Describe three things you like about this section.
    2. What does your GSI need to do less of in section?
    3. Put any additional comments.
  • Quick answer (very directed or short answer questions are good for students who don't want/can't write a lot and the answers can sometimes give a more quantitative evaluation than the free response questions). E.g.:
    1. On a scale of 1-5 (5 being great, 1 being horrible) rank the following.
    2. Give the section a letter grade.
    3. Circle MORE, LESS, or THE SAME for the amount of time (relative to the semester so far) we should spend on each item.
  • Humorous (but still informative). E.g.:
    1. Draw a face that best describes how you feel about this class.
  • Humorous (just for fun). E.g.:
    1. Make up an hilarious nickname for your GSI.
  • Humorous and/or totally random questions are good in moderation, they can break up the seriousness of the eval and show off your personality.
  • Put a variety of types of questions so that all types of students can give accurate feedback and you can get both qualitative and quasi-quantitative results.
• After the eval is filled out:
  • It's a good idea to read through them all twice: once to just read every answer and the second time to see if you can spot some trends and consistencies (based on the assumption that if a majority of students agrees on something, then it might actually be a valid point or an accurate assessment).

• We will ask you to compile a short summary report that includes:
  1. consistent comments
  2. averages/standard deviations/histograms for any quantitative questions
  3. any hilarious, unfairly mean, or really thoughtful comments
  4. a personal assessment of what you've learned and what you'll change (and when)
• Food for thought: In addition to turning it in to us for this class, the summary report could be sent to the Head GSI and/or prof (as opposed to having them read all of the evals). Most professors, however, do not request reports or copies, or even require that you pass out midsemester evaluations.
• Arguably the most important part of evals is responding to the criticisms (both positive and negative) publicly in front of the class and addressing at least some of their concerns (Slater & Adams call this 'closing the loop').
• Different profs have different opinions of students responses on the evals: some ignore them completely and assume that the students have no idea what's best for them, some ignore them because the prof teaches the way they teach and that's that and it won't change, and some actually read through them (or at least read their GSIs' summaries of the evals).
• Sample ones on the EBRB.
• Handout the eval handout?

1. Write a midsemester evaluation and administer them in your sections next week (9/26-9/30). After reviewing your students' responses, write up a ~1 paragraph summary of the evaluation (What did you learn? What changes might you make?). Bring this summary and a copy of your (blank) evaluation to class on 10/5. If you are teaching a lab course, you are encouraged to talk to the Professor of the course and see if it's possible to adminster a midsemester evaluation for the class as a whole. If you are not teaching at all this semester, please draft a general midsemester evaluation (one that you could use in future semesters), but you will not be administering it.
2. If you haven't done so already, visit your peer's section. Meet up for discussion and complete the Peer Visitation Worksheet by 9/28 (next week!).