Aha!+Moments

A Collection of Reflections and Moments from my Physics Blog
The past month has been a whirlwind of learning, reflection, and paradigm shifts in how I think and feel about teaching and education. There have been numerous moments that the proverbial light bulb has gone off in my head, and I’ve silently exclaimed “Aha!” underneath my breath. Along these lines, I think the most important shift in how I think about education has been asking the question, “What do I want my students to get from this experience?" instead of “How can I teach this material the best?”. The following experiences have resonated with me deeply, and are major reasons why my perspective has shifted:
 * 1) The first Aha! moment happened in the first physics core class. The theme that **people learn through experience, not just by being lectured to,** stuck a huge cord with me. Far too often as a student or tutor (or boyfriend, son, brother, etc...) I've been caught in a misunderstanding... and all parties involved are guilty of repeating the same phrases and information over, and over again. As we all know, this never works! There is no change in understanding, because the experiences from which our understanding is built and derived, are not changed by being told things. Why would we expect this process to work with students? And yet, this is exactly how school is mostly taught (especially at the university level!). At the end of the day, it only matters what the students get from the experience, and if a teacher candidate acknowledges that **people don’t learn from being lectured to**, this dramatically shifts the way they have to educate.
 * 2) The second Aha! moment was along the same lines as the experience above. It was that students (and people in general) form their own opinion about things. And **beliefs come from experiences.** If someone believes that the Earth is flat, no amount of telling them it’s not is going to change their view. They have to see it for themselves, whether that be through traveling to the North pole and seeing their longer shadow, or talking first hand to the (great^16)-grandchild of Magellan. As a teacher, this means that **we have to give students new experiences to form their own explanations from.** Spoon-feeding them the Coles Notes surface version of a deep understanding we’ve developed over years of experience isn’t the way to do it. An internal discussion within themselves has to be created. I recently wrote something on facebook which I think is apt here: // "It is the friction between the inconsistencies within us the creates the most wonderful sparks of understanding." //
 * 3) Along the lines of both of these is the new-found understanding that there is a huge disconnect between what a teacher says and what is learned by the student. This idea resonates a lot with me, and directly connected the shift between the two questions I mentioned to start this post. It doesn’t matter what your lesson is, even if it was the best lesson in the world... **What did the student get out of it?** If you can’t answer that question satisfactorily... you should probably rethink that 'awesome' lesson.
 * 4) Associated with this understanding (I’m seeing a pattern here!), is the realization at how outrageously privileged we were as students. There’s so many ways to learn and perceive information, and as teacher candidates, we’ve all have particular ways of doing so (as university is the great pigeon-holer, and school in general is taught in very specific ways). **We have to get outside the shells of the privilege we have enjoyed for the entirety of our educational careers.** We have see things from the student’s point of view. **All of their many points of views.** We have to teach in a way that is fair to all types of learners, and remove the bias that is inherent in the current education system.
 * 5) Another idea has resonated with me was that the fear of being wrong is what kills creativity. This is majorly important for me to stress to myself. **Creativity is the link between learning and application.** A student can know every fact in the world, but if they can’t think of ways to adapt and apply them to new situations, it doesn’t mean much. However, to be creative a student needs to be able to take risks. **You have to be able to be completely wrong, to be completely ingenious. Students who are afraid of being wrong will never take risks.** This understanding has profound impact on traditional ways of teaching, such as marks, rewards, punishment, and competition. It also shows why students learn better in groups and communal settings, where it’s safer to be wrong and make mistakes. This point is a huge blog post (or four) in and of itself, but I’ll just say the following: This Aha! moment has led me to question whether a classroom could be setup to explicitly foster taking risks. Such as valuing wrong answers that are well thought-out and justified, as much as (or more than!?) the right answer (which was equally well thought out). What matters is that students try. In the end I don’t care (that much) if they get the right answer, but I want them to try. To take those risks. A plug and chug answer is only slightly better than a blank page. **I want to assessment and evaluate risk-taking.** To hell with ‘right answers’!* (They get overthrown every century or so anyways!)^
 * 6) The last major moment of clarity I’ve experienced in this first month, are ways to start educating along the lines of the ideas mentioned above. Problem Based Learning is a new, healthy way of looking at curriculum. **Open ended questions remove some of the fear of being wrong**... there is no accepted right answer! They also familiarize students with questions that have no clear directions. **Students have to approach and analyze, filter and research, hypothesize and adapt.** Gone should be the days where students are spoon-fed information and steps in a problem, and then plug and chug into refer-to formulas. ([|ala Dan Meyer]). And people wonder why tests are done so poorly when a small step is switched, which doesn’t effect the required understanding of a question.

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^By people who take enormous risks.
 * Disclaimer: I’m not actually sure how much of this I actually believe, but I do think that there is far too much weight put on ‘right’ answers and not on the process it takes to produce ‘right’ answers.======

In terms of the course, I was unsure about how the FCI is administered. I found it odd that the FCI is such a traditional styled test. Preliminary reading of Five Easy Lessons shows that interactive teaching helps students have a deeper understanding of concepts. **What about interactive testing, to allow students to show how much they physically understand physics??** There has to be a better way to do tests! I’m not sure how I would make this work, but I think it might be better for the student... or at least some students. I was also unsure about how much I'm going to be able to prep for classes. I anticipate my first 2 or 3 years of teaching to be crazy. I also feel like (apart from the POE and various small examples done in class) **I’m starting from scratch.** This style of teaching is far outside my experience in a teaching capacity, and my experience as a student. I'm all for it... **but I need experience!!** I’m really unsure at how to balance the role of facilitator and lecturer. What if a student claims that electricity doesn’t exist? Where do I step in and tell them that it does, or do I introduce an experiment / experience the next class that shows that electricity does exist? These are the situations I’m really unsure about, but hopefully are answered with more experience. :D

I’m not sure what I wished we spent more time on. Each class there’s so much [|rabbit hole digging] going on. To spend time on each new idea is to limit the amount of time on other ideas. And who knows what other deeply resonating ideas await? I feel like you could spend a whole lesson on things you cover in 15 minutes. But then I would want to hear about all the other 15 minute whole lessons you wouldn't cover. I feel like this: **the whole class in condensed... but it has to be.** //(I really wanted to make a conformal time joke in this paragraph... but by time I was ready to, my idea of what this section was about had already expanded.)//

Teaching science (and physics) is about critical thinking. At the end of the day, who cares if the students can recite Avogadro's number... or the continuity equation. Can they formula ideas? Can they justify reasoning? Can they approach a problem they’ve never seen before, make reasonable assumptions, and suggest potential avenues for solving it? **Lecturing will not accomplish this.**

// As an educator in these disciplines, it is my job to foster an environment that allows students to experience new perspectives and to challenge their assumed ways of thinking. Not by telling them what is right, but by letting them discover, synthesize, and risk their own ideas about the world. It is my duty to create an atmosphere where being wrong is awesome... if you’re risking being right to be innovative. It is my job to help them be the best critical thinkers and self-learners they can. //

// It is my job to prepare them for the problems they will face in real life, whether those problems are in science, physics, or otherwise. //