teaching and learning

This is something we have known for the last 10 years (or 20) through for instance the research done by Eric Mazur and collaborators.They showed that using peer instruction improved student learning of physics concepts by 20% in a real-world, class setting, compared to a “regular” lecture-based approach with the sage on the stage imparting their wisdom to the young susceptible minds! That is a fine example of a very deliberate teaching practice.

I have extolled the virtue of my whiteboard in previous posts (see e.g., here and here), but it turns out that knowing how to work with a whiteboard could actually get you a job. I often say that I am a believer in technology, that it will fix a lot of problems at several scales. Sometimes the best technology, though, is an old-school magic board and markers.

Here is another convert of the magic of the whiteboard: http://lifehacker.com/5950957/how-a-whiteboard-helped-a-terrible-delegator-keep-a-team-on+task. He provides a list of why whiteboards work: “Whiteboards are big enough for everybody to see.Whiteboards make you want to fill the space, and therefore expand and branch your thoughts.Whiteboards inspire you to keep writing, to keep pushing on what’s in your head, because it feels awesome to swing your arms that widely. Whiteboards feel less like you’re committing to an idea than throwing it out for consideration.

An oldie, but worthy of a link: http://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2011/10/05/whats-the-most-important-lesson-you-learned-from-a-teacher/ I have since tried to identify a specific teacher and lesson for my own story, but I am not good at recalling memories, and my university teachers were pretty old school, sage-on-the-stage types of teachers, not exactly my style. The one person that keeps coming up is my first kayak instructor (name forgotten) when I was 16 (?), in France. It was just me and him, and he really focused on breaking kayaking down the basics: reading the water (currents and countercurrents) and weight position in the boat (left-right and front-back), followed by exercises that internalized those basics before moving to the next step.

I am about to submit the grades for the two courses this semester, and this often leads to self reflection. I am not going to do that now, but I will do something better: link to the self reflection of a teacher that is well-written, funny, insightful, sometimes reflects my own experiences, sometimes not at all. So I highly recommend William Bowers’ “All we read is freaks” for all educators. I could extract so many passages out of this long piece, but this is the one I emailed to myself:

… outside in the Arboretum, with our First Year Seminar class. The (only?) advantage of an early spring this year. Although Ingrid would probably point out that our discussions, even in the Arboretum, ”… had been sitting on the land, instead of having roots within it.” (Laura Piersol, Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 2010, 15:198-209)But how to design a university course to have its roots within the land? It is easier to do this in the context of a field course, but with a Monday-Wednesday 8:30-10 am lecture slot?

Ryan Norris via Tom Nudds sent me a link to this web site, and I think all three of us had the same “What the …” reaction after reading the entry by Irene Pepperberg, titled “The Fallacy of Hypothesis Testing”: “I was trained, as a chemist, to use the classic scientific method: Devise a testable hypothesis, and then design an experiment to see if the hypothesis is correct or not. And I was told that this method is equally valid for the social sciences.

… rests on actually reading and understanding each other’s words. This is a difficult exercise, and not only for students. Tom Nudds and I just covered in community ecology the rationale for protected areas planning based not only on representativeness (making sure that all species are protected), but more importantly also on persistence (see his article in Biodiversity and Conservation for a summary of their ideas). If the target areas have all the species you want to conserve, but lack essential components that would ensure their actual persistence through time, representativeness means nothing.

An interesting paper in Science by Stumpf and Porter takes a hard look at “general” power laws in science: “A striking feature that has attracted considerable attention is the apparent ubiquity of power-law relationships in empirical data. However, although power laws have been reported in areas ranging from finance and molecular biology to geophysics and the Internet, the data are typically insufficient and the mechanistic insights are almost always too limited for the identification of power-law behavior to be scientifically useful (see the figure).

What do these four, apparently very unconnected items, have in common?  http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/lake-vostok-drilled/ http://www.thecleanestline.com/2012/02/cerro-torre-deviations-from-reason.htmlStar wars: the clone wars http://www.vpacademic.uoguelph.ca/fys/seminars/My life used to be easy. I was a scientist,  climber (a long time ago), father, and a teacher. And now suddenly these separate aspects of  my life got sucked into a vortex, all thanks to reading some passages of Aldo Leopold’s “The Land Ethic” for the First Year Seminar course Ingrid and I have designed. These items literally came across my desk (RSS reader, watching TV with the kids, teaching a course) in a 2 day period.