Christopher Moore is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Coastal Carolina University. He lives in Myrtle Beach, SC with his wife and two children.I’m back in Farmville after spending the weekend in College Park, MD being taught how to teach. (Technically, I’m in Richmond working on research right now, but I will be in Farmville tonight.) I didn’t get an opportunity to blog about the workshop much as it was going, because the schedule was very dense and filled 12 hours of each day. I’m very tired.
The highlights: Eric Mazur of Harvard and Edward Prather of the University of Arizona. These two could not be any more different in terms of personality and presentation. However, they both managed to completely convince me of the power of Peer Instruction. I’m sold. (I even learned a little astronomy during Ed’s workshop!)
I took notes on my fancy tablet PC, so rather than re-hash most of the meat from memory, I’ll just upload PDFs of those notes when I get back to my office tomorrow. But I will leave you with the number one technique I walked away with that will find use on day one this coming semester: Think-Pair-Share using color-coded cards.
[...] Ed covered think-pair-share, lecture tutorials, and ranking tasks. I’ve mentioned Prather before, and I saw the same basic stuff at the AAPT New Faculty Workshop last summer. However, I still [...]