Don't pull the weeds in this studio

When people ask me what I study, I do try really hard to fight the temptation to ramble on and on about physics education research, but you know how it is - sometimes I can't help but let it slip out. And it really is exciting stuff (I like to think); I get to look at the gender gap in physics, and try to work my way through the complex weave of issues that contribute to this gap, with the hope of finding some positive solutions. Specifically, I'm looking at the impacts of physics self-efficacy (which just refers to how confident you are in your ability to do physics) on the success and retention of women in physics. A lot of very fascinating research has been done in this field, and I am quite looking forward to learning more.

So yes, admittedly it just happened now; it really is so hard to mention physics education research without rambling on for at least a paragraph. This blog post, however, is about such a rambling that happened recently when I was talking with a person who teaches in the engineering department. I assumed that as a female educator in a similar field, she would be enthused to hear that such research was going on in a nearby department. But her response to my excitement about self-efficacy was:

 "Oh, well you know, in engineering, our students aren't touchy feely like that."

I didn't know what to say. How could an educator completely ignore study after study done on engineering students showing that they are touchy feely like that?

Through educators who think this way, we have created a "weed-out" system, without taking the time to think about how this affects our students' self-efficacy or the future of engineering as a whole. In this type of system, which views students as disembodied transcript numbers, professors have even been known to say,

"Look to your left. Look to your right. One of them will be gone by Christmas."

Of course, we like to think that in such a system, we are weeding out the academically "weak" students - these students would make poor engineers anyway, right? But I believe that such a system is actually hurting or even eliminating the innovative, collaborative, ethical, and diverse engineers - the very engineers who we need to discover solutions for the challenges to be faced by our changing world.

• Firstly, such a system weeds out students with a strong sense of ethics who care about their fellow student. A student who genuinely cares and tries to help their classmates succeed does poorly because this kind of cut-throat system requires that your fellow classmates to do worse than you so that you can "win". 
• Secondly, we weed out minority groups using subtle and sometimes even overt discrimination as described in Malicky's A Literature Review on the Under-representation of Women in Engineering. We make sexual jokes about women in engineering - we mean it all in fun of course, but objectification can not help but wear down a person's self-efficacy. In lab experiments, a woman can find her role in writing down the data rather than actually using the equipment because of the unspoken assumption that she is not as good at engineering as her male lab partner. Women who do persist in the sciences can find themselves acting more masculine than they might like to blend in. In my observations, the discrimination towards students with faith backgrounds in the sciences is even greater than that towards women. Students and professors toss in jokes or even overt insults directed towards people of faith, often leaving those who believe in God with a damaged self-efficacy and a strong sense that they are not welcome to study the field that they love.
• Lastly, we weed out those with new innovative perspectives. I believe that creativity needs a positive environment to flourish. Any artist will tell you that their studio space is essential in their creative process - some artists need to listen to music, some need to be in nature, some need to be in community with other artists, I need tea, chocolate and natural light - the specifics of the studio differ, but the theme is the same: artists need an environment which uplifts their soul to produce great work. I believe that creativity in engineering design requires the same uplifting environment. How can a "weed-out" atmosphere, in which the constant fear of "I'm not smart enough" plagues many students, be a studio space for engineering innovation?

I think we need to take a step back, study the literature on self-efficacy and the gender gap in engineering and science education, and re-assess the sometimes unspoken, but still prevalent "weed-out" attitude that exists in the sciences and engineering.

Thoughts on Teaching in the Tutorial

I find that teaching does something ridiculous to me. It's similar to the effect of drinking five cups of coffee before entering a ball pit. I sometimes think that if I could step outside my body while I'm teaching, and watch, I'd surely be saying to myself, "who is that?" This afternoon, I found myself quite literally leaping over chairs, acting out graphs with my body, and feeling ridiculously gleeful when my students experienced success in their problem solving. I honestly don't know how it happens; before tutorial, I was really quite tired, but as soon as the students walked in the room, I was on cloud nine. I can't help but wonder, is teaching secretly some form of a caffeine pill?

I'm still on the fence about how effective this high degree of excitement is for student learning. For some students, the excitement seems to be contagious - it gets a positive atmosphere in the room which spurs them on to learn more and have fun while learning. That is of course exactly what I love to see. For other students, however, I'm afraid that it distances them. The student who is really struggling doesn't want to see someone else having a jolly good time doing physics. They need a TA who comes along side them to meet them where they are at, in the emotional state that they are experiencing - a TA who they can relate to. This is of course much easier one-on-one; when a student approaches me individually with a stressed look on their face, of course that automatically changes my approach with them. But in the classroom, I am finding it very challenging to be the sort of TA that each of my very different students need.

We started our first tutorial with a great POE from Tom - the one with three tracks: (A) has a ramp followed by a hill, (B) has a ramp followed by a flat stretch, and (C) has a ramp followed by a valley. They all start and finish at the same height, but their paths are different. It's a fun POE to talk about kinematics, misuse of conservation of energy laws, and how the normal force can change the horizontal velocity when something is rolling (unlike a projectile which has the same horizontal velocity all through its path). The students got right into it! As soon as they entered the room, ten minutes before the start of class, they began investigating the tracks and trying to work out a solution. I love working with these students - you couldn't possibly ask for a better class.

During the first round of tutorials, I used this POE as a stepping stone to kinematics/ dynamics, but I also used it as a way to draw out and validate the curiosity they all have as physicists. Once we had discussed as a class the various possibilities for a little while, I asked them to vote if they would like to actually observe what happens, or just move on to the rest of the tutorial. Of course, all of them really wanted to see what really happens - and made this very clear to me verbally when I pretended to suggest that it didn't really matter. I was able to encourage them to hold onto this curiosity that has gotten them here studying physics. I shared with them briefly about my undergraduate experience - how my learning community of friends and my curiosity and love of learning made undergrad a truly enjoyable and enriching experience. Of course, after all this, we did observe which ball won the race, and everyone was surprised and interested. Three of the students explained why things resulted in the way that they did.

After this, we dove into problem solving. I had used another combination of my supervisor's and Tom's great ideas and cut up a giant sheet of whiteboard material into 2ft x 2ft whiteboards for teams of 3 students each to use to work out problems together. I gave the teams one of two different problems to solve and 40mins to solve them. One of the problems, given to me by my supervisor, was particularly successful in getting the students really thinking:

Before the Golden Gael’s football game this past Saturday, the quarter back was warming up by tossing the football straight up in the air and then catching it again. Determine the percentage of the total flight time during which the football is in the top half of its trajectory.

 I love this problem because there are no numbers! Of course that was the student's first response too: "I can't solve this without any numbers!" It was also a great chance for them to see just how essential it is to have a really good picture and well defined variables with useful subscripts. Of course, all of the groups required considerable support/questioning to reach the solution because it's not an easy problem. A few students came up with some creative approaches too.

After our 40 minutes of problem solving in teams, I had the students find their lab partner (who did the other problem), and teach them how to solve the problem they did. I like this strategy because it requires every student in the problem solving team to have a firm grasp of what is going on. Knowing that you have to teach this problem to someone else really motivated the students to participate in the problem solving.

I had a specific plan for these teaching partners. Last week, I made a lovely colour coded spread sheet to set up optimal lab/teaching partners. We had given the students a diagnostic test on the first day to determine where they were at in their understanding. The spread of overall grades was huge - from 33% to 100%, and everything in between. I took the questions from the test and divided them into questions which tested an understanding of inertia, of Newton's 3rd law, etc. This was a very imprecise science, of course, since most good physics questions require students to synthesize more than one idea, but I did my best. Then I matched students who achieved approximately only a 15-25% difference in their overall score, but scored very differently on the different aspects of the test. For example, I would put a student who achieved an overall score of 75% but achieved 100% on inertia problems and only 50% on 3rd law problems with a student who achieved an overall score of 55%, but achieved 100% on 3rd law problems and only 10% on inertia problems. My thinking was that the lab/teaching partners will be able to teach each other, but neither partner will get frustrated as the one who is always helping the other, since they both have different strengths. So far in the first two tutorials, this appears to be going well. I have yet to decide if the gains have been worth the significant amount of time that I put into sorting the data from the diagnostic test.

The second tutorial followed a similar structure. This time, we started with a brief class discussion about their feedback from an online get-to-know-you survey I had put out to them in the first week. They had shared with me what they love about physics, what they were most concerned about in the course, their plans for the future, and their hobbies (so that I can make them the stars of my tutorial problems). We specifically addressed the top three concerns they had brought up:

1) Keeping up with the workload
2) Maintaining high grades
3) Worries about having an incomplete math background. 

We chatted about some strategies to keep up with the work, maintain high grades without obsessing over grades, and I asked them for their advice with how to bring their math skills up to speed.

Following this, we entered the usual pattern of team problem solving with the whiteboards followed by teaching your lab partner how to do the problem you solved. All this went quite well - they were comfortable with the system, and did a great job solving the problems and teaching each other.

The difference with this week's tutorial was that it also ended with a quiz. I had written a quiz problem that I was really quite pleased with: it was about a student playing piano - one hand is playing a scale (consecutive notes) at constant speed, and the other hand is just starting to play a scale accelerating from rest. The question was to draw a position vs time graph for the two hands relative to the piano, and then to draw a graph of the right hand's position relative to the left hand. The final part was to find the time when the hands met. I thought it was a really fun question - the students would get to combine their understanding of position vs time graphs with their understanding of relative motion, and that would feel oh-so-rewarding. I definitely had my head in the clouds on this one.

The students really struggled with the quiz. One girl was actually shaking for the full half hour and several were visibly distressed. I felt so badly. In the end, I was able to find enough part marks to pass all but one of the students, but these students are used to getting 98% on physics tests - a 50%, even though it was on a quiz worth next to nothing in their final grade, was really hard on them. I think it's a very positive and important thing for them to be highly challenged by the problems they do in teams - this stretches them in an environment that has all sorts of supports. I didn't intend, however, to give them such a difficult problem in the already stressful situation of a quiz assessment.

I think I need to begin the next tutorial by apologizing. I hope I can also use it as a bit of teaching about teaching for my con-ed students - to share with them one of the challenges of teaching is to think like a student - and I didn't do that very effectively in writing the first quiz. While the students do need to be able to solve problems of this difficulty by the time the midterm arrives, it wasn't fair of me to expect them to be awesome problem solvers, able to synthesize different concepts, on the very first quiz. I hope that my apology reassures them that I have no desire to "weed them out" of physics, that I care about them, and that they aren't stupid.

I must admit, I'm glad that I'm not a doctor. As a teacher, I make a lot of mistakes, but at least there's always that next tutorial to try to set things right again.

Sweet and Savoury Motivations

I went to a teaching development workshop the other day, which was a great workshop. I learned a lot and made some great connections. However, I was also given all sorts of information on how to get a fancy certificate for attending. And it got me thinking and realizing that the sugary motivators that are held out before all of us from high school on through our undergrad are really no longer appetizing to me. I don't need to hear that this line will look extra pretty on my CV or resume. The sweet symmetry of a 96% on a transcript just doesn't thrill me anymore. I don't need a certificate - not even if it has a pretty gold seal. Even a neatly rolled up degree to collect dust under my bed doesn't feel very motivating. I don't really want to make any more money than I could make by leaving school now. So as I enter "grade 18" as you could call it, I feel like I've eaten so much of this false motivating candy, that I'm feeling a bit ill from it all.

So then, what happens when these sweet motivators are no longer motivating? Why should I work so hard to research physics education? To pour hours into my TA work? To complete paintings? To make music? To plan study groups? Why am I here, and why am I doing this?

I think that my motivation at this stage of my life looks much more like what I was motivated by when I was in kindergarten. And while I loved chocolate in kindergarten too, I like to think that my motivation both then and now is surprisingly more savoury and longer lasting. When I think about the things that drive me to get up in the morning and do life, these are the motivators that I think of today:

1. I love people. I want to give someone the precious gift of a place to belong. I want to see my students feel comfortable with themselves and confident in where they are headed. I want to see them smile. I want to see my friends feeling beautiful, and my family feeling important. People are surely the warmest motivators.
2. I'm curious - so curious that I remember spending a full year in elementary school trying to work out the formula for permutations and combinations since (fortunately) no one had told me that such a formula already existed. I just wanted to know how many different phone numbers or license plates there could be. And now that the grades and CV lines and certificates, which had sparkled often brighter than my curiosity in high school and undergrad, have lost their shine, I feel like that beautiful curiosity is able to motivate me more and more. 
3. I love to be loved. The approval, especially of those who I particularly look up to, is as important a motivator for me now as my kindergarten teacher's "that's a beautiful painting" was. It still means so much to me when someone tells me they felt connected or touched by my art, or that they learned something exciting in my class. Maybe it's childish, but I'd be lying to say that love and approval aren't still a very significant motivator for me.
4. I need meaning beyond my tiny life. Perhaps here is where my kindergarten theory diverges a bit. To be honest, I don't recall a deep need for meaning in kindergarten. But I certainly am highly motivated by it now. I want to have done something good with my life - something that could impact people in positive ways for years to come. I want someone's life to be better because of my life. I want the world to be better because of my life - at least by a little bit. I want to make God smile.

I see many different motivations in my first year students. Of course, many are highly motivated by marks - so much so that they would choose a boring course over an interesting one just because they think they could achieve a higher grade. But I think there are quite a few students who are motivated by things other than grades, and I'm looking forward to getting to know them better and finding out what these other motivators are.

Back in School

Hi Anneke,
What a treat to see your blog appear on my screen!  THANKS for all those insights on your first day.
DID YOU GET INTO THE SINGING???  Sure hope so.
I really look forward to reading about your first class as a TA!--and the reactions to the 3 tracks!!
I won't write more now because I have 3 proposals due on Monday (2 with other people) for the conference I run every 2 years at Herstmonceux Castle.  Have to be sure I'm on the program!!
Best,
Tom

The First Day!

It's very good to be back to school.

I love the excitement of the first day - the campus flooded with students, including my wonderful brother. It will be great to study with him again. The new students are eager and early to lecture. The returning students are chatting with their friends about the good ol' days when they were in first year. My brother was hobbling on crutches as he broke his ankle on Friday, but he was cheerfully eating his lunch on the bench of the phyics building's sign none the less.

I had the privilege of meeting the first year students I'll be working with in their first lecture today, and I can't wait to get to know them better. They have that hesitant but hopeful look about them - like they aren't quite sure what to make of this yet, but they're going to give themselves an honest chance to learn. A few of them are con-ed students, a few upper year students, a few people just giving physics a try, and lots of people hoping to study physics in the future. I can't wait to get to know them better and learn each of their stories - right now, I'm just doing my best to work on nailing down names and programs of study!

It was nice to sit in on the first lecture - the professor does a great job of getting the students to feel as ease and comfortable to laugh. It may take a bit of work/time to get them truly building community with each other. He started with a good exercise of putting them in groups according to which residence they live in, so that they have someone they know in rez who is also in physics. However, when they came into lab later that afternoon, they were dead silent with each other. We'll see what happens, but I hope that by continually putting them in learning communities in class, in the lab, and in tutorial, they will eventually build that community themselves. I love talking to people (I strike up conversation to random people for the minute that I'm waiting in the line at Timmies), so I sometimes have trouble understanding why two classmates would sit beside each other and not talk, but I know we all have different levels of comfort with that sort of thing (and perhaps we've been told 4000 times in school not to talk to our desk-neighbour...)

Another part of the first lecture that I particularly enjoyed - the professor was providing his reasoning for why he will be using interactive "peer instruction" teaching methods instead of traditional lecture. He did a brief activity in which he had the students write down something they are very good at (many students wrote "playing guitar", etc). Then he had the students write down how they learned that. Then he asked them how many people learned what they are good at by lecture? Did they watch their music teacher play the instrument? Clearly, they learned to be experts in that field by doing not just by passive listening. It was a quick activity, but I think it made the point clearly and effectively.

One thing that is of significant concern to me in the class is the fear factor. Today reminded me of just how terrified I was in first year physics. One of my high school teachers had told me that physics, and specifically physics at Queen's, was very very hard - I'll never know if he was subtly suggesting that I wasn't very bright or if this was a generalization for all students. But either way, it really made me scared. And that was exactly the look I saw on so many of my students' faces today. I want to sit down with each of them and tell them that physics does not deserve the bad reputation it so often gets. I want to tell them that it's okay if you don't understand everything right away - you aren't expected to! It's like learning an instrument - you don't play Beethoven after studying piano for a day. But they are used to courses like Biology where they can just sit down before the exam, memorize everything they need to know, and do fine. Physics isn't like that - it's a skill which you need to work on a little bit every day - and it's okay if you're not super pro at it the first time. I want to sit down with each of them, hear their fears, and help them work through those fears. If I had a genie, I would wish for 63 hours of extra time to spend an hour with each of them.

In my "research time", I did a few more modules of the online ethics course for researching students, and ran around campus on the ever on-going search for a test of student's self-efficacy. This is a much harder task than you might expect! Such tests seem to be either very expensive, unavailable or unknown to the many librarians I've spoken with, but I'm not giving up hope yet! The plan for tomorrow is to try the psychology building - I expect they'll have more insights there.


The evening of my first day, I had an encouraging audition! I'm very much hoping to sing with the choral ensemble this year, but priority goes to undergraduate music students. Encouragingly, however, the conductor seemed very pleased with my audition - here's hoping that not too many other alto II's in the music program tried out! I would absolutely love to sing again if I can. I'm on pins and needles until the list is posted in the music building tomorrow!