Teaching

My Teaching Philosophy and Goals

As a professor, teaching and educational outreach will be an integral part of my livelihood. As a scientist, my job is not simply to research and create new knowledge but also to transmit that knowledge to society through teaching and outreach. Effective teaching is a learned skill, one that requires continued maintenance including staying up-to-date on the latest research in education trends, adjusting one’s methods based on generational shifts, and tracking of students’ future progress, all of which I will do during my career. Effective teaching requires setting goals for what students will know and be able to do by the end of a given course. This goes beyond simply giving students information and hoping they absorb it; it requires interaction between students, between students and instructors, and amongst instructors to guarantee that the goals of education are met. In addition, faculty should act as mentors and advisers to students of all ages and backgrounds, including supplying underprivileged students with the social capital necessary to succeed. This means setting time aside for open office hours, understanding that students may have different (sometimes limited) preparation, and accommodating this without reducing standards. I plan to be an effective teacher and mentor to all students and provide them with a quality education.

To paraphrase Piaget [[i]], education’s goal should be the development of individuals who can create new things and go beyond simply repeating what has been done in the past. Piaget’s sentiment especially should apply to a college or university education, which teaches the future political, business, science and societal leaders. These future leaders need to be prepared for changes, be adaptable, and be ready to invent and accept new technologies and new solutions to unforeseen problems, and education is a large part of that preparation. Education within this paradigm should be broad based – learning should cover a range of subjects and fields including humanities, arts, social sciences and natural sciences.

Education in the natural sciences, including physics, should develop critical-thinking skills equivalent to formal reasoning – abilities to examine empirical data and apply them in greater contexts, as well as the ability to critically analyze new work. Development of these skills in the natural sciences at the college level requires both coursework and labwork. At the undergraduate and introductory graduate level coursework should cover accepted theories, hypotheses and current knowledge – including the regimes in which each theory is applicable, where it breaks down, what more is needed to be researched, and how different theories are compatible with each other through general principles.

The sciences, including physics, are fundamentally experimental. Coursework needs to be supplemented with labwork so that students understand that the theories and mathematics taught in a lecture setting apply to the real, physical world. In my past experience, university classes have not been designed in this manner: Laboratory classes have been separated from the more theoretically inclined lecture classes or have been nonexistent. Given the opportunity, I would like to be involved in curriculum development to maximize the educational experience for students, including integration of laboratory and lecture courses. I understand that providing labs with every lecture class and concept is unfeasible, especially for upper division and graduate level classes, but this should certainly be done at the introductory physics level. Once students understand the basic processes involved in good experimentation, further development can potentially be limited.

Ideally, the educational process in laboratory physics should be based on the learning cycle introduced and researched by my grandfather, Robert Karplus (and many others) [[ii]]. The learning cycle consists of three phases: exploration, invention and application. Exploration involves minimally guided hands-on activities where students can develop their own intuition and experience for what happens with real systems. Invention is a phase where students develop their own hypotheses models to explain data – including plots and basic quantitative analysis. Application puts what students have learned into greater context – fitting to well-developed theories and explaining errors. Note that this learning cycle differs from that often used in universities, where students are given a theory or hypothesis to test, fit their data to that theory, and explain away the differences and errors that inevitably occur. The exploration, invention, application cycle better prepares students for actual research outside of the undergraduate coursework, research where answers might not be known ahead of time and models may need to be modified and criticized to match new data. The usual procedure of known model, experiment, fit can lead students to think that science is about determining fitting parameters, not about exploration, and that is not what a college education should teach.

Lecture courses in physics, which comprise the bulk of all physics courses, should develop theoretical and mathematical understanding of phenomena as well as logic skills. Teaching in a large lecture setting has given me insight into a range of student learning abilities and how to address these differences. I have found that lectures must not be simple explanation of material, reading from and writing on slides or the chalkboard. A good lecture involves some reading from and explaining a pre-prepared presentation, but must also include interruptions of demonstrations, example problems, and the occasional class-level question. Students become more engaged when the lecturer actively asks for questions and input, and takes multiple responses. This allows the lecturer to understand how and what the students are learning, and allows the lecturer to adjust speed and content based on direct feedback. I hope to implement such techniques into introductory lectures, and continue improving education based on empirical studies. (As a note, my evaluations for a large lecture course included comments such as "highly knowledgeable," "kept me awake with demonstrations and examples," and "kept students engaged by asking questions and discussing answers.")

The undergraduate physics curriculum needs to cover the spectrum of underlying physical theories. Required upper-division coursework must include classical mechanics, electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics and mathematical or numerical methods. Numerical methods are especially important to learn with the advancement of modern computing; I hope to help design and teach such courses on Mathematica, other programming languages, and modern numerical software like ComSol, to show how a vast array of problems can be solved numerically. Another option is to include some numeric in the standard curriculum for required courses such as classical mechanics. Advanced laboratory or research, involving a subset of concepts covered in the upper division coursework, should also be a requirement. The advanced laboratory class should include electronics, lasers, cryonics, and other modern equipment, plus writing and presentation components, to prepare students not just for graduate work but also for science industry careers.

Graduate curriculum in physics should consist of advanced methods and theories in the basic undergraduate subjects – electrodynamics, classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, mathematical and numerical methods – as well as advanced coursework in students’ general area of research such as condensed matter of elementary particle physics. Graduate education also needs to involve attendance of research seminars and colloquia so that students are aware of progress being made outside of their niche research fields. I also think that graduate education could benefit from classes and seminars dedicated to physics education, teaching and outreach, as such skills are often lacking in physicists but are necessary for engaging students and the general public.

I have the background to teach any standard physics class at the undergraduate level, both lower and upper division, as well as the basic graduate level courses. I can also teach classes dedicated to solid state physics, electronics and applied physics (my research specialties), advanced laboratory, fluid mechanics, and (if needed) introductory cosmology and particle physics. My research specialty has been in ferromagnetism, and I would be interested in teaching a special class dedicated to magnetism and magnetic dynamics. The dynamics of ferromagnets is often glossed over, simplified or ignored in solid state and electrodynamics courses, and this treatment disguises the rich physics associated with ferromagnets, which includes many-body physics, nonlinear dynamics, and different equations of motion from Newton’s laws. My background across academia, industry and government gives me insight into these job arenas which will help me mentor graduate students and undergraduates with a fresh perspective.

Teaching is an important component of any academic career. My experience lecturing at Boston University was challenging and fulfilling, and I hope to continue in the future.

[i] J. Piaget, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 2, 176-186 (1964)

[ii] College Teaching and the Development of Reasoning, ed. R. G. Fuller, et al., Information Age Publishing (2009)