Teaching Experiences

Courses Taught

University Physics I - Introductory Calculus-based Physics

College Physics I - Introductory Algebra-based Physics

Research Methods for STEM Education (DBER)

Introduction to Electromagnetic Theory

STEM Education Research Journal Club

Pedagogical Resources 

Teaching Philosophy

My primary goal in teaching is to work alongside all class participants in helping them achieve the course’s stated learning goals in a way that values themselves as humans and learners. This means the class (and I include myself as a participant in the class) must work collaboratively to make sense of the content and increase our understanding. For instance, I regularly teach University Physics I, which is the first semester Introductory Calculus-based Physics course taken by Electrical Engineering, Chemistry, Computer Science and Physics majors.  One of my goals is for students to understand how to reason conceptually about fundamental physics principles, not just solve “plug-and-chug” problems. The peer-reviewed literature on the learning and teaching of physics resoundingly demonstrates that improving conceptual understanding requires a significant departure from standard instructional methods.  I employ Peer Instruction, which is a pedagogical strategy that is well-known within the UC-Boulder Physics department. PI has been shown to be particularly effective at improving student learning in a large lecture setting. I present multiple-choice questions on which students vote and then discuss their reasoning for selecting an answer with their neighboring students.  This assures that every student has the opportunity to talk to someone about thought-provoking physics questions multiple times per class. I was co-founder of NDSU’s Learning Assistants Program (built on the model created by Valerie Otero from UC-B) that provides key agents within . Our LA Program has been key in transforming many courses in the College of Science and Mathematics from standard lecture models to classrooms that employ active learning techniques, such as peer instruction.  

My classrooms have been highly adaptive to meet my students’ expectations. Published literature suggests that students gain limited conceptual knowledge from traditional instruction, such as seeing an instructor work out problems in the classroom, and yet years of conditioning has given students this expectation for a lecture course. My effective solution for this was to video record myself working problems outside of class and post the solutions on YouTube (see user TheDrWC on youtube.com). Off-loading these transmissive activities to a more appropriate medium has allowed for an expansion of interactive activities within the classroom. When I employed this method in conjunction with in-class interactive strategies, such as Peer Instruction and adapted Tutorials in Introductory Physics, my class has shown as high as a 40% normalized gain on a standardized assessment, the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE). This demonstrates that my students’ learning was 20% higher than the best standard lecturer classrooms according to the published literature. Several years ago, a new STEM teaching building was erected on our campus. My colleagues and I successfully lobbied or the inclusion of SCALE-UP classrooms in the new building. Once created, I further adapted my class within the SCALE-UP room to include at-the-board work, whereby, every single student in my class can simultaneously get up to the board to work on a problem or draw a graph of the motion of an object, or a free-body diagram. Students can work with one another, with LAs, and myself differently than typical PI interactions. It helps myself and my LAs know who might need more support with a given task or problem.

I extended these teaching methods to the upper-division physics course that I have taught, Introductory Electromagnetic Theory course. Again, eschewing from tradition lecture, students regularly engaged in many forms of interactive activities such as Peer Instruction and other in-class hands-on/minds-on activities. I’ve borrowed, with permission, extensively from UC-B’s Steven Pollock and other’s open-source tutorials and peer-instruction questions. I’ve also incorporated lessons and ideas about kinesthetic activities, and small/medium whiteboard activities from Oregon State University’s Corinne Manogue. By identifying the research-based strategies of outstanding physics instructors, I can weave them together with my own ideas to create a unique and effective course for my students. One that allows for a great deal of collaboration and interactions within and outside the classroom. 

I have created a highly interactive graduate-level course called Research Methods in STEM Education. There are several courses taught on PER, most notably at UC-B and the University of Maine, but very few that investigated how research on learning and teaching of science and mathematics at the university level was conducted. The development of this course again utilized professional contacts at other universities and across disciplines. In this course, students read primary literature, post and engage in rich discussion through online blogs, and, most importantly, conduct real experiments and implement methods as part of their studies. It has proven to be a pivotal course for our Ph.D. students in Chemical, Biology, and Physics Education Research.

I view my experiences as a research mentor to be among my responsibilities as a teacher. As a mentor, I have focused primarily on bringing undergraduates with an interest in DBER into existing or newly developed research, as evidenced by my two NSF grants that have built one of the nation’s exclusively DBER REU programs. I have mentored six undergraduate researchers during my time at NDSU and ten REU undergraduate students. Despite a restrictive graduate student pool within the Physics Department, made even more limited by the lack of TA lines available, I successfully recruited my first graduate student in Spring 2015.