10: Teaching at Human Speed: Less rush, more reach

In a reprisal of Ben’s presentation from a summer teaching and learning conference, Ben and Amanda discuss making space in the classroom. Often as instructors, doing an involved, engaging, and meaningful activity means that you are taking up a significant amount of time for students to arrive at ideas on their own. Isn’t it easier for content coverage to just lecture for 50 minutes? – Yes. Is it better? – A strong probably. Big picture: If you feel stressed and rushed, your students are probably feeling it too.Ben and Amanda briefly discuss the principles of Backward Design that contributed to Ben’s planning process for re-design of his introductory physics course. He found more time for implementing retakes and digging into the often glazed over end-of-semester content. Not only is leaving space useful for the whole semester, but for each day of class. Ben and Amanda unpack what they do with their 50 minutes, including methods for students to take over a little of the responsibility for their learning.Here are the citations for the articles Amanda mentioned:Brown, B. A., & Ryoo, K. (2008). Teaching science as a language: A “content-first” approach to science teaching. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 45(5), 529–553. https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.20255Roth, W. M. (2017). The thinking body in/of multimodal engineering literacy. Theory into Practice, 56(4), 255–262. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2017.1389218Let’s get into it!