Classes started yesterday for the winter term. This is the first time I've had to teach in six months, thanks to juggling my schedule so as to let me stay home for much of the Fall term. I'm always surprised by how much I forget, and how much I remember about the process.
The remembered stuff is pretty obvious-- bits of trivia that aren't in my lecture notes, or old ad-libs that work well to hep make some point or another. The forgotten stuff is stuff that seems like it ought to be obvious, like just how much talking is involved in the process. I came out of yesterday's class and drank the better part of a liter of water immediately, and my mouth was still dry.
The class I'm teaching-- sophomore-level "Modern Physics" (i.e., Relativity and QM)-- necessarily involves a lot of lecturing. This isn't the sort of material that students have good intuition for, so it's really hard to do much with class discussion. Especially at the start, when there's a fair bit of background that they need to learn before anything else.
Of course, I'm forever second-guessing that, especially after reading stories about the effectiveness of "peer instruction". And I will make the usual effort to get more discussion into the class, probably starting with the paradoxes that crop up in relativity, which should be Friday's class. There's enough material to cover, though, and so much of it is factual in nature, that I always end up defaulting to a mostly-lecture format.
Which means that I always forget just how much of the class time is spent talking. There are plenty of things that are worse to forget, of course, but that doesn't cut down on the amount of water I end up drinking.
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You're right about dry mouth and lecturing! I always wonder if I'm coming down with a cold before I remember that I just spent the last hour talking nonstop.
You know, I think it is possible to teach courses like Modern without lecturing too much. I teach pchem, and last semester I taught QM for the first time in many years, using sets of POGIL (process oriented guided inquiry learning) activities - some my own but most from published sources. The students were able to grasp the mechanics - how to normalize wavefunctions, determine probability densities, etc - by working through the activities. What I found they needed from me was more context. WHY was this stuff important? I think what I enjoyed most was that we spent each class having conversations about different QM model systems and spectroscopy, rather than must me telling them about it all.
Anyway, have a good semester!
Suggest you change "first time I have had to teach" to "first time I have had the opportunity to teach". It's gonna happen, and you might as well be positive about it.
Honestly, I have no faith in "stories" about the success of any particular instructional technique. Inspired peer instruction is better than a lackluster lecture. A stellar lecture is better than poorly-guided "inquiry-based" learning. I bristle at terms like "best practices", because I don't think that there is any teaching method that is best for every teacher OR every student. At the end of the day all that matters is - are most of the students learning what you want them to learn? My guess is, in a roomful of sophomore physics majors, the answer is probably 'yes'.
That said - the ONLY place in my "Space, Time, and Einstein" course where I used a group technique was with relativity paradoxes. I guided them through the twin paradox, and the pole/barn paradox in class... then the following day I let them work in groups to try to find the trick to three others: the "searchlight" paradox, the "scissors" paradox and the "meterstick/hole" paradox. I won't say it was an unqualified success, but it was ok as a change of pace.