SEAN ROBINSON: By the time students
get to their third year of the physics major,
they really know an extraordinary amount
of physics.
And that is really a secondary goal
of what we're teaching here.
Junior Lab is really about the professional development
of the student as a scientist, and that means things
like approaching a difficult piece of apparatus
with an attitude that you're going
to be able to get it done.
Understanding that anything you try
is not going to work the first time.
You're going to have to debug it.
It's about keeping very careful records of what you've
done so that when you have to go back and repeat it,
you can see what you've done.
There's a large number of things that sort of add up to,
this is the way a professional does
it, which is different than almost anything they've
done previously in their career as a physics student.
ATISSA BANUAZIZI: So our class--
the CIM classes-- the goal is to get students
to learn to communicate like professional practitioners
of their own disciplines.
And that is really what 813, I think, excels at--
getting students to work, and think, and talk,
and write like physicists.
Students have to present over and over
and over again throughout the course of the semester.
And we think that this iterative process is really important.
We start out giving them some instruction
at the beginning of the semester,
but often they still don't feel wholly
comfortable with what they're doing
the first time they present.
And so once they've presented, they get videotaped,
and then we meet with them to discuss the video,
to discuss the slides, to see what worked
and what didn't work.
And those one-on-one conferences that we have with them,
they're reinforcing the core concepts in the instruction,
but in a way that's really directly linked to the work
that they've already done, the work that they're
continuing to do.
And to challenges that they've already
experienced so they can really understand
sort of the significance of these strategies.
Your Your primary mode in the laboratory
should really be as a coach.
You're trying to figure out what that student needs
at that moment in time.
There's a phrase here that's sometimes
called Just in Time Teaching.
And if you know what that means, it's
where the laboratory is sort of the perfect place
to do that type of teaching.
Oftentimes the tasks we give students in the lab
are really complex.
They may not have all the background
they need in order to complete the task when
they're starting it.
That level of uncertainty really causes
some anxiety in the students and can
be a barrier to their learning.
But if you're a professional scientist, this type of anxiety
is something you're actually very familiar with.
Most of us really don't know what
we're doing when we start a new research project.
I find it very useful to notice when a student is
in that condition and call it out, and actually
explain how this is actually a very normal thing.
This is not them being in a state of failure.
This is them actually feeling like what
a real scientist feels like.
A major part of a course like this
is building up the student's identity as a scientist.
Helping them move their understanding of themselves
from being a physics student to being a physicist.
If we can achieve that by the end of the semester,
then this course is a complete success
even if they've learned not a single thing about quantum
mechanics or relativity.
JANET CONRAD: What makes 813 or Junior Lab unique to me
as a teacher is that I am able to actually do
coaching in that class as opposed to just lecturing.
And I really like coaching.
It's the approach that I really prefer for helping students
to improve.
I like to work with students one-on-one
and try to understand what it is that they are not
getting so that I can then tweak it a little bit.
And often, very tiny tweaks make really major differences
in how well they can succeed.
So I sort of think of myself as a coach,
and I think that's what I'm really good at.
And so having found Junior Lab as a course to teach,
I want to stay there.
SEAN ROBINSON: Several years ago,
our approach to teaching data analysis in Junior Lab
was we would have a few lectures.
We would take the first hour and a half of each lab session
on the first couple of days of the semester
and just lecture to the students.
We'd give a blackboard talk, or a PowerPoint presentation,
and tell them everything there is
to know that would get them at least through a semester or two
of Junior Lab.
Now, of course, nobody would remember
any of that by the time it came to actually do
data analysis sometime in the next few weeks after that.
And given everything we know about how people learn,
that is not at all surprising.
So the way we do this now is there
is a little bit of instruction, either by some reading
or a video on the web, which is mediated through the Open EdEx
platform on MITx.
They do a little bit of what amounts
to a reading quiz on MITx.
But we don't necessarily believe that watching someone
give a lecture on a computer screen
is much better than giving a lecture in person.
Not necessarily.
So we believe the real learning is
going to happen the next day when they come to the classroom
and we're going to do some sort of very active exercise
on this very same material, which they just
learned overnight.
So the direct instruction that happens
as part of the preparation, we really
are treating it as the preparation.
It's not the main learning.
The main learning is going to happen with the active exercise
that happens in class, but we just
need to have some sort of priming
so that when they arrive, they are
ready to start that learning.
GUNTHER ROLAND: So one of the changes
that we made over the last three or four
years was to flip the classroom in 813 and 814.
Essentially, what we found is that we
spend a lot of time in class with lectures
by the lab staff, which in the end
seemed to be only moderately useful in really getting
the material across.
So what we decided to do was to export the lectures, in terms
of in the form of videos, to the MITx platform,
and replace the time that we spent on that previously
with in-class exercises and class discussions
to really rehearse some of the concepts that were introduced
in the lectures in class, which also gives us
a much closer communication with the students.
And we can find out what it is that really needs
to be explored in more depth.