Collaborative Effort–Teaching General Physics

I have been teaching general physics for non-Physics majors since 2008. I have implemented interactive learning elements into my lecture and “real life” questions, which allows the students to have short (3-4 minutes) discussion in small groups to find solutions for the given questions. I have seen improvement in student engagement and finally in test scores, especially within the semester as the students embrace this style of teaching. However, in order to really affect improvement, I communicate with other physics faculty to reflect on the evaluation of successful teaching. This would also allow each contributing faculty member to learn from each other and to have a better defined lecture script including in-class questions and physics demonstration material. All successful professional efforts require collaboration, as such to be truly successful at teaching we must learn to collaborate as physics educators, similar to how we collaborate as physics scholars. I started forming a team of faculty teaching the same course, where we discuss the material together with our TAs (teaching assistant) and LAs (learning assistant) on the weekly basis. We also discuss topics such as student’s confidence and feeling of belonging and how it impacts their learning and the success of mastering the course material. My goal here is to bring collaboration to our teaching team and to our students so that the teachers can teach better and the students can learn more while developing competencies that will carry over into their professional lives.