Establishing “Yes” Space
Katie Ansell is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Physics Department. She focuses her teaching efforts in the introductory courses, routinely teaching large-enrollment lectures and directing the implementation of innovative pedagogies in the physics laboratories. Her teaching principles include trusting students, building their confidence, allowing them to struggle, and guiding them to succeed. In addition, she transforms the classroom into a collaborative place where experiences, needs, and emotions are shared—an environment where students can feel that learning takes time and that they can succeed even if they don’t understand something the first time they see it.
Another teaching technique is to establish a “YES” space by challenging students to try thinking about new situations and solving new problems in a way that any response is acceptable. By doing this, she supports students’ shared basis of experience upon which to build classroom knowledge. She utilizes positive reinforcements and self-determination to drive the classroom atmosphere. In lectures, she incorporates minute papers to help students practice “just trying” and to develop empathy by reflecting on their prior experiences and expectations. She encourages students in the laboratory to be comfortable with open-ended experimental settings, which become increasingly challenging as the semester progresses. The goal of this learning process is to create an environment that supports productive struggle. Her message to other instructors is if you want students to think, make space for them to do.
Resources:
General information: IOLab
- Documentation of the service
- Samples of shared data (does not require login for access): Capacitor charging and discharging, Push on the IOLab, Force probe reading
Physics Education Research Conference (PERC) Proceedings papers from 2016 and 2017 with information about students’ attitudes in the new lab format and documenting their successful responses to “open” prelab questions.
A video presentation from an AAPT 2021 summer meeting summarizing the pedagogical design of introductory physics labs (video)(slides)
Syllabus for Physics 102 https://courses.physics.illinois.edu/phys102/fa2021/
Physics 102 course description: https://courses.physics.illinois.edu/phys102/fa2021/course-description.html
Pre-lab contents for Physics 211: https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/107872/Prelabs.zip?sequence=5&isAllowed=y
In-class content for Physics 211, including rubrics: https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/107872/Current_handouts.zip?sequence=2&isAllowed=y
Anonymized samples of minute papers (or of minute paper questions). See attached: questions and responses to four different questions from early and mid-semester.
Anonymized samples of team-based lab designs. Three examples from Physics 101 Lab 4, along with example rubric feedback