Course Design and Planning
In this section of my portfolio, I focus on course design and planning. The work that goes into a course before teaching is crucial for creating a smooth classroom experience that accomplishes your learning goals. Below you can find some specific examples of course design and my thought processes.Introductory Course Design
Astronomy 101 Syllabus
Above you can find a link to a syllabus I designed for an Astronomy 101 course, a general science education course for non-majors. I have not yet taught this course, but it is a course I will likely teach in the future. It's also a course I look forward to teaching as I think one of the most important things I can do as an astronomer and educator is to share astronomy with the general population.
I started designing this course with the idea that I wanted to tell the story of astronomy. My overarching goal for the course is to step students through our understanding of the Universe and how we build that understanding up from our observations of the cosmos. For this reason, I want to organize the course starting with our observations of the night sky and our understanding of motions in the Solar System. Then I want to move out to stars and our knowledge of their lives, building out to galaxies as collections of stars. Finally I want to end with galaxies as tracing the structure and history of our Universe.
The second aspect around which I designed my course was the idea that I wanted to structure the course around five (or so) major assignments that asked students to explore the major concepts I want to get across. I have decided that these assignments will exist in two parts: the first part will be short quantitative questions that prepare students for the second part; the second half of the assignment will ask students an open-ended question related to the concept from that portionof the class. Currently I have slated the open-ended questions to be: Design Your Own Solar System, Make Your Own HR Diagram, Your Favorite Extra-Galactic Object, Pick Your Own Scale, and Life in Your Solar System. I like the solar system activites - students will be asked to design their own solar system, choosing a central star and describing the locations and motions of their planets. At the end of the semester, they will then discuss where life is most likely to occur in their solar system. I am also pleased with the scale activity - students will be asked to pick scales to describe the sizes and time scales of the Universe. I am still undecided about the activities for the stellar and extra-galactic units; especially for the extra-galactic unit I hope to come up with an assignment that better explores the concepts I want the students to learn.
One of the things I am very excited about for my planned course is the final activity. I am going to ask students to work in groups to argue for the funding of a telescope. I describe this activity more in the Student Assessment section, but the general idea is to get students invested in material from the semester by asking to make a persuasive argument based on science.
The last thing I would like to point out about my syllabus is that I am upfront with the students, both about my expectations for them (and also what they can expect of me) and the reasoning behind everything I have planned for the course. I want to integrate active learning into my classroom and in order for that to work, I need students to buy into the idea. One of the best ways to achieve that is with transparency.