September 20, 2023 Issue #15

SPOTLIGHT is the OPTYCs bi-weekly newsletter. It brings you OPTYCs activity updates, highlights from recent publications related to physics education, and news & resources for Two-Year colleges.

Upcoming events

• PER Journal Club Discussion September 22, 2023 from 3:00pm-4:00pm EDT
  Join us to share what you do in labs in this discussion about best practices.

• STEPUP 2023 Women Workshop September 23, 2023 from 12:00pm-1:30pm EDT
  Join us as we learn how to implement the STEP-UP lesson on 'Women in Physics'.

• STEPUP 2023 Actions Workshop October 7, 2023 from 12:00pm-1:30pm EDT
  Join us as we learn how to implement the STEP-UP lesson on 'Everyday Actions'.

• PER Journal Club Discussion October 27, 2023 from 3:00pm-4:00pm EDT
  Join us to talk about physics for life sciences.

• TPT 2023 Workshop October 28, 2023 from 12:00pm-2:00pm EDT
  In this workshop, The Physics Teacher Editor, Gary White, will discuss the general publishing process, and also help you develop ideas you may have to submit to TPT. 

• PALS 2023 Workshop November 4, 2023 from 12:00pm-3:00pm EDT
  The Physics Activities for Life Sciences (PALS) are carefully structured to take students from basic ideas and guide them towards mastery using thought experiments, simulations, and hands-on experiences using equipment that is common in physics instructional labs. In this workshop, we describe the evidence-based design of these activities, allow you to try out a few PALS, and show how PALS improved student learning gains on concept inventories.
  

Announcements

• SPOTLIGHT is planning to add a section named "Reader's corner" that will feature contributions from readers. Please consider sharing comments, tips, ideas, resources you have come across or anything that you think might benefit your physics TYC colleagues.
  Contact me directly if you have any question or suggestion: karim.diff@sfcollege.edu

OPTYCs Programs

• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Change Teams: The goal for this two-year-long program is to create a capacity-building learning community among two-year college physics-related teaching instructors to support efforts to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion for our students. We are now accepting applications for Cohort 1 (until October 20, 2023).
• OPTYCs Leadership Institute 2024: The TYC Leadership Institute is an innovative fellowship specially designed for Two-Year College Physics faculty, aiming to develop and enhance their leadership skills. The application deadline is October 20, 2023.

One way to jolt students out of their complacent ‘studenting’ habits, is to start class with a thinking activity. In his book Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics (Corwin - Sage Publishing, 2021) education researcher Peter Liljedahl provides many examples of these types of tasks. To be a thinking task, the problem that is posed must: be open-ended (no one correct answer), have a low floor (it takes very little effort or knowledge to get started), and have a high ceiling (there is much complexity in the task so that high achievers can keep exploring). And interestingly, devoting the first few minutes of a class to one of these tasks, even if they are not relevant to your content, primes students into thinking and they are much more likely to continue thinking throughout the rest of the lesson.

Honor Emmy Noether With the Unit For Momentum

Why this petition matters

Started by Erik Jensen

Sign the petition here 

Announcements

Presentation Submissions  Calling all physics educators! AAPT invites you to join a vibrant and enthusiastic community of fellow educators. If you're passionate about advancing physics education and have innovative teaching ideas to share, seize this opportunity to connect and collaborate at the 2024 AAPT Winter Meeting in the captivating city of New Orleans. Submission guidelines can be found here.  Review session topics available for submission.  Submit your presentation today.  Deadline: The last day to submit an abstract is September 27.

Video AAPT inaugural episode: Solar Eclipse Activites - 9/26, 7PM Eastern Introducing Video AAPT: Free virtual streaming interactive workshops for everyone with a passion for teaching physics! episode 1: Solar Eclipse Activities airs on Tuesday Sept. 26 at 7:00 PM. Click here for more information and to register

Recent papers

How do we assess computation in Physics? This paper provides a snapshot of some commonly used assessment activities and forms for computation in Physics. 

Social Reader Perusall: A Highly Effective Tool and Source of Formative Assessment Data This paper describes the authors' experience using Perusall in a STEM course at Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia.

Integrating Python data analysis in an existing introductory laboratory course The authors of this papaper describe how they created and used Jupyter Notebooks their laboratory course at Potsdam University in Germany. 

• The American Association of Physics Teachers 
• Committee on Physics in Two-Year Colleges (AAPT area committee)
• Join the TYC Google group: Send an email to tycphysics@googlegroups.com
• PhysPort Recommendations about teaching methods, assessment, and results from PER
• PER Central A resource collection for physics education researchers 
• Physics Review Physics Education Research Fully open access journal for PER 
• arXiv Physics education The arXiv repository for physics education papers
• AIP Statistical Research Center Data on education, careers, and diversity in physics, astronomy and other physical sciences

optycs.aapt.org

The work of OPTYCs is supported by NSF-DUE-2212807.