AAPT.org - American Association of Physics Teachers

Two-Year College New Faculty Experience

More Information:

Two-Year College New Faculty Experience
The American Association of Physics Teachers presents a 18-month experience designed specifically for Two-Year College Physics Faculty in their first five years of teaching.

The experience will equip participants with techniques that are:

  • Engaging
  • Hands-On
  • Proven at Two-Year Colleges
  • Based on Physics Education Research
  • Design for Promoting Active Learning

The experience will include:

  • Conferences, March 23-26, 2011 and July 28 - August 1, 2012
  • Online discussion sessions from June 2011 - July 2012
 

Overview

Timeline

November 8, 2010 Early notification of acceptance
December 20, 2010 Application deadline
January 28 - 29, 2011 Introduction to online system
January 30, 2011 - March 15, 2011 Online discussion of seminal journal articles in Physics Education Research
March 23 - 26, 2011 New Faculty Conference, Butler Community College, El Dorado, KS
April 2011 - May 2012 Implementation and mentoring of participants
July 28 - August 1, 2012 New Faculty Commencement Conference, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
National AAPT Summer Meeting

Leaders

  • Scott Schultz - Delta College, University Center, MI
  • Todd Leif- Cloud County Community, Concordia, KS
  • Dwain Desbien- Estrella Mountain Community College, Avondale AZ
  • Tom O'Kuma- Lee College, Baytown, TX
  • Danny Mattern- Butler Community College, El Dorado, KS
  • Warren Hein- American Association of Physics Teachers, College Park, MD

Costs

It is our expectation that we will cover through a pending NSF grant the following:

  • Room, you will be provided a room during the New Faculty Conferences to share with a participant of the same gender. We will try and accommodate requests for private rooms, but you will need to pay for half the room charges.
  • All meals and snacks during the New Faculty Conferences will be provided on conference days, you will need to pay for meals on travel days. National Science Grants due not allow funds to be spent on alcoholic beverages.
  • All workshop materials will be provided free of charge. Many participants find it useful to bring their own laptop computers, but this is not a requirement.
  • The online discussion board accounts will be provided free of charge.

* With the expectation of the NSF grant, we expect there will be no registration fee for this experience.

Participant costs

  • Home institutions are expected to cover travel expenses for participants to get to the two conferences. This includes airfare and meals on travel days.
  • The second conference will take place as a tandem meeting to the AAPT national summer meeting. As you are already there, we would highly encourage participants to stay an extra three days to participate in the national meeting. If you elect to stay, you or your home institution would need to cover the associated cost of staying which would include registration fee for the national meeting and the room and board for the extra days.
  • We are working on negotiating graduate credits for participating in this New Faculty Experience. We will publish this as soon as we have the details worked out. If you wish to receive these credits, you will be responsible for paying the tuition. This will be optional.

Applying

Simply fill out the application form (PDF) and send it to Scott Schultz (sfschult@delta.edu)

 

Why you should join in on the Experience:

This Experience is designed to equip new faculty members with knowledge of active learning techniques that are both based on Physics Education Research (PER) and that have been successfully implemented at two-year colleges across the country. Led by experienced two-year college physics instructors, this conference will empower a new faculty member as they embark on the important mission of developing critical thinking skills in their students and developing the future technological workforce for this country.

This Experience will focus on Physics Education Research and the data that show traditional lecture-based physics classes result in relatively small gains in student conceptual understanding of the fundamental concepts of physics. Much of this will take place through an online discussion of journal articles related to the topic during June and July. Consequently, conference participants will be ready for the actual conference as they will understand why there is a need to engage students at a higher cognitive level.

This Experience exposes participants to three major pedagogical initiatives in introductory physics that have improved student comprehension: Microcomputer-Based Labs (MBL), Introductory College Physics/Twenty First Century (ICP/21), and Instructional Strategies in Introductory Physics (discourse management/TIPERS). Based on their exposure the first day, participants will choose two of these areas to further explore over the next two days.

Contact & Information

Need to know more? Contact Scott Schultz at sfschult@delta.edu

This program is supported by National Science Foundation grant #DUE 0603272