Podcast #2
In this episode we talk with Jim Rolf from the Yale Math Department about flipping classes, the role of failure in the classroom and why it is that we teach.
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Show Notes
0:00 ⏯ Intro
1:10 ⏯ Teaching at the Air Force Academy (Don’t you wish your students would salute you?)
2:10 ⏯ Teaching integral calculus at Yale
3:00 ⏯ Comparing instructors
3:48 ⏯ When students are lulled into complacency
6:32 ⏯ How is your course different from year to year?
7:28 ⏯ What would the perfect class look like?
8:20 ⏯ Testing for competence, proficiency and mastery
10:19 ⏯ What’s the biggest recent change in your teaching?
13:02 ⏯ Do the students read the textbook?
15:16 ⏯ Do our students perform better than they did before?
16:25 ⏯ How do you know when a new teaching idea works?
16:47 ⏯ Learning objectives are no walk in the park
18:20 ⏯ Longitudinal analysis
20:17 ⏯ Is a ‘good’ easy class a good thing?
21:50 ⏯ Jim asks: Do good ideas emerge from bad ones?
23:13 ⏯ Earning ‘failure points’
23:43 ⏯ Student aversion to failure; peer instruction
24:30 ⏯ Is teaching a performance of learning?
25:49 ⏯ Asking students to read one truly awful paper
26:36 ⏯ Encouraging failure through anonymity
27:57 ⏯ Are Yale students perfect?
29:54 ⏯ Identifying students with problems early on
32:30 ⏯ Studying your own teaching with surveys and focus groups
34:32 ⏯ What was your biggest failure in the classroom?
38:42 ⏯ How did you become a teacher?
41:02 ⏯ Teaching as service and as a fun activity