Teaching Your First Astro 101 Course
Overview
- A simple zero-based course design process enables you to better organize your Astro 101 course and make it more understandable to students. This process covers establishing teaching goals, developing core ideas, determining student outcomes, and assessing learning.
Congratulations! You have a chance to teach your first intro astronomy class. Looking at the text for the course, you can't imagine how you will cover all of this material in the seemingly few weeks alloted. You wonder what topics you should leave out. You are thinking about your course wrong! Instead of trying to decide what to cut, you should decide what to put in. Consider a zero-based approach that will bring greater organization and continuity to your course. The plus-side of this approach is that your course organization becomes more obvious to students. Topics develop more naturally, your presentations become more thoughtful, and students usually respond more positively because they can understand the structure of the course. The downside is that you spend some additional time in preplanning, thinking through conceptual dependencies and trying to determine which educational tools work best for you. The good news is that the bulk of this work occurs the first time you teach the course and only requires tweaking in future semesters. (Lest you remain naive – good instructors do not “write their notes in ink to use forevermore;” they tweak the course – content and methods – every time they teach it regardless of methodology, so this maintenance work should occur anyway.)