Students Learning About Learning

I had meant to track down Linda's email about the side-class that I (and Liz and John) could teach to support SUSTAIN but I am a little impatient to get some ideas down about how I envision the ideas that such a class could incorporate.


As I recall, the idea is for us to have a 2-unit class to provide some additional direction to students in our department/major to help ensure that the SUSTAIN experience is linked back to the major curriculum. In do some reading about learning portfolios ( Zubizarreta, John and Barbara J. Millis

The Learning Portfolio: Reflective Practice for Improving Student Learning Reflective Practice for Improving Student Learning, Jossey-Bass; 2nd edition 2009) I came across multiple times discussions about how important it was to get students to reflect on their learning. One set of reflection questions for students that was brought up (and reinforced throughout the essays in the book) is as follows:

Walking in a students' shoes--physics

It looks like I'll be playing a support teaching role to Pete in the physics courses that we'll be teaching in the winter.  Right now, these courses look like a range of courses on mechanics, and a "concepts of physics" course. Of course, this requires a great deal of review for me, especially in the mechanics area.

So, this summer, I am attempting to re-learn physics as if I were a student in SUSTAIN-using open education resources.  Here, I record some of my thoughts of this experience. First, I should point out that I have every advantage in (re-)learning physics: