Welcome to Ep 160 of the Think UDL podcast: Teaching Physics is Not A Solo Sport with Melissa Eblen-Zayas. Melissa Eblen-Zayas is Professor of Physics at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and a previous Director of Carleton’s Pearlman Learning and Teaching Center. In this conversation we talk about what it means to be an effective teacher of Physics and how to lean into disciplinary identity, being a Physics Professor, to teach Physics better. There is much crossover from UDL that Melissa is able to pinpoint, apply, and share with others that is helpful for not only Physics professors but all other faculty who want to improve their teaching in their discipline. She also introduces the EP3, Effective Practices for Physics Programs, which is created by Physics professors FOR Physics professors to help not only in their teaching, but recruitment and curriculum design, and anything and everything that helps a college level Physics program succeed. But mostly, we talk about taking down barriers for students so that they can more effectively learn, and in this case, learn Physics!
Resources
Contact Melissa Eblen-Zayas via email at meblenza@carleton.edu
The first part of the interview references the article Melissa Eblen-Zayas wrote with colleagues Kristen M. Burson (Grinnell College), and Danielle McDermott (Los Alamos National Laboratory): Course Modifications to Promote Student Mental Health and Move Toward Universal Design for Learning
We also reference the poster that Melissa Eblen-Zayas presented recently about the EP3: Supporting Research-Based Teaching by Building On Disciplinary Professional Identity
You can peruse the Effective Practices for Physics Programs Guide for helpful suggestions for any college level Physics program. It is a comprehensive guide made by Physics Professors that includes many best practices for teaching Physics.
Melissa Eblen-Zayas also created this handy chart of the Crossover between the EP3 and UDL
Transcript
54:08
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Universal Design for Learning, physics teaching, disciplinary identity, EP3 guide, effective practices, group work, mastery-oriented feedback, student reflection, choice in learning, UDL modifications, physics labs, student mental well-being, collaborative problem-solving, teaching strategies, educational development.
SPEAKERS
Lillian Nave, Melissa Eblen-Zayas
Lillian Nave 00:00
Welcome to Think UDL, the Universal Design for Learning podcast where we hear from the people who are designing and implementing strategies with learner variability in mind. I’m your host, Lillian Nave, and I’m interested in not just what you’re teaching, learning, guiding and facilitating, but how you design and implement it, and why it even matters. Welcome to Episode 160 of the think UDL podcast, teaching physics is not a solo sport with Melissa Eblen-Zayas. Melissa Eblen-Zayas is a professor of physics at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and a previous director of carleton’s Perelman Learning and Teaching Center. In this conversation, we talk about what it means to be an effective teacher of physics and how to lean into disciplinary identity, which is being a physics professor to teach physics better. There is much crossover from UDL that Melissa is able to pinpoint, apply and share with others that is helpful for not only physics professors, but all other faculty who want to improve their teaching in their discipline. She also introduces the EP three, or effective practices for physics programs, which is created by physics professors, for physics professors to help, not only in their teaching, but recruitment and curriculum design and anything and everything that helps a college level physics program succeed. But mostly we talk about taking down barriers for students so that they can more effectively learn, and in this case, learn physics. We mentioned a few resources in this conversation, and you’ll find them in the resource section just before the transcript on think udl.org, and as always, thank you for listening to the think UDL podcast. I just want to welcome Melissa Eblen-Zayas, who I met recently at a conference. I want to say thank you for joining me on the Think UDL podcast.
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 02:27
Thanks for inviting me to be here. I’m looking forward to the conversation.
Lillian Nave 02:30
Me too. I’m really interested, anytime I get a chance to talk to someone who is a stem professor, and physics is that’s a tough one. We’re going to talk about how people have anxiety about physics, and you have beautifully linked Universal Design for Learning principles in your physics teaching and have helped others. So that’s what I’m very much excited about. But the first question I have for you is, what makes you a different kind of learner?
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 03:00
Yeah, so physicists in general, really like building models of the physical world, but and many physicists enjoy sort of thinking in those abstract models, but I’ve always been a person who is much more interested in like, how you apply these models to the understanding of everyday life, or how I see these models connected to other fields, and so I’m definitely a person who likes the application to the physical world, as opposed to just dealing in this realm of abstract mathematical models. So why do metals bend and why do ceramics break? That’s much more interesting to me then, just like, let’s talk abstractly about materials.
Lillian Nave 03:44
Oh, I love this. This is awesome. And you’ve also got me thinking, My My son is studying chemical engineering, and he’s in a lab with, like, liquid metals, yes,
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 03:54
yes.
Lillian Nave 03:54
And he will start talking to me, and I’m like, I am a smart person. I think I’m a smart person. I am not as smart as this kid telling me about how liquid metals act in space and open up and all this. This is very cool, okay, as a artist, as an art historian, this is blowing my mind. I love it
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 04:14
well. And I will say, like, if you want to talk about connections, right? And my interest in connections, there’s actually some physicists who have explored sort of the optics that old masters used in developing their their craft. So there are connections between art history and physics.
Lillian Nave 04:34
Yes, there are. I love it. That’s awesome. Okay, so I’m really glad that you are very much interested in application, because what you’ve done is is something that not many folks, at least that I’ve had the chance to talk to, have done, which is really be able to apply the thinking like a scientist kind of thing to thinking about how you teach as a physicist. And it’s rare, and I’m very. Excited to talk to you about it, that you that someone’s able to really articulate that, and that’s what got me super excited about seeing your poster, and made me jump right on you to talk. So let’s get into the physics and and physics courses. I know because I’ve had several of my own children have taken physics in college, and they cause high anxiety in students, both majors and non majors, and you have written a wonderful article, which we’ll link in today’s resources, and you and your co authors have suggested three UDL modifications specific to teaching physics to help ease that anxiety and promote student mental well being. And the first thing I’d like to talk about is you talk about group work, which is an aspect of physics labs and classes. So what is it that can be done to make group work, which is something the UDL guidelines say is very good, because it relies on collaboration and creates community, but can also be detrimental to mental health if done poorly. So what can you do for group work in physics classes to make it less stressful and more successful?
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 06:16
Yeah, so I think, I think you’ve pointed out, and I’ve had lots of discussions with colleagues about this inherent tension in that, you know, first of all, most of physics in the professional realm, it is done by teams of physicists working together, right? And so ultimately, we’re not just doing group work, because it’s good in the classroom, right? But actually, if students go on and have careers in physics, they will have to work as a part of a team. But aside from that, right, you know, the group work can be a great opportunity to build community, create connections, help students see that they’re not alone in struggling to understand, you know, what’s going on in the classroom, and the questions that they have are shared by their classmates, but we often assume that just if we put students together in the classroom in groups, then voila, all these wonderful things will come out of it, and and so what my co authors And I really talked about in this paper is how important it is to be very sort of careful and intentional in how you structure group work, so that you can, you know, get the benefits and try to minimize the some of the some of the, some of the challenges that come about with with group work. And so, you know, I think, you know, there’s a couple of things that we think about in this realm. First is being very clear about articulating your expectations for group work, like, why are you having students participate in groups? What do you hope an effective group will look like? Right? Actually describe what you’ve seen, or sometimes I’ll include little videos of here’s a dysfunctional group in in lab, and here’s a functional group in labs that that we can actually like. Visually see what does this look like, and talk about what that what that looks like. And I think also asking students about their own experiences, because sometimes students are, you know, reluctant to engage in group work because they’ve had really bad experiences with group work in the past, and so bringing that up and having students identify why this didn’t work for them can can be helpful. And then I always, when I have students work in groups, I always collectively as a class, we sell, we decide on some guidelines for working in a group. But then I have each individual group sort of make some additional modifications for how they hope that they’re that they’re going to going to work together. Another element of making group work successful is allowing group members to really get to know each other and work together for an extended period of time. I used to be a person who I would just always mix up my groups, because my sense was like, oh, let’s have students meet as many people in the class as possible. But then as I started reading some of the literature and talking with some of the students, I realized that, you know, that can actually be very high anxiety for students if, like, every single class period, you have to go in and introduce yourself to a new set of people, if you’re sort of an introvert, that does not work well, and if you’re not sure, like, Can I trust these people, you don’t actually have time to build any sense of relationship. The other thing that that also came out is if you’re only with a group for a very short period of. Time you’re much, students often are much more concerned about making mistakes because they’re afraid that they will be judged and their only interaction with people in the group will be the one class period where they gave a stupid answer or made a mistake, or, I mean, and not that, I mean, mistakes are good. There’s no no but that’s how the students internalize it. And so if you allow students to work together in groups for an extended period of time, then the groups begin to understand each other, trust each other a little bit more. And certainly one day may be a bad day for you and you’re really struggling, but another day, you know you may be the person who’s sort of stepping forward and leading the group and explaining a particular a particular idea. So that’s important. I think there’s also, it’s important to structure groups and group interactions. And I think there’s, there’s two pieces to this. One is, if you’re having students work in groups, make sure that what you’re asking students to do really benefits from having them work together. So for example, if there is a really straightforward physics problem where there is only one right way to do it, and there is one answer, and it’s basically just exactly repeating an example in the book. There’s not much benefit necessarily to bringing multiple minds together to work on this. On the other hand, conceptual questions, those actually are much richer for having conversations with because, you know, people might have slightly different conceptual understandings or different ways they’re thinking about applying this and that’s richer. Or, you know, problems that are sort of bigger and meatier and more complex lend themselves to working in groups. But I also feel like it’s important for students who are not as comfortable working together to really help them understand that there are different roles to be played in groups and in different contexts. We’re really intentional about asking group members to take on particular roles. And so I went to graduate school at the University of Minnesota, and Ken Heller had a physics education research group there that did a lot of work on cooperative problem solving, and they had this model where there are four students, sort of work in groups of four, and there are four roles, and someone is a manager, someone is the recorder, someone is the skeptic, and someone is the summarizer. And then as they work on different roles or on different problems, people rotate those roles so that someone is not always the person who is the recorder, or someone is not always the manager. And you encourage people to sort of step out of their comfort zone, but also encourage everyone to engage, or I can say here in in our department at Carleton, we found that in our sophomore level lab courses, labs tend to be places where students very much default into their comfort zone. And so my colleague, Marty Baylor, was a person who sort of initiated this, and now our entire department has has taken this up, where students work in groups of three, and there’s three roles. And so someone is the apparatus Meister, someone is the notebook Meister, and someone is the analysis Meister. And the idea being that, you know, one week when you’re the apparatus Meister, you are the person who is like, taking the lead on, you know, connecting things, fiddling with the knobs, the person who is the notebook Meister is the person who’s responsible for keeping really good records about what you’re doing, and the person who’s the analysis Meister is sort of thinking about, Okay, how are we going to set this up? How are we going to analyze the data? And then every week that rotates so that you can’t, you don’t have the person who is super comfortable with the equipment, always fiddling with the equipment, and you don’t have the person who’s, you know, not very confident, always defaulting to the role of notebook Meister and and so. So that’s another way to try to make groups work. Well, I think the other, the other element, is just to continuously help groups improve. So talking about the interactions you’re seeing with students as they work in groups, and then inviting students to regularly reflect and report on how their group is working, because then it’s not as if, well, you know, I’m just interested in what you’re doing in groups. I’m not interested in the process of how you’re interacting as a group. I. Actually intentionally asking and talking about that, then you’re emphasizing it’s not just the content you’re engaging with, but it’s actually how you’re engaging that is, that is also important to me.
Lillian Nave 15:13
All of these are really helpful. I mean, I can see that physics always has a lab, right? So you’ve got a four credit, right, rather than a three credit. And so this is really great to think about how I can see this application too, outside of physics, yeah, lots of different ways. It’s really good, but I had never heard of the meisters, the apparatus, Meister notebook, Meister and analysis Meister. And it makes me think of one of the things that I talk to my students all the time about is that learning zone. Like you said, we don’t want the person who’s super comfortable with the notebook always to be the notebook, because they need to stretch and right right, learn how to work the apparatus, and we don’t. I want all of my students to be uncomfortable some of the time,
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 16:05
exactly, and so you don’t want them to always be out of their comfort zone. And so in this case, students begin to and I think that also helps then in the group, because, you know, when you’re outside of your comfort zone, you can let your you can let your group members know and say, like, wow, this feels a little uncomfortable to me, but then your group members can also see you doing something where you really shine and and so in in that regard, I think it helps sort of build the sense of like as a team. We each have different strengths and that we bring, but also areas where we need to grow. And part of being a team that’s sort of being supportive as people are growing and and then also appreciating when people are flourishing.
Lillian Nave 16:47
Yes, yeah, and you’re giving each one of those students that opportunity to be the one who’s helping the other person and being the uncomfortable one at the same at different points. So that’s fantastic. Those are really great, I think, ideas that we could use, and especially for our physics faculty. This is a really great implementation, but you have more because a second aspect that is really important in Universal Design for Learning is mastery oriented feedback. So what does that look like in a physics class?
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 17:27
Yeah, so I’ll just say that when I was a physics student, many eons ago, right? A lot of what physics was was, you know, it was more traditional lecture, right? And then you would practice outside of class on problems, right? And then you would turn in your problem set, and, and, and this was even when I was also beginning as a faculty member, right? It’s like, okay, let’s give these students problems, have them practice the problems. But then homework, although we’re considering it practice, we would grade it for correctness, right? It’s like, did you get to the right answer? And, I mean, yes, eventually we want students to be able to get to the right answer. But if what this really is is practice, we shouldn’t be assessing them on like, Oh, were you able to get to the right answer this first go round and and so the idea of mastery assessment is is to change the focus during the practice phase, from I’m focused on, can you get the right answer while you’re practicing, to, are you paying attention to the process, And are you sort of being reflective on the process and sort of understanding where, where you’re getting stuck? And so this can take a couple of different formats. You know, I have many of my assignments, including, you know, homework problems, including written assignments that are that have the option of revise and resubmit. Because, in physics, right? If you’re writing a paper, almost no papers are accepted, just as are, right? You know you’re gonna, you’re gonna revise and resubmit it. And so actually, if this is practice, revise and resubmit it, right? So you put in an initial effort. And I’ll sort of say, like, here’s where I’m seeing you’re struggling. Here’s where I’m seeing you’re doing really well. Take another look at it and turn, you know, and then resubmit it to me. And so that’s one way that you can sort of focus on, on mastery oriented feedback. Another way that, that you can, you can do this is oftentimes, I’ll have students do make a preliminary attempt at something outside of class time, and then I’ll have every student come in and bring it into class, and they’ll discuss it with partners, and, you know, maybe share with a partner about, okay, here’s what I. Trying to do. Here’s what you’re trying to do. Let’s see, sort of where we’re in agreement in terms of what our approaches were, and let’s see where our approaches diverged. And then sort of, I’ll circulate and sort of see, okay, where are the common points where folks are having trouble? And use that to say, like, okay, here, here is where I’m seeing the challenge. And here are the things you need to think about in order to overcome that, that challenge. And so I think those are, those are some of the ways that the you can think about it. I’ve also, you know, one of the things I also think is a challenge about a lot of the ways that we do assessment is it’s sort of one and done, and there’s not much incentive for students to actually go back and really think about where they ran into difficulties, or think about, you know, okay, what do I need to know moving forward? And for something like physics, where the discipline and what you’re learning really does keep building on each other. It’s not like, I can just say, like, well, I didn’t understand this, and I’m just going to ignore it and move on, because we’re going to come back and build on this, right? And so it is really important to me that students, you know, take stock of what they understood and like, even on exams right, like so exams are assessing where you’re at. But these concepts, if you take a subsequent course, or later in this course, are you’re going to see them again. And so thinking about opportunities to, you know, make exam corrections, or to think about having, I also will sometimes include some learning reflections, where you can get points for reflecting on, you know, what, where did you struggle and how do you think you’re going to try to take a new approach to this as you go forward? I think, I think is important in order to set students up for recognizing that they may not have understood something right at this point in time, but it’s worth the time to, like, go back and think about it more, because this topic is going to come up again.
Lillian Nave 22:11
Yeah, that is so, so important, and that reflection part is major in UDL. That’s one of the things that I know when I was in school, there was very little reflection. It was, get it done, hand it in, don’t think about it again, right? And that made me really forget a lot of things,
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 22:31
yeah, I mean, and I will say that this is not necessarily about mastery oriented feedback, but on the on the reflection piece of things, you know, I have, just as I have, you know, weekly sort of physics content assignments in my classes. I also have, in my intro physics class, like a weekly learning reflection assignment. It’s not great. I mean, it’s only graded in terms of, you have to do it and and you if you want to, students can sort of, you know, Slack, you know, slack off and not put much effort into it, but it sort of says, like, Okay, what was, you know, one visual that we talked about this week that just either really worked for you or really didn’t work for you, or it might be something about like, what is one time this week where you talked with a classmate that they really helped you understand something, right? So I’m sort of trying to, like, highlight all the different ways they might be, you know, learning about things that is not just I went to class and I’m too, you know, and sort of highlighting different modes of learning, different modes of help, seeking different different basically challenging places that they found and actually surfacing that. And then sometimes they’ll actually say, like, Okay, well, here’s an interesting like, I read the learning reflections, and here’s what I’m seeing. You know, these people found this to be really confusing, and these people actually found this was the most helpful thing, and that, I think can highlight that, like not everyone is experiencing the class in the in the same way,
Lillian Nave 24:07
absolutely. And my goodness, if I had all of these reflections and opportunities for formative feedback, I think I would remember a lot more about the physics that I took and I think we had this conversation. Like the only thing I remember from physics. And I took AP physics in high school. I got an A in the class, but I failed the AP exam, so I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I’m a very compliant student. I just don’t think I got all of the concepts, and because one day we needed to bring in a skateboard to learn about velocity, right? And, and I had a skateboard because I was cool and I was a girl skateboarder, and that application of that, that’s what I remember. And, and I still remember about like it’s a same force, but I kept on going faster.
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 24:59
Yeah, right.
Lillian Nave 25:01
And, and that was, like, the best thing that I learned from physics, because we got to do that. And of course, labs is, you know, that’s why we’re doing these things. We’re experimenting with them. But I there was definitely something that I was not getting, like the reflection or the formative feedback, because I thought I was ready, and I was like, I think I get this then, with that summative assessment at the end of my high school physics career, I was like, I really did not. And look at me, I became an art historian.
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 25:35
And I think that’s, I think that’s exactly what we don’t want our students to have an unrealistic assessment of, like, where they stand, and I and I also feel like it’s important that like, their assessment of where they stand is not based on the grade, just the grades they’re getting. Right? I feel like, oftentimes we feel like the grades tell the students how they’re understanding, but like, to your point, right? Like it’s sometimes an age just shows that you, like, checked all the boxes, not necessarily that you had a depth of understanding and you’ve, like, really retained it over any period of time.
Lillian Nave 26:09
Yes, exactly. That’s why I think it’s still like, such a mystery to me. Was like, I feel like I would pretended to learn physics at the time, but this, all of this sounds like, oh, I would totally get it this way. I would this would be so helpful. Yeah, so, so I love it, okay, and it’s really, I just see this as so helpful. You’re doing great application here. So the the third thing that you and your co authors wrote about that I thought was great and is So UDL, with bright, shining, flashing lights, is choice, and giving choice to our students is a huge flexibility UDL aspect. But my question is, how much choice can a physics class give its students, and what does that look like?
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 26:59
Yeah, so I think there is a way in which there certainly are some constraints on the level of choice that you can provide in a physics class, because of what I was describing before, where you know physics really does build and there are lots of connections. And so you do need to sort of build the fundamental building blocks in and you need to build them to some extent, in a particular order, right? You can’t say, like, Oh, I’m gonna, like, skip kinematics and just jump over here to, you know, to this more advanced topic, because if you don’t have that basic, those basic foundations, you you’re going to have trouble, sort of, like, making sense of things. And so I do feel like there are some limitations that that are put on, on that, that being said, I do feel like it’s important to give students some agency. And so, you know, one of the things is on, like practice problems or problem sets, right? Oftentimes thinking about not just saying, here are the problems that you must do, but saying, okay, here are, you know, maybe a few core problems that I want everyone to practice and then choose, you know, which of these problems you think more you need more practice on or choose which of these problems show applications to you know, your area of study that you’re interested in, most people taking intro physics are not actually going to continue on in physics. They’re taking it because it’s required for something else, and so trying to have practice problems that sort of demonstrate Okay, here is a way that this might be useful in this particular context. And so in that way, then when you’re spending time, you have some choice on, you know, okay, this is the area where I want to sort of see how physics is applied in this area. Or it might be vice versa. It might be like, actually, I’m not interested in this area, but like, I know I need more practice on this topic. And so if you’re self aware, to know that, like, Let’s do so more practice problems on this topic, and let’s do less practice problems on this topic, which you already know. And so as opposed to me dictating, these are the set of practice problems that you must do, providing some general guidance about about things. I also, in a number of my upper level classes, I give students choice about, if I’m really focused on like, you’re presenting the results of like, what you did in lab, or something like that. I will sometimes give students a choice. You can do it in writing, or you can do an oral presentation, right? Because I’m actually not, in this case, right? In a case where, where my learning goal is that you learn how to write, do technical writing. Okay, then I’m going to make you do. Technical writing. But if my goal is like I want to see, did you understand the lab? And can you explain to me your analysis? I’m okay if you either do that in writing or if you do it in an oral presentation. And so that’s the that’s another type of choice that that I might, I might include. And then the other thing, the other place where, in our department, we’ve tried to be sort of intentional in how we think about this. In some of the intro labs, we try to make the intro labs such that it’s like you have to choose how you are going to explore this question, and then, because, ultimately, experiments are not following what someone tells you to do, right? It is you have to design the experiment yourself. And so for experiments where we try to decide on some experiments that don’t require a lot of, like, equipment that is super sensitive, and we’re sort of saying, like, explore physics out in the world, right? And then you make, you design the experiment, and you analyze the data in the way that you see fit, and you choose, sort of like, what is the range of distances you’re going to use? Or you choose, you know, what exactly is the is the object you’re going to follow the path of, or something like that. We’re still getting at the same question, but it really forces students to have ownership of like, oh, okay, I’m going to choose to look over this range of distances, and another group might just look over this range of distances, and then we can actually we can actually have some conversations between the groups about, okay, well, what did your group find in terms of the choices you made and what you were exploring in lab, and what did your group find? And, and, and then it’s less about it that’s more authentic in terms of how the science will actually happen. And we can’t do that for all of the labs, because certainly sometimes, you know, we want people to learn how to use a particular piece of equipment, or learn how to use a particular analysis technique and and in order to really ensure success, we have to provide constraints. But we always do try to provide at least a couple of labs where, where there is that flexibility and choice.
Lillian Nave 32:24
Yeah, that sounds more fun. And that’s where I would bring in my skateboard. And Exactly,
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 32:29
exactly, or like, in at Carlton here, I have a colleague who we in the winter trimester. She has students go out and take sleds out on campus if there’s snow. And like, okay, then what are you going to look you know, what are you going to analyze on the sledding hill as you, as you go outside,
Lillian Nave 32:48
oh my gosh, that is super fun for physics. Oh, I love it. And I bet you do have snow quite a bit.
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 32:54
We do. We do. I mean, that is one of those labs, though, where you definitely have to have a pivot in case there is not snow, or if it’s like, mine is 20 degrees. Yeah, you don’t want to send people out. Yes, you doing lab. So exactly,
Lillian Nave 33:07
I once made the major mistake of doing an art walk, and it was the coldest day in Boone ever. It was like it was a negative degree. And those poor students, I was like, come look at this outdoor sculpture. And they were just chattering. It’s like, nobody’s learning anything. They’re just like, “Where can I get some hot chocolate?
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 33:25
They will remember, but maybe not what you want them to remember
Lillian Nave 33:29
exactly. They will remember how stupid that was for me to take them out on a day like that, right? Pivot, you always have to have that. Okay? So, so that’s great. I didn’t even think about all those choices you could have. And I’m also very impressed by what you’ve specifically connected with the UDL guidelines to something called the EP three, and I want to get into that because you’ve made some really good headway in using UDL to teach like a scientist and teach like a physicist, but it’s really connected to the discipline of physics. So what is the EP three and why is it important to lean into that disciplinary professional identity?
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 34:17
Yeah, so EP three is That’s an acronym that sounds that stands for effective practices for physics programs. And this is a joint effort of the American Physical Society and the American Association of physics teachers. And the EP three initiative was launched maybe 10 years ago, before I have only been involved in the past couple of years, but, but initially, the idea was, you know, there is a lot of evidence out there, and there’s a lot of community wisdom out there about what makes for a thriving physics program. And the EP three guide is like writ large. So it’s both like what happens in the classroom, it’s how you design the curriculum, but it’s also things like recruitment and retention, advisory, advising and mentoring, career preparation, like all different aspects of physics programs and during you know, over the years, the physics community, over 250 physicists from 100 different institutions have been involved with this initiative, and so the way the process works is there’s an invitation for experts to sort of contribute their recommendations or their research findings about what leads to thriving physics programs, and those contributions then are synthesized by committees of different physicists. And then they’re sort of developed into the section of like, here are themes of effective practices on this particular topic. And then underneath those themes, there’s some specific sort of, here are specific examples of how you can implement these themes and and then now goes out and is, you know, peer reviewed by people who then make additional suggestions. So then you have this sort of, like big picture collective community wisdom of here, here’s what’s helpful and and I think you know, often when we think about what happens in the classroom, you know faculty are trained into a particular disciplinary way of thinking, right? And when they when they hear about recommendations for like, here is something you should do in the classroom, right, they often are skeptical and say, Oh, but I don’t know if this is relevant or helpful for training students in my particular disciplinary way of thinking,
Lillian Nave 36:48
exactly, right?
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 36:50
And I think the fact that the EP three guide is developed by professionals who are concerned with the health of the discipline, right? Then physicists can look at the EP three guide and say, like, Oh, okay. These are recommendations that are made by my peers in physics. And so if they, you know, if they make a recommendation about thinking about, you know, some aspect of how I should structure my classroom or how I should support student learning, it’s not made from sort of a generic place of like, oh, this is going to be helpful for students, but like, this is actually intentionally thought about in terms of how it would help physics students, right? And I will say that, you know, throughout my career, I’ve occupied somewhat unique roles in that I straddle the discipline and I also straddle educational development. So I for for four years, rotated in and was the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at my institution, where it’s a rotating Center Director model. And, you know, in my role as an educational developer, that was really where I first learned about UDL, and it’s a powerful framework, but I will also say that it’s sort of overwhelming and it spoils a bit. You know, once again, if you think about going back to like, I don’t like dealing with abstract models, I really like thinking about the application. Like I felt that same way about UDL, to be quite honest. I’m like, Oh, I can see how this abstract model might be helpful to some people. But like,
Lillian Nave 38:34
Yeah, how’s it going to work for me?
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 38:35
I don’t see how it works for me. And so one of the things that’s really nice about the EP three guide is that it was not developed in terms of like, okay, let’s start with UDL. It’s like, let’s start with, what are the principles that make for effective physics classes and help students succeed in those classes. And yet, many of those recommendations that came from the physics community indeed map directly onto UDL guidelines, but they’re framed in a way that just avoids sort of that abstract UDL jargon. I mean, and I think jargon actually goes both ways right. I mean, I don’t want me right like, I think jargon is actually super valuable, because it gives those on the inside a way to convey, like, very specific ideas very quickly. But for people who are coming from the outside, that’s hard, and so it’s like for people coming from the outside of UDL, it’s hard to sort of understand what that means. Physicists are equally, you know, equally culpable of this in that, like, if you’re coming out from outside of physics, and you think about like work or energy, we use worker energy in colloquial terms, in ways that, like, do not always matter. Match with the physics terms, right? And so and so we need to be just very mindful of that. And so, the thing that I like about the EP three guide is it, it encourages folks to sort of lean into their approach as a scientist and sort of say, Okay, think about your classroom as a place where you can experiment, right? And so try something you know, like, have an objective, have something you want to explore, try something, take some data, right? And so, like, see what is the student experience like, and then decide what you can learn and make adjustments accordingly, and, and, and. So in that regard, it feels a little bit more approachable.
Lillian Nave 40:49
Absolutely, you kind of answered two questions in one, because you talked about the jargon that I was interested in too. But that’s good, like it can throw people off, and it can also be this Shibboleth, this, like, Oh, you’re one of us, right? Yeah, right, right. You’re in the in crowd, right? But, yeah. But I can also see how it’s going to help some beginning teachers too. Yeah,
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 41:17
yeah. And, I mean, I’ll give you an example of, like, one way in which the the translation, or things get lost in translation. You know, there is in UDL, there’s a lot of emphasis on, like, multiple means of representation, okay, and so I hear multiple means of representation. And like, as a physicist, I’m like, what does that mean, right? And yet, as a physics teacher, you know, it’s important to include equations and text and graphs and to have some, like, demos where students are actually, like, rotating on benches with weights and, like, the kinesthetic aspect of things. And then there’s like, maybe some computer simulations, and so, you know, and so the EP three guide, right? It doesn’t say engage students with multiple means of representation, right? It says, make sure that you help students sharpen their thinking and reflect on their understanding by having them, you know, think about a topic using graphs, equations, text,
Lillian Nave 42:22
yeah, diagrams, all that.
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 42:24
That’s an example where they they’re just the that it’s exactly the same thing, yes, but it’s just in a in a framework, or in the language that a physics instructor is like, oh, yeah, of course. I can do that. That’s not hard, right?
Lillian Nave 42:42
I already do that,
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 42:43
right? And I think, or another example which we, which we went back to, is, you know, in the UDL, they talk about, how do you recruit interest, right? And how you like, build on students interests. And I think in physics, you know, a lot of our intro physics classes, as I said, are not for physics majors, right? So they are for pre health students, or they’re for engineers, or, you know, they’re all that kind they’re all all different kinds of populations of students that we’re trying to serve. And so, you know, there’s a lot of focus in the in the EP three guide about, okay, in courses that are going to have students in the life sciences, right? Consider what are authentic applications of physics and actually encourage students to intentionally develop connections between what they’re seeing in their physics classes and what they’ve seen in their life science classes. And so that’s that is a UDL principle, right? But it’s framed in a way and with a language that is very comfortable to physicists. Yes,
Lillian Nave 43:49
I wish every discipline had something like this. This EP three is so effective practices for whatever programs it wouldn’t have all P’s, yeah,
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 44:01
yeah, no, I feel like that. A lot of the a lot of the work is it wouldn’t take that much for other disciplines to translate, you know, this kind of idea to their disciplines,
Lillian Nave 44:14
right? It could be for philosophy programs, right? But that would, they’d have to use a different name, because that’d be confusing. You know, we’re out there for a civil line. P3 acronym, exactly. Yeah, they’d be a copycat, yeah. So it’s often time I found, like, when I started talking to people about UDL, a lot of mine, my energy was like, Oh, you’re already doing it. You see this thing that you’re doing as a physics professor using charts, diagrams, you know you’re doing all this that’s multiple means of representation or and that’s what actually got me into the whole faculty development, is I was doing something, and my colleague Tracy Smith was like, Oh, can you tell the folks about formative. Summative assessment. I was like, Sure, absolutely, what are those? I just didn’t know. That’s what they were called,
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 45:05
right, right, right, exactly. And I think it’s interesting in that, you know, there are definitely different paths into educational development, and sort of, you know, remembering that educational development is essentially about bridging between lots of different ideas and different disciplines.
Lillian Nave 45:25
Yes, it is, I love and applying it. Going back to your first answer, the application of right here are these abstract ideas, yeah, but what does it really mean in
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 45:34
exactly
Lillian Nave 45:35
my discipline, for what I’m doing, or as the Center for Teaching and Learning director, what does that mean if I’m apply it across the campus,
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 45:41
exactly,
Lillian Nave 45:42
any number of things. So the last part from your poster was about offering entry points to centers for teaching and learning, but also instructors disciplinary professional societies. So how does that EP three, which is awesome, and I hope all of our listeners are going to take a look at that, because they should start their own in whichever discipline they are. So how can that offer entry points to physics professors to reduce those barriers to learning?
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 46:16
Yeah, so, I mean, I think one of the things about the EP three guide is, as I said, it’s, in some ways it’s overwhelming because there’s so many options there, but I also feel like it makes it a way for physicists to how to choose one aspect of something that they’re thinking about and Just get a list of ideas of things that you might want to try, right and and I think, for example, one area is what we talked about a little bit before, about like reflection and metacognition. And, you know, how do you bring that like into the classroom? But also, how do you think about that as you’re thinking about advising and mentoring of students, or career preparation of students and and I think there are ways in which, you know, having faculty members, you know, be intentional about encouraging reflection in students, and also to recognize, though, that you know, the EP three guide has some concrete recommendations, but I think one of the things that we also encourage people to do, and in the poster that you saw, is that, like, no one is ever doing this work alone, right? And so if you aren’t quite sure about how to implement a particular recommendation, right, you can talk to your physics colleagues. You can talk to your colleagues in the Center for Teaching and Learning. Like, there’s a lot of different people who are looking at these same ideas from different aspects. And like, teaching should not be a solo sport. Yes, it really is. It’s a lot more fun, and you can get a lot farther with a lot less work, if you talk to other people for ideas. And so I think part of what we want with the EP three guide is, you know, to give physics faculty ideas about how they might take new approaches, you know, or let’s say you’re thinking about like redesigning learning objectives for a course. What are some things you might need to think about, how might learning objectives for a course impact your pedagogy? How might it impact curricular design? How might it, you know, impact lots of different things, and then you know, sort of saying like, Okay, well, here are some concrete steps of things you might think about. And also, though, like think about talking to, you know, your center of teaching and learning, or think about talking to other people in your department about to make sure that you’re all on the same page. And so I really like the fact that the EP three Guide is a sort of community effort, right? It is, you know, lots of physicists contributed to it. And find what pieces are things that you’re looking to change or do something different with. See what recommendations are in the EP three guide. But then also think about who else you can talk to to make some changes. And there’s a lot there, you know, in the teaching and learning section, right? I will say, you know, thinking about, like, alternative grading, or thinking about group work, or, you know, some of those things that that we’ve talked about, or, or, you know, have those are all in the EP three guide, and, and so there’s some recommendations there. But I think you can also think about that as like that’s a conversation starter with your colleagues to move on. So the one thing that the EP three guide that we’re currently still trying to figure out is it was mostly developed prior to the era of generative AI, right? So one of the. Things we’re thinking about is like, which of these core practices are actually still core practices in the era of AI, and which of these might actually become easier in the era of AI, and what might become harder in the era of AI? And so that’s something that those of us who are involved with EP three are still thinking about a little bit so, so there’s always, there’s always food for thought. There is never, you never arrive at an end point with, with anything with regards to teaching and learning, in terms of, like, Oh, this is, you know, this is the answer. But I hope that EP three will serve as a good, you know, conversation starter some concrete ideas, but also concrete ideas that folks will talk with others in their department or others in their institution about,
Lillian Nave 50:51
yeah, it’s such a great idea. And as as you were just sort of explaining and kind of wrapping up this concept of what the EP three is, it seems I go back to your first answer, that you want to see application of things and in your roles. Thank you for telling us about like, how you’ve been. You are right now of professor of physics, but you have been the Center for Teaching person. And I can just kind of see connecting the dots between your disciplinary. It’s like you’ve got a disciplinary like a department meeting, physics department meeting. And then over on the other side of a continuum, you’ve got the Center for Teaching and Learning that you were also heading and part of and deeply enmeshed in. And then in the middle is this EP three, which is melding those two things
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 51:37
exactly, exactly. And so it’s been a, I mean, I will say it’s been a really fun space to work in, because it’s one of the few places where I feel like often I’m either in my disciplinary silo or I’m with my educational development hat on. And this is really fun because it allows me to bring both sides of me together. And so, so I enjoy thinking about things through the through the lens of EP three,
Lillian Nave 52:01
yeah, I can tell you’ve had a smile on your face the whole time talking about it, which is absolutely beautiful. And it’s been so exciting for me to think about this. I often get lots of questions about, okay, how does UDL work in STEM and specifically things like, come on, physics. Are you kidding? Well, no, I’m not. And Melissa Eve Lillian Zayas is not kidding either, because here it is, it’s it’s right there. It’s applied,
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 52:29
yeah, exactly.
Lillian Nave 52:30
UDL is applied right there in teaching physics, and they’re really great ideas. So thank you so much for spending the time to talk with me today. And I’m really excited that folks will get to see and maybe kind of make some more of these. This is such a great idea to have an EP three, or whichever discipline you want it to have,
Melissa Eblen-Zayas 52:48
right? Great. Well, thanks for the conversation. It’s been a lot of fun.
Lillian Nave 52:52
Thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The think UDL podcast. New episodes are posted on social media, on LinkedIn, Facebook, X and blue sky. You can find transcripts and resources pertaining to each episode on our website. ThinkUDL.org, the music in each episode is created by the Oddyssey quartet. Oddyssey is spelled with two D’s, by the way, comprised of Rex Shepard, David Pate, Bill Folwell and Jose Cochez. I’m your host, Lillian Nave, and I want to thank Appalachian State University for helping to support this podcast, and if you call it appellation, I’ll throw an apple at you. Thank you for joining. I’m your host. Lillian Nave, thanks for listening to the Think UDL podcast.