UC Santa Cruz - The Center for Teaching Excellence

Center for Teaching Excellence

1156 High Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95064

Phone: 831-459-5091

Email: cte@ucsc.edu

Mail Stop:
CTE / Chancellor's Office

Location:
Kerr Hall, room 133

CTE CALENDAR

Committee Pages

Sitemap | Contact

Teaching Awards
Statements on Teaching

Bruce Schumm– Teaching Statement 2002-03
Assoc. Professor of Physics

It is truly an honor to be nominated for a 2002-03 Excellence in Teaching Award. Here are some thoughts about teaching: what I try to bring to my teaching, what I look for from students, and one or two things that I’ve found that help to establish a supportive and enjoyable learning environment for the students in my class. To begin with, a word about teaching in the Physics department. Physics faculty tend to teach across the broad spectrum of physics classes, from lower division all the way through the graduate core curriculum. In the seven years that I have been teaching, I have taught the gamut of classes from non-calculus introductory physics through technical graduate classes in Particle Physics. One typically teaches a course twice in a row, and then moves on to new ground. Other than the rough guide provided by the catalogue description, the format and approach to the material is a matter of academic freedom – which means that physics faculty are largely on their own and continually developing new courses. Without a doubt, the key to successful teaching for me is meticulous preparation. Almost everything positive about the courses I teach stems from this. My preparation is done in two stages: I typically have explicitly written out most of the lectures, with great attention to pedagogy, before the quarter begins. Then, in the 60-90 minutes before each class, I re-read (and sometimes re-work) each lecture, and reflect carefully on the flow and full content of the lecture before entering the classroom. Knowing far in advance exactly where I am going with the material, I can do a good job of weaving the course together, connecting it organically from beginning to end, developing in the students a sense of forward motion that builds to several climaxes throughout the quarter. In physics, the clearest explanation is the simplest, and the one most directly connected to the world of everyday experience. Such descriptions arise only when the lecturer is fully in command of the material at hand, as well as its broader context, in terms of supporting concepts, the experimental basis of the material, and, as importantly, its historical context (over the years, I’ve read several books on the history of physics as I’ve developed my courses). With the mind freed from puzzling over the finer points and from trying to establish the flow of the lecture with chalk in hand, the finer touches – such as spontaneous humor – are more likely to work their way in. I am not an easy teacher. I drive the students hard, and demand complete rigor of both them and myself. My exams require a deep facility with the material as well as creativity in its application.
The challenge of teaching is to drive the students to the limits of their potential while maintaining a conducive learning environment, and the key here is empathy. All faculty members have themselves gone through programs similar to the ones they are now helping to provide, and as an instructor, I think it’s absolutely essential to remain in touch with one’s own experiences as a student. Most importantly, learning is an iterative process, and no student ever emerges from a class fully in command of the material. As I teach physics classes, which draw heavily on background material from both prior physics classes as well as math classes, I spend a lot of time revisiting concepts that the students are already `supposed to know’. I remember from my own experience how I didn’t really learn those basic underlying concepts until the second or third time I had seen them. Very roughly, my lectures are about evenly divided between re-introducing and dwelling on these pre-requisite concepts (but often in a new and intuitive context) and driving forward into new territory. Sometimes I fear that the quickest students in the class will be bored by the re-hashed material, but in my years of teaching, I have never found this to be the case – in fact, some of the best feedback I’ve gotten has been from top students in support of this approach. My class time has been, through my years of teaching, almost entirely lecture-based (but I do run regular field trips deep into the bowels of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center for a look at physics in action), although I do not avoid active and peer-based learning as a matter of principle (see below). Nonetheless, as I have found my legs in teaching, I have found the lecture format to be quite successful, and have relied heavily upon it to get myself up and running as an instructor. There is, however, much more to teaching than the time one spends in front of a class. I hold regular office hours, and beyond this offer additional contact time by appointment, particularly for students who are struggling with the class. I try to be pro-active: in larger classes, I conduct or arrange special review sessions geared towards students who are doing poorly; in smaller classes, I often call low-performing students into special meetings, try to help them assess their own learning process, and even try to help them re-chart their course if we come to the mutual conclusion that physics is not the route to happiness for them. I am as proud of the students that I have appropriately advised into other fields as I am of those who have gone on to graduate school at Harvard and Cornell. Establishing a safe and supportive environment for all levels of students, both in and out of class, is a top priority for me. I both view and treat the students as adults fully responsible for their own actions (as I was treated as an undergraduate as Haverford College), and almost all students respond positively to this vote of confidence in them.
I do view teaching in a larger context, and am active in a broad spectrum of teaching-related activities that provide a substantial degree of cross-fertilization with my nominal UCSC teaching duties. I have developed relationships with publishing companies (Addison-Wesley and Freeman Press), and provide consulting for their development projects, both in terms of manuscript review and in-person focus groups. I have found Addison-Wesley focus groups particularly stimulating, and have come away from them with a strong interest in exploring active-learning approaches for lower-division physics. Sadly, having acceded to chair the Graduate Council next year, I have had to place these interests on hold for the time being, as that has entailed a course relief during the quarter I was to teach a lower-division class. On another front, I was responsible for the first major overhaul and modernization of the lower-division laboratory program since its development in the early days of the campus. I am also quite active in primary education, being vice-president of the Board of Directors of Tierra Pacifica Charter School, a public school in the Live Oak school district dedicated to whole-child education and the fostering of community ethics and an outlook towards life-long learning. Again, I find myself taking pieces of this work back into the classroom at UCSC; some of the approaches we are learning about and developing at the Tierra Pacifica, while geared towards primary education, do have broader pedagogical application (in particular, the explicit attention to the development of the learning process itself as a pedagogical outcome).
I often joke with friends that teaching is a wonderful experience – in retrospect. More and more, though, I am finding it to be a major source of satisfaction in real time, and a larger and larger component of the force that propels me up to the top of the hill every morning. I am also exceedingly happy with the vast majority of students I have had the pleasure to work with here at UCSC, at all levels I have taught. Teaching is extremely demanding, but even more so, it is rewarding and vitalizing. It is a privilege to be able to do it, especially at UCSC, where it is valued so highly!

Please contact us if you have any questions or comments about this site