Physics89L

Social guidelines and expectations

There will be a lot of discussion in this class. Students are expected to engage with others in a respectful manner. This includes thoughtfully sharing their ideas, but also listening to others’ contributions. It is our highest priority that the classroom is a welcoming place to engage in academic discussions.

To facilitate the most effective and inclusive learning environment by promoting deliberate exploration of what we don’t know, we have a few “social guidelines”:

  1. People you work with, including other students, come from a variety of backgrounds and are exposed to different concepts. It’s useful to keep this in mind while discussing topics which may not be new to you but are new to others.
  2. Be cognizant of how your language may affect others. For example, acting surprised when people say they don’t know something can deter people from speaking out. “Subtle-isms” are small things that make others feel uncomfortable. For example, saying “It’s so easy my grandmother could do it” is a subtle-ism.

If you find yourself saying something that you later recognize as unwelcoming, please apologize, use it as a learning experience, and then move on. If you see repeated unwelcoming behavior from someone else, you can point it out to the relevant person, either publicly or privately, or you can ask a member of the teaching team to say something. After this, we ask that further discussion move off public channels. Please don’t pile on to someone who made a mistake. The “subtle” in “subtle -isms” means that it may not be immediately obvious to everyone what was wrong with the comment. Please use it as a teachable moment, and then assume the message was received.

Self-organized group learning

You will be spending most of your time working in small groups. While each of you will have your own computer and will be working through the notebooks on your own, there will be many times when you are asked to discuss questions in the notebooks.

Small group discussions can be tricky. There are many different ways that people discuss new ideas, some people are naturally quieter than others, some people express themselves in a few sentences, others take more time to express themselves. Some people organize their thoughts while speaking, others people like to think things through before they start speaking.

As the start of the course we’d like each group to have a short discussion about what you think will work best for your group to:

1. To help each other understand the course material and answer the questions in the labs.
2. To make sure that everyone participates.

Some groups might find that everyone is comfortable just speaking out, other groups might find that it is more useful to be more deliberate and have a system where you speak in turn when answering the questions. The point here is really to do what works for you and your group.

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