Cross-training teaching between physics and chemistry departments

Abstract

This paper presents a faculty cross-training project that is designed to train Physical Chemists to teach introductory Physics courses and for Physicist to teach introductory Chemistry courses. The project took advantage of the large number of chemists (36) and physicists (11) at Georgia Gwinnett college, a predominantly undergraduate, access college located in Lawrenceville, Georgia. The college currently enrolls close to 12,000 students with about 4,500 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors. The college prides itself on small class sizes and all STEM laboratory classes are limited to 24 students. The small-class size model triggers the need for hiring many faculty to cover large, introductory multi-section courses. The cross-training project allowed the flexibility of faculty from Physics and Chemistry to acquire the skills needed to step in to support each other’s classroom needs. Additionally, the project (i) served as a cost saving measure of hiring large number of adjuncts to cover for these introductory undergraduate courses and (ii) allowed Department Chairs to effectively manage and handle course assignments for the large sections of introductory courses in Chemistry and Physics by tapping into the reserve of expertise generated by the cross-training project. Furthermore, preliminary results from such interdisciplinary cross-training indicated improvement of the D/F/W rates and student retention. Such a faculty cross-training project could be a model for other institutions in developing faculty expertise to teach large sections of introductory-level courses.

Introduction

Georgia Gwinnett College (GGC), founded in 2006, is an access, four-year liberal arts public institution in the University System of Georgia (USG). The college currently enrolls close to 12,000 students [1] (Data USA, n.d.) and is labeled by the U.S. News and World Report as the most ethnically diverse institution (public or private) in the southern regional college list for nine consecutive years [2]. Figure 1 below shows the student age distribution, demographics, student classifications, and enrollment status of GGC students. Some additional characteristics of GGC students are as follows:

1. About 50% of GGC students are first generation students who need regular guidance and motivation.

2. Many students come to GGC with poor academic performance, time management, and professional skills. They need personalized mentoring time management support, and career counseling.

3. Many students struggle with paying for college - approximately 65% receive Pell grant.

4. A high percentage of student work a significant number of hours (largest average work hours in the USG system).

The diversity of the GGC student body is mirrored by the diversity in its faculty. The college is identified as a Minority Serving Institution (MSI) and Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), with its main mission of providing education to underserved undergraduate students, where faculty engagement in teaching and mentoring students are the hallmarks. Student demographic data was obtained from the GGC’s public-facing website.

The college is committed to an integrated educational experience, the innovative use of educational technology, student success, and new teaching pedagogy. Furthermore, the college encourages collaborative efforts among faculty to (i) develop teaching modalities that contribute to student success, (ii) leverage faculty expertise across departments to promote interdisciplinary engagement of students, and (iii) implement high impact practices (HIP) through community learning projects.

To support the above commitments, the college places a strong emphasis on small class sizes. In particular, all laboratory courses are limited to a maximum of 24 students. All lecture and laboratory activities are conducted by faculty with no support from graduate or undergraduate teaching assistants (TAs). The small class size model combined with the large student body requires employing a large number of faculty with annual teaching load of 20 credit hours (30 contact hours). Table 1 shows the faculty number distributions across the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments.

Table 1: Faculty numbers in the STEM departments. Data were taken from the GGC Faculty Directory in 2019 [3]

Compared to other institutional models, the college’s large contingent of faculty across all STEM departments is unique and presents several opportunities. One such opportunity is a faculty cross-training professional development project that will allow faculty to receive pedagogical and curricular training, be credentialed, and teach in a closely related department. A few of the STEM department combinations that are suited to such cross-trainings are (i) Physics & Chemistry, (ii) Mathematics & Physics, and (iii) Chemistry & Biology.

This paper describes a cross-training project between Physics and Chemistry. The training is aimed to provide competencies needed by faculty to be successful in a particular discipline area [4] [5] [6]. Below the authors present the innovation (motivating factors), project description, outcomes, discussions, and conclusions.

Innovation: Motivating Factors

Between the Physics and Chemistry departments at GGC, there are more than 50 full-time and part-time faculty (47 full-time Ph.D.s and 10 part-time instructors who have earned an M.S. degree or higher). The full potential of this combined faculty knowledge resource base has not been fully utilized, as faculty time has been limited to teaching introductory-level courses within their department. A motivating factor of this project is to take advantage of the large faculty size and to present them with novel learning opportunities.

Out of the 36 Chemists (Table 1), 14 have identified as Physical Chemists, who mostly teach Introductory Chemistry, and teach Physical Chemistry approximately once every 10 years. The Physics Department, at the time of this writing, offers a minor in Physics, but there is no option to major in the subject. Physics faculty are likewise constrained to teach mostly Introductory Physics. In order to offer faculty new and challenging opportunities, this cross-training project was proposed. Briefly, there would be a partnership between a Physicist and a Physical Chemist such that the Physicist “learned” to teach the introductory Chemistry courses offered at GGC, while the Chemist “learned” to teach algebra-based Physics. Upon completion of the cross-training program, described in more detail in the next section, each faculty member would be certified to teach courses in a new department. This cross-training project offers the Chemistry and Physics Departments the flexibility to share faculty resources in areas where faculty teaching expertise are needed as well as providing faculty the option to teach a wider variety of courses. Table 2 shows the breakdown of GGC’s typical number of introductory-level courses taught per semester.

Table 2: Typical number of sections of courses in this project listed by course and term. Data were obtained from GGC enrollment records in Banner.

Data on the number of faculty, number of sections taught in chemistry and physics, and faculty expertise used in this project were taken from internal databases at GGC.

At GGC, Principles of Physics (I & II) and Principles of Chemistry (I & II) are critical introductory courses for STEM students. These courses include quantitative and qualitative aspects of Physics and Chemistry and present a challenge to the pool of students in our STEM programs. Students taking introductory Chemistry and Physics struggle with the basic math concepts needed to complete calculations relating to the subject matter. These required courses must be successfully completed before advancing to upper level STEM courses.

Data Availability Statement

The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available on the Data USA website, which provides a profile for Georgia Gwinnett College. This includes enrollment data, faculty distribution across departments, and other relevant institutional information supporting this study's findings. The data can be accessed directly through the following persistent link: https://datausa.io/profile/university/georgia-gwinnett-college#enrollment.

Practice: Project description

Faculty from Physics and Chemistry are carefully selected to participate in this project based on their interest and commitment to student learning, additional teaching load, number of students on the faculty teaching roster, research and service obligations, and qualifications or expertise in the new material. These metrics should be considered in order to limit potential negative impacts on the training project.

The program covered the period of Spring 2017 through Spring of 2019. In the Fall of 2016, faculty were identified to participate in this training model. The authors are the faculty who piloted this program, and served as both mentors and mentees. The foundational idea for the training model was to have each partner act as a mentor in their home department and a mentee in their new department. The team decided that in the first cycle (Table 3), the faculty mentor would be the instructor of record and the faculty mentee would be added to the class as a TA. The mentor provided the mentee with course objectives, course materials/notes, example problems, reading quizzes, and laboratory materials for each week. Additionally, the mentor worked with the mentee on setting up and testing laboratory activities. The faculty mentor led class instruction in the first cycle while in the second cycle the faculty mentor observed their mentee in class and provided feedback and support.

In the first cycle, the faculty mentee attended class as a student and TA. The mentee reviewed all teaching materials before each class, completed example problems and reading quizzes, participated in class discussions (as a TA) with student groups, and completed laboratory activities. The faculty mentee helped with grading and kept detailed notes of classroom practices that worked best. Additionally, the faculty mentee obtained feedback from students, and tracked student progress by compiling data on student homework assignments, quizzes, project participation, and class discussion levels. Finally, the faculty mentee helped in administering and grading tests and the final exam. In the second cycle, the faculty mentee was the instructor of record who led the class. A summary of how we completed this work is presented in Table 3. 

Table 3: Teaching plan for Physics-Chemistry cross training. The typical teaching load at this time was 2 4-credit lab courses per term (12 contact hours).

The model thus presented above (Table 3) is reflective of academic semesters that permitted time to conduct training. The provided data in table 3 are complete and match the description in the contribution. Readers who are interested in obtaining a copy of the full training schedule should contact Joseph Ametepe ([email protected]) or Cynthia Woodbridge ([email protected]).  These routine mentor and mentor responsibilities do not include the regular mentor-mentee meetings to address the logistics of conducting the course, specific roles, debriefing after classes, meeting to discuss observations and what was learned, and course wrap up.

A typical makeup of two of the courses under the training project are:

1. CHEM 1211K with 22 students, mostly freshman and sophomores (5 Biology, 2 Chemistry, 2 pre-Nursing, 4 IT, 2 Math, 2 Business, 5 Undeclared) and taught using Thayer Method and

2. PHYS 1112K with 24 students, mostly juniors and seniors (all pre-allied health – medical, pharmacy, physical therapy, etc.) and taught using active lecture and extensive in-class activities comprising of laboratory activities and active problem-solving sessions.

The above course make-up is typical of the introductory Physics and Chemistry courses at GGC and consistent with all the course sections enrolled as part of the cross-training project. It is hoped that upon completion of participation in the project, faculty will gain (i) content, (ii) pedagogical, and (iii) curricular knowledge in the training area. Also, it is hoped that upon completion of project, faculty will gain familiarity with the tools and materials used in developing laboratory activities.

During the project period, the mentor-mentee team gathered data on student performance (homework, quizzes, tests) and participation level in lab activities and class discussions. Also, the team documented important practices that worked best and noted areas that presented challenges. The team met regularly to discuss student reflections as well as student performance on graded events and how to address conceptual misconceptions. What follows are some of the outcomes of the project.

Practical classroom strategies and implementation

Practical classroom strategies

The instructor of record and the TA schedule weekly meetings to discuss the class format, laboratory activities (if any), homework assignments, and any planned projects. These weekly meetings will allow for clear expectations of class outcomes and develop strategies to address student success matters. Additionally, the interaction provides opportunity of one-on-one mentoring, feedback, and reflection. The feedback sections should include time to discuss assessment results to better understand individual students’ strengths. 

Participating faculty members should be encouraged to try high impact practice teaching modalities. For example, in the cross-training described in this paper, the participating faculty used both the Thayer methods, modified version of a flipped classroom, and included more hands-on projects in the classroom. Participating faculty should take advantage of the presence of two faculty (low student-teacher ratio) to engage students in a manner that is beyond what the traditional classroom with only one instructor offers.

There are student and faculty benefits of the above strategies. For student benefit, they can develop self-confidence, interpersonal and teamwork skills. Students are able to handle complex tasks in a two-instructor classroom than the traditional one-instructor classroom. They receive more individual or one-on-one attention compared to the traditional one-instructor model where students compete for instructor time. These strategies allow students to develop critical thinking skills because of opportunities of inquiry-based learning opportunities. For instructor benefits, they have more time to reflect, learn from each other, and provide positive feedback for improvements. Furthermore, instructors are able to share workload and complement each other’s strengths.  

Implementation

For institutions looking to adopt similar cross-disciplinary training, the authors recommend that the following steps be included in their adoption model. The participating departments should form a cross-disciplinary training task force made up of faculty members from the participating departments, who are interested in such professional development cross-training projects. In order to get support from upper administration for the cross-training project, it is important for the taskforce to clearly outline the benefits of the project to include (i) increase ability of faculty, through credentialing, to teach courses in other close-related departments, (ii) cost savings to institution, and (iii) faculty cross-disciplinary professional development opportunities.  Identify courses or course sections, from participating departments, that should be included in the project. Next, it is important to officially establish an approved timeline of when training begins and ends to allow for department Chairs planning of course assignments. For the cross-training project to benefit students, the authors recommend that the task force explore common curriculum course themes and modify course and teaching content to best support the interdisciplinary nature of this project. Seek by-in from Department Chairs so that course scheduling will allow for the participating faculty members to effectively participate and complete training in the schedule training time window. For best practices, it is best for faculty members participating in the cross-training project to teach the same sections of classes. Such an assignment will reduce the number of new course preparation times for the participating faculty members.  

Credentialing

Clear discipline-specific professional development, through continuous education, credentialing guidelines be developed, presented to the Dean of the school, and approved by department chairs. As part of the guidelines, the cross-training project should be (i) deemed relevant continuing education experience in the given field and (ii) fully cover course required competences needed to teach the course objectives related to the disciplines. As part of the credentialing process, a course-by-course justification should be made only for faculty members who have completed the cross-training project and fully approved by their department chairs of the participating departments and Dean of the school. The justifications for the credentialing cross-training must be documented by an official letter from the Vice President of Academic Affairs, kept on the faculty file, and a copy presented to HR.

Before a faculty member is approved to teach a class, the faculty must first complete the training and demonstrated that he/she can be successful in teaching such class. The latter can be demonstrated through documentation of success during apprenticeship period. Additionally, the faculty member must receive regular in-service training, periodic evaluations and have direct supervision by a faculty member experienced in the teaching area.

Outcomes

The unique benefits of the cross-training project included providing faculty the opportunity to teach other subjects, real-time mentoring, a foundational set of curricular materials, and classroom teaching experience leading to credentialing. The skills gained in the cross-training project far outweigh an individual being credentialed by completing 18 graduate credits in a subject area.

The partnership between the mentor-mentee team during the project period has led to numerous collaborative activities, which produced presentations, laboratory manuals, publications, and ongoing research projects between the authors.

Collaborative faculty teaching and learning

The project promoted collaborative teaching between the Physics and Chemistry faculty by sharing expertise within the same teaching space. These faculty were able to explore new teaching modalities such as the flipped classroom and (slightly modified) Thayer methods [7] [8] [9] [10]. The mentor-mentee team in this project have been able to present on lessons learned from the projects at local and regional conferences [11] [12] [13]. Such collaboration also opened avenues for faculty to conduct Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) projects and research [14] [15].

As colleges look for ways to improve student retention, progression and graduation, the project provided a way for faculty to work together across departments to improve quality of teaching and implement best teaching practices for student success. The type of partnership and collaboration between the Physics and Chemistry Departments created as a result of this project deviates from a traditional approach where faculty members develop teaching partnerships with colleagues in their department silos.

Improved classroom atmosphere

As compared to other classes taught individually, the presence of two instructors (faculty mentor and mentee) inherent with the cross-training project seem to have improved classroom morale and promoted increased student participation and learning. The sections of the introductory Chemistry and Physics courses in the training model saw more student interactions with instructors; students were motivated to persevere in our courses, despite difficulties. In fact, student comments indicating their appreciation of having two instructors was a consistent theme in end-of-term course evaluations.

Dual-credentialing certification

The training provided a pathway for faculty to be credentialed in teaching classes besides the traditional introductory classes in their respective departments. For the credentialing process, faculty completing the cross-training project first submit an application and a letter of support from the Dean to the Promotion and Credentialing (P&C) committee for review. Upon a successful review and approval, the P&C committee sends a recommendation to the Provost for review. With the P&C recommendation, the provost makes a final review to confirm or reject the P&C’s recommendation. Approval of dual credential status is communicated by memo to the faculty member and their Department Chair. The provost’s memo becomes an official record that is communicated with HR and kept on file for accreditation purposes. This process mirrors GGC’s process for promotion.

Clear discipline-specific professional development, through continuous education, credentialing guidelines be developed, presented to the Dean of the school, and approved by department chairs. As part of the guidelines, the cross-training project should be (i) deemed relevant continuing education experience in the given field and (ii) fully cover course required competences needed to teach the course objectives related to the disciplines. As part of the credentialing process, a course-by-course justification should be made only for faculty members who have completed the cross-training project and fully approved by their department chairs of the participating departments and Dean of the school. The justifications for the credentialing cross-training must be documented by an official letter from the Vice President of Academic Affairs, kept on the faculty file, and a copy presented to HR.  

Before a faculty member is approved to teach a class, the faculty must first complete the training and demonstrated that he/she can be successful in teaching such class. The latter can be demonstrated through documentation of success during apprenticeship period. Additionally, the faculty member must receive regular in-service training, periodic evaluations and have direct supervision by a faculty member experienced in the teaching area

Rewards

The main reward is for interested faculty, who get to experience new things. The rewards include the opportunities for new professional collaboration with a colleague from a related department. Participating faculty developed (i) various projects used to support both Physics and Chemistry lectures, classes, and laboratory and (ii) established long-term interdisciplinary research projects that would not have existed. Furthermore, the different perspectives brought by the participation team in the classroom enhanced student learning. Traditional department have limited opportunities for interdisciplinary teaching partnerships of this type. The cross-training provided opportunity for faculty to be credentialed to teach new and different things increasing the employability of faculty if they decide to pursue other employment opportunities. For professional development, the project provided the opportunity for faculty to learn from colleagues who have different teaching and classroom management style. The extensive classroom mentor observation and feedback helped the participation team to be better experts in what they do. The project helped the participating faculty to know their students better in and out of the classroom.

Challenges

The time commitment to participate in this project is extensive and nontrivial. The courses taught in this project were not counted as part of faculty load (Table 3) and no compensation was provided. The authors were volunteers who hoped that by developing this model, future iterations would allow appropriately certified faculty to count these courses as part of their load. We had to develop and implement methodologies that required working with facilities to ensure there was adequate seating, laboratory supervisors to ensure there was adequate equipment and consumables, each other to discuss and refine teaching methods, set up lab activities for courses, etc. The time spent in coordinating the additional resources and responsibilities needed for our classes is somewhat comparable to the time required to establish a new course and/or teach a course for the very first time. The time commitment is significant; as shown in Table 3, the mentor, for example, adds a third (fourth) lab-based class or 6 additional contact hours to their teaching load for the term they serve as mentor.

Evidence (Discussion)

At the end of each semester, the faculty mentor-mentee team had several meetings to review and discuss (i) the impact of the team teaching practices, (ii) feedback collected through student reflections, (iii) the class participation (activities and discussion) levels of students, (iv) pattern in progress in tests (if any), (v) future modifications of content and delivery.

Despite the differences in content of the introductory Physics and Chemistry courses, project faculty (mentor and mentee) found some commonalities that Chemists and Physicists work to address in their courses at GGC. They include but are not limited to:

• The perception that Physics and Chemistry are “hard.”

• Students are unable to establish connections between the material in the courses they are enrolled in and previous classes. 

• Students do not see or are unable to make connections in the class content. 

• Students struggle with math and using their calculators correctly. 

• Students struggle with making and interpreting graphs. 

• Students struggle with following directions, particularly in labs.

• Students struggle with learning and lack strong study skills. They prefer to memorize rather than seek understanding. 

• Students do not prepare sufficiently prior to class but heavily rely on the instructors to tell them what they are/should be doing. 

Additionally, the working team found that apart from students’ perception that physics and chemistry are “hard,” they lacked the foundational preparation, college preparedness, and the analytical skills of applying course concepts. For example, our students struggled with basic math, using calculators correctly, and making and interpreting graphs. Also, students do not prepare sufficiently prior to class but heavily rely on the instructors to tell them what they are/should be doing. Furthermore, students struggle to follow directions during laboratory activities, lack good study habits, and unable to connect concepts from different related topics. The faculty mentor-mentee team took advantage of the collaborative nature of the teaching modality to address these specific challenges.

The observations mentioned in the preceding paragraph have been noted to be general for STEM majors [16] [17][18][19]. Outside of the math requirements and commonalities noted above, it was also surprising to see how much content overlap there is between the two sequences. This is illustrated in the Venn diagram (Figure 2) below.  Topics in Figure 2 come from course outcomes and texts.

The required content overlap is indicated by the intersection (purple region) of the Venn diagram. Common overlapping themes included forces, pressure, particle motion, energy, work, heat exchanges, rates of reaction, and properties of matter. Additionally, there were overlapping laboratory skills that included appropriate measurements skills, proper reporting of data, graphing, using bar charts and pie charts, and scientific writing. Specific practical examples were selected to ensure that students are able to use required contents in both physics and chemistry.

Typical W/D/F rates in Chemistry and Physics at GGC are: CHEM1211 = 39.8%, CHEM1212 = 45.1%, PHYS1111 = 19%; PHYS1112 = 7%. These data were obtained from the GGC enrollment management system and averaged for the years of the project. The high W/D/F rates in Chemistry, in particular, may effectively quash students' aspirations for careers in STEM fields. At GGC, many students enrolling in introductory Chemistry courses are either freshman or encountering their first science course. On the other hand, students in taking the introductory Physics courses are mostly juniors, seniors, or post-baccalaureate students and would have previously completed several STEM courses. These students would have, somehow, figured out how to learn, have proper time management, and have some basic concept of the sciences. Such drastic differences in the students enrolling in the introductory Chemistry or Physics courses explains the difference between the W/D/F rates for Chemistry and Physics. Students in introductory Chemistry courses are more prone to struggling than those in introductory Physics courses. This project helped improve the W/D/F rates in the Chemistry sections enlisted in the cross-training project.

Conclusion

This paper presented a cross-training teaching framework allowing Physics and Chemistry faculty to teach in each other’s departments. The model provides a framework to credential faculty so that they can teach classes in other departments and have such courses count towards their annual teaching load. The project (i) improved faculty professional development by providing the opportunity for faculty to do something different, (ii) allowed for new interdisciplinary collaborations across departments leading to publications in SoTL journals, and (iii) improved student learning in challenging introductory STEM courses. Finally, the project encouraged collaborative efforts across STEM disciplines such that students have faculty experts from different subject areas in introductory courses with the goal of maximizing student learning. The model can be adapted by other departments or other institutions. For institutions looking to adopt similar cross-disciplinary training, the authors recommend that the following steps be included in their adoption model. The participating departments should form a cross-disciplinary training task force made up of faculty members from the participating departments, who are interested in such professional development cross-training projects. In order to get support from upper administration for the cross-training project, it is important for the taskforce to clearly outline the benefits of the project to include (i) increase ability of faculty, through credentialing, to teach courses in other close-related departments, (ii) cost savings to institution, and (iii) faculty cross-disciplinary professional development opportunities.  Identify courses or course sections, from participating departments, that should be included in the project. Next, it is important to officially establish an approved timeline of when training begins and ends to allow for department Chairs planning of course assignments. For the cross-training project to benefit students, the authors recommend that the task force explore common curriculum course themes and modify course and teaching content to best support the interdisciplinary nature of this project. Seek buy-in from Department Chairs so that course scheduling will allow for the participating faculty members to effectively participate and complete training in the schedule training time window. For best practices, it is best for faculty members participating in the cross-training project to teach the same sections of classes. Such an assignment will reduce the number of new course preparation times for the participating faculty members.    

Acknowledgements

The authors want to acknowledge and thank the School of Science and Technology at Georgia Gwinnett College for supporting faculty participation in this cross-training project. The authors want to particularly thank Dr. David Pursell for his leadership in developing the cross-training idea and hosting a series of information sessions on implementation plans.