Teaching as Coaching: Actively Engaging Students

Written by Andrew Richter, Physics & Astronomy

I have been teaching introductory physics courses at Valpo for twenty years, always with a continuous improvement mentality.  I try new things based on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and then evaluate for effectiveness, student responsivity, and equity. 

Our student population is constantly changing in terms of preparation level, so I am always adjusting my teaching in order to reach students where they are and help them get to where they need to be for their next steps.  I know I have succeeded when I see anxious and self-doubting students realize that physics is doable, interesting, widely-applicable, and mind-expanding.

I describe myself to students as their “coach.” This has several implications and benefits. It is a role that many of my students are already familiar with, since they have participated in sports or academic teams. They know that the coach is a guide, mentor, rule-setter, evaluator, and cheerleader, and that he or she is on your side and wants to help you succeed.

This means that the student’s role is as an “athlete.” I explain that their duties are to come to all meetings with the coach to get instruction on new techniques to improve (classes); to try out those techniques during the class so they can get immediate help (worksheets); to put in the time in the “gym,” following a daily training schedule (homework and quizzes); and to train for the “games” (tests). 

This analogy also makes clear where the majority of their time should be spent on getting better and stronger: on their own, outside of class, regularly throughout the week.  I come back to this model time and again, noting often that if all they do in class is listen to me lecture, without trying to employ the techniques presented to them, it’s like watching me do push-ups and thinking that they are getting stronger.

It is also vital for me to draw in the students by connecting their areas of interest with physics.  I show them how physics can enhance what they are actually passionate about. One way that I do this is through copious uses of examples from across the disciplines:

• To connect to student athletes, beyond just using the coach metaphor, I use examples drawn from football, soccer, track and field, etc.

• To connect to those going into medicine, I regularly give examples of how physics is involved with the way the body works, governing things like fluid flow, forces exerted on joints, vision correction, etc.  I also show how physics has been used to create many of the advanced medical and chemistry diagnostic tools they encounter in other classes and in the medical field.

• To connect to meteorology students, we talk about how Doppler radar works, how the math involved with electric and magnetic fields is the same as for wind fields, and about remote sensing applications.

• To connect to everyone, we look at how consumer technologies work. For example, I frame the second semester of introductory physics by outlining how the course will explain the basics of how their smartphones work: speakers, WiFi connections, cameras, circuitry, the touchscreen, wireless charging, and GPS tracking.

The whole point of all this is to disrupt the standard professor/student relationship, their perception that physics is irrelevant to their interests, and their relationship to their own learning. Thankfully, I have some robust evidence that my varied approaches work across a range of student abilities.

For one thing, DFW (Drop, Fail, or Withdraw) rates in the calculus-based introductory sequence are considerably lower now than before I began teaching the course, dropping from around 25% to  15-20%. I think that part of this improvement is due to the fact that I do not allow students to use technology in the classroom (e.g. phones, laptops, tablets).  I have found that way too many students are distracted by their personal technology, and that this impacts the lower-achieving students more than the higher-achieving students. Lately, I just use physical worksheets in class. While not perfect, worksheets do provide opportunities for active and peer learning.

In our department we use a pre/post conceptual physics survey to gauge learning in our first semester course. Nationally, gains in typical lecture courses are around 20-25%, meaning students pick up 20-25% of concepts that they didn’t yet know at the start of the semester. In my classes at Valpo, using the techniques I have developed over time, the gains are usually 35-50%, matching those achieved by master teachers using active learning techniques. 

During the 2023-2024 school year,  the students in my fall physics introductory course had the lowest pre-test score we have seen in 25 years of taking data, around five standard deviations below the average. Even so, their post-tests scores at the end of the semester were on par with the post-test scores from previous semesters (about one standard deviation below).

Most of the students in my introductory physics courses will likely not end up doing any more physics. But they can still be ambassadors and innovators. When I tell a new doctor that I am a physics professor, they always respond with “I really didn’t enjoy physics.” Imagine instead that they would say “I loved physics and it helped me be who I am today.” Likewise, engineering and meteorology students will go on to productive careers in their fields, but those that enjoyed physics, or at least saw the utility of it in their fields, have a better chance to drive innovations based on fundamental physics.