teaching

Learning to think
like a physicist.

I teach introductory physics at the University of New England. My courses emphasize asking meaningful questions, building and testing models, scientific reasoning, collaboration, and learning to work productively through uncertainty.

The learning environment matters.

Learning physics requires intellectual risk. Students have to ask questions, make predictions, expose incomplete reasoning, try approaches that may fail, and revise ideas in front of other people.

I try to build classrooms where that difficulty is productive rather than punitive. Psychological safety and academic challenge are not opposites. The goal is a space where students can experience real friction, uncertainty, and disagreement while still feeling able to participate fully.

Inclusion is part of that design. Students enter physics classrooms with different educational histories, levels of preparation, ways of communicating, and relationships with science. I want the structure of the course to give students multiple ways to engage, contribute, and develop confidence as scientific thinkers.

How we do physics.

Ask

Decide what we actually want to know. Learn to formulate questions that can be explored with evidence, models, mathematics, or experiment.

Model

Identify the important features of a system, make assumptions explicit, and build a representation that can actually be tested.

Predict

Commit to an expectation before knowing the result. A prediction gives us something meaningful to compare against observation.

Test

Use experiments, data, mathematics, and computation to ask whether the model behaves the way we expected.

Revise

Be wrong. Figure out why. Change the model, the assumptions, or the reasoning, and try again.

Teaching approach

My courses draw substantially on Modeling Instruction , an approach that organizes learning around the construction, testing, discussion, and revision of physical models.

More broadly, my teaching is informed by research on active learning, student participation, equity, belonging, and inclusive physics classrooms. Rather than treating lecture as the primary site of learning, I want students actively reasoning, discussing, representing physical systems, solving problems, and responding to one another's ideas.

Toward a modeling theory of physics instruction Hestenes, American Journal of Physics, 1987 A modeling method for high school physics instruction Wells, Hestenes & Swackhamer, American Journal of Physics, 1995 Toward equity through participation in Modeling Instruction in introductory university physics Brewe et al., Physical Review ST Physics Education Research, 2010 Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics Freeman et al., PNAS, 2014 Active learning narrows achievement gaps for underrepresented students in undergraduate STEM Theobald et al., PNAS, 2020 Students' sense of belonging in introductory physics course for bioscience majors predicts their grade Cwik & Singh, Physical Review Physics Education Research, 2022

Productive friction.

I do not want physics to feel effortless. Some amount of confusion, disagreement, and struggle is necessary for meaningful learning.

The distinction I care about is whether that friction comes from engaging seriously with the physics or from fear of embarrassment, exclusion, or being judged for not already knowing.

A good classroom should make room for the first and work actively against the second.

Background

My teaching is informed by a background in astrophysics, numerical relativity, and computational physics, along with experience teaching introductory university physics, secondary physics, and STEM enrichment programs.

I am especially interested in helping students experience physics as a process of asking questions, building models, testing ideas, communicating reasoning, and revising what they think they know.

Learning to think like a physicist.