How I Realized that I was Unprepared to Teach

Giles Mitchell
Sep 8, 2018 · 3 min read

I ought to be an excellent physics teacher. I have studied physics for twenty-four years of my life and I have been an active physics education researcher for eight. I work in a university that strongly supports education, and I have colleagues who are knowledgeable about teaching. I have carefully observed other teachers to understand how they teach. I have taught a class for graduate students about how they should teach physics.

And yet, when I taught my introductory courses, the same problem kept coming up. It was a teacher’s nightmare: nothing I did seemed to work. Every student was stuck on every problem. This blog is in large part about the origins of this problem and how I am working to fix it.


I had assigned a list of conceptual physics problems to my students, who were working in small groups. I talked to the first group of students, and they were not sure how to begin the first problem. As I had been trained to do, I didn’t give them the answer. Instead, I gave them little hints and asked questions. I moved on to the second group. They, too, were not sure how to begin the first problem.

By the time I got to the fourth group, I realized that the whole class was still stuck on the first problem. I paused the group work and had a class discussion about the problem. I then turned them loose on problem two.

The next group I talked to was stuck on problem two. They were not sure how to begin.

What was I to do?

The problems were not meant to be excessively hard. They were taken from the workbook that was packaged and sold with the students’ textbook. The textbook had been designed with the results of physics education research in mind.

The scenario described above has been fairly common for me when I try to teach one of my introductory college physics courses. I am an education researcher, and I teach a pedagogy class about how to teach physics. So when this happens it feels extremely embarrassing. I should know better. I am very familiar with the physics, and I am familiar with the research about student thinking — but it is not enough.

I know that it is not the students’ fault, because (1) I don’t think it can ever be collectively “the students’ fault,” and (2) I personally know teachers who do just fine with the same population of students and the same textbook.

I am now investigating some techniques that are helping me to improve as a teacher. If your challenges are similar to mine, the techniques may be helpful to you too. I think that the fundamental problem was one of communication: the ability to put oneself in a student’s shoes, understand what they need, and communicate clearly with that in mind. However, it is not that I was hard-hearted or unmotivated to understand the students’ needs, but that I didn’t know how to go about it. I hope you will enjoy my stories and ideas.

The Social Development of a Teacher

How I started learning to teach after being an education researcher for eight years

Giles Mitchell

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The Social Development of a Teacher

How I started learning to teach after being an education researcher for eight years

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