5 Questions for Vernita Gordon

Since 2008, the Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award has been given to University of Texas System faculty members who have an exceptional track record of demonstrating the very best in classroom performance and innovation in their courses for undergraduate students. This year's award winner from UT Austin, Vernita Gordon, is a professor in the Department of Physics. She is also no stranger to recognition as a leading instructor, having previously secured a President's Associates Teaching Award, a Provost's Teaching Fellowship and a UT College of Natural Sciences Teaching Excellence Award.

Her leadership at the front of the classroom springs in part from a passion for her subject area. Gordon first became enamored with physics in high school, fascinated by the notion that people had figured out how to make predictions about how everything - from rockets to planets to falling objects - will behave, using mathematics as a tool to observe and understand the world.

Today, she says she considers herself fortunate to have the opportunity to share that same sense of wonder with her students, as they learn to make predictions using equations that can help unlock a new understanding of the universe.

To Gordon, the real classroom magic goes beyond students' connections with the subject. It includes a community of learners, who are empowered to access resources and develop lasting confidence in their ability to problem-solve over the long run.

Read on to learn more about Gordon's perspective and experience in teaching.

1. What are the roots of your interest in physics?

When I was growing up, I read a lot of science fiction, and there was a lot of physics embedded in that science fiction. I enjoyed that. Then in my junior year in high school, I took a physics class, and we were talking about conservation of momentum, and the teacher was explaining how a rocket works.

I said, "But the rocket would be losing fuel all the time. You don't know the mass of the rocket, because that's always changing, so how can you make a rocket work if everything's always changing?"

And the teacher answered, "Oh, well, you have to do this with calculus."

Nobody in the class had taken calculus yet, but to me, that was really interesting. I liked the idea that you could use math to make predictions in the real world and say: I've done this equation, and now I'm going to watch a thing happen in the real world that's going to follow what I solved for in this equation. That was really appealing to me, the idea of math connecting to something observable and tangible.

2. Physics is a subject that some college students never had in high school. When a class has students with different levels of math and science experience, are there techniques you lean into to help both instructors and students?

The biggest thing (and this is really hard to do) is try not to make assumptions about what people know. It's really easy to make assumptions. As a faculty member, you walk into the classroom thinking, "OK, I remember that when I got through high school, I was at this place, and so these people should be at the same place."

Those assumptions are almost unconscious. But everything we do in higher ed is based on K-12 schooling before and what kids have learned, both in terms of the content and in terms of just being a good student - things like knowing how to study - skills that we shouldn't assume people know.

There are all of these times when I feel like, if students would just do a few things, they would do so much better. Pay attention to how they study and how they manage their time. Come to class. Do the reading ahead of time. Go to the Sanger Learning Center and attend review sessions. Doing these things makes such a difference. We have to figure out how to explicitly teach those in a way that people can receive and process them.

It's also true that some students seem to view learning science as memorizing things and being able to regurgitate information versus learning how to apply ideas in new situations. When I say, "I want you to really understand this. I want you to be able to use it in a new scenario that I've never talked about in class and use your existing knowledge to integrate with your knowledge of the world," that's something that many of them haven't been asked to do before. And it's really surprising for them when they're asked to do it.

3. We often think about STEM students learning a lot from peers and working through complex content in small groups. However, earlier this year, you and your fellow researchers published a study in the American Journal of Physics that found students in certain physics classes perform better with interactive lectures and in-class discussions. Why is that?

We speculated in the paper about what we thought might be going on, but we didn't directly evaluate possible causes. Anecdotally, I felt like I saw that when students spontaneously formed small groups on their own, they tended to cluster by their level of prior preparation.

Students with a strong physics and math background tended to group with other students with a strong physics and math background, and students with less physics and math background tended to group with other students with less physics and math background.

If that's the case, then the people who already had a lot of the foundations necessary to do well in the class were learning from each other and doing well. And the people who were less well prepared for the class were struggling without a clear sense of direction. But, again, that's just "anecdata."

4. As a professor, you're balancing an active biophysics research program with your work in the classroom. How do the two different parts of your job interact, and how have you navigated that balance?

That's honestly not the hardest balancing act. The hardest balancing act is between what I'm trying to do at work and what I'm trying to do as a parent. You work hard. You try to be efficient. You use your time as well as you can.

In the research lab, a lot of times that means delegating things to really good people in my group who can do them very well. And when it comes to teaching, it means paying attention to what other people have developed and, once a good thing has been developed, building on that.

In both research and teaching, you're working with individual human beings, whether they're the students in your classroom or the people working in your research group. And it's really important to pay attention to the individual human being, and to figure out as much as you can: How do I help this person to succeed?

You do some things that are intended to work in the aggregate and make learning or research better for everybody. But then you also have to recognize human beings aren't just an aggregate. Sometimes it is about understanding what you can do to make things better for this particular person. That involves spending a lot of time talking with people. Every individual who struggles is going to struggle in a different way, but when I can figure out how they're struggling and how we can make it better for them, I really like that. I like finding ways to make things better for people depending on what they need.

5. What do you find most gratifying about teaching physics?

I don't know that it's common in jobs across the world that you get to spend a significant part of your job teaching people about things you think are neat. It's neat to me that we as humans have come to understand physics. Using mathematics and equations, we have a predictive understanding of how the world is going to behave, we understand how things work, and we can describe it and make predictions, so we know what's going on.