This Month’s Teaching Strategy comes to us from Patrick Len of Cuesta College. Patrick has been a member of our greater CAE community for quite some time, and he is now taking over as our new Astrolrner@CAE Guest Moderator. For the past year-plus, John Feldmeier has been doing a fantastic job leading us through many interesting conversations, and we at CAE have no doubt that Patrick will do the same. To start things off, Patrick would like to share a bit about himself, how Astrolrner@CAE has been beneficial to him, as well as a few tips on how to be a good Astrolrner@CAE contributor. So, John, thanks for your moderation! We’re sure we haven’t heard the last of you yet. And now, heeeeeere’s Patrick!

Hello, fellow astronomy educators! I'm Patrick M. Len ("P-dog" to my students), and I am your new Guest Moderator for Astrolrner@CAE. I currently teach physics and astronomy at Cuesta College, a small community college in San Luis Obispo, CA, and have taught physics and astronomy at Cosumnes River College (Sacramento, CA), Sonoma State University (Rohnert Park, CA), and University of California (Davis, CA).

I have been closely following Astrolrner@CAE for a number of years. Moving from a large research university, to a state university, to being relatively isolated at the community college level, Astrolrner@CAE has been a great resource to reach out and engage with other astronomy educators and education researchers.

After teaching in learner-centered classrooms for the past 13 years, I have seen much promise and value in engaging students in this environment. Much research has been done to show that learner-centered instructional strategies help improve students learning. The hard work before us is to improve our implementation of these strategies, and encourage our colleagues who still stick to lecture to try them.

On top of the conventional duties as your moderator, I would like to also post topical links/media that you may find useful to incorporate into your presentations, as well as share tips/tricks/hacks that you may or may not have already used in your classes yet.

Here are the moderator guidelines for posting: 1. Make a positive contribution to the astronomy education community. 2. Make a personal contribution (no spam/commercials). 3. Make sure your message is intended for the entire list, and not for a specific person. 4. Be concise; summarize or link to material that is lengthy and/or substantively posted elsewhere.

Lastly:
5. You know that person that tries to submit those kinds of posts? Don't be that person.