2011 ALPhA Immersion Program

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This project supports a prototype offering of a new program for developing faculty expertise in teaching upper-level undergraduate physics laboratories. The ALPhA Immersions Program provides in-depth faculty-staff professional development, in which instructors spend three full days apprenticing with expert mentors, learning a single instructional-physics experiment in order to teach it confidently themselves. Six geographically diverse Immersion workshop sites are being offered in the summer of 2011, with 18 different experiments and 12 mentors. Approximately 58 faculty and staff are participating in the program. These instructors often need to teach laboratory experiments that are outside of their own fields of expertise. Intellectual Merit: Participants in the Immersions explore all aspects of a single advanced undergraduate laboratory experiment in a setting similar to their students' experience. The participants may be learning an experiment that is far from their field of specialization, but after the Immersion, they can teach that experiment at their own institution. This allows an expanded pool of students to experience contemporary instructional labs that do much more than repeat classic experiments, introducing students to modern instrumentation and increasing the breadth of experience for students who will be engaged in independent research. Broader Impacts: This program's focus is on developing faculty and instructional staff expertise in physics departments across the entire country. It does so in a very direct way, bringing small groups together to learn contemporary instructional labs that they want to implement at their own institutions, but do not have the expertise to develop on their own. Moreover, at each immersion site the collected cadre engages in broader discussions of how these labs can be integrated into their curricula, which is a conversation explicitly aimed at eliciting discussion of curricular tactics, strategies, and models. Reports on these discussions are being shared at national meetings. The impact of this program is widespread. In addition, some financial support is available to encourage participation by instructors at institutions serving under-represented populations.