2011 ALPhA Immersion Program

该项目支持一个新项目的原型，该项目旨在开发教授高水平本科物理实验室的教师专业知识。Alpha Immersions计划提供深入的教职员工专业发展，教师花三整天的时间在专家导师那里当学徒，学习一个教学物理实验，以便自信地自己教授它。2011年夏季将提供6个不同地理位置的沉浸式研讨会站点，其中有18个不同的实验和12个导师。大约有58名教职员工参加了这个项目。这些教师经常需要教授他们自己专业领域之外的实验室实验。智力价值：沉浸式实验的参与者在与学生体验相似的环境中探索单个高级本科实验室实验的方方面面。参与者可能正在学习一项远离他们专业领域的实验，但在沉浸之后，他们可以在自己的机构教授该实验。这使得更多的学生可以体验当代教学实验室，这些实验室的功能远远不止重复经典实验，向学生介绍现代仪器，并为从事独立研究的学生增加经验的广度。更广泛的影响：该项目的重点是在全国范围内培养物理系的教师和教学人员的专业知识。它以一种非常直接的方式做到这一点，将小团体聚集在一起学习当代教学实验室，他们希望在自己的机构实施这些实验室，但没有自己开发的专业知识。此外，在每个沉浸地点，收集的干部都会参与更广泛的讨论，讨论如何将这些实验室整合到他们的课程中，这是一次明确旨在引发对课程策略、战略和模式的讨论的对话。关于这些讨论的报告正在国家会议上分享。这一计划的影响是广泛的。此外，还提供了一些财政支助，以鼓励为任职人数不足的人口提供服务的机构的教员参与。

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.