Michael Reid

U of T astronomers to help students in West Africa reach for the stars

geoff.vendeville — Tue, 25 Jul 2017 14:17:48 +0000

U of T astronomers to help students in West Africa reach for the stars

geoff.vendeville Tue, 07/25/2017 - 10:17

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Once a student at a summer school for young West African astronomers, U of T master's student Margaret Ikape will be returning as an instructor. She posed in the observing dome of U of T's McLennan Physical Lab (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

Geoffrey Vendeville

Author legacy

Geoffrey Vendeville

Topic

Global Lens

Astronomy

Global

International

Graduate Students

Michael Reid

Subheadline

Margaret Ikape and Jielai Zhang will be teaching young astronomers at a summer school in Ghana

Since her childhood in Nigeria, Margaret Ikape has been fascinated by space. She remembers seeing a fireball blaze across the night sky when she was 8 years old and asking her dad what it was.

His answer didn't satisfy her curiosity, triggering more questions: How far are the stars? How big are they? Why is the Earth round?

She went in search of answers to the University of Nigeria, which back then was the only university in the country to offer an undergraduate program in astronomy. She spent time in a program called West African International Summer School for Young Astronomers in Accra, Ghana, which was started three years ago with the help of University of Toronto's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Today, Ikape is a master's student at U of T. She plans to return to Africa this week to introduce a new group of students to astronomy and space.

She'll be teaching undergraduate students about cosmology at the same West African summer school that she attended.

Not everybody has the opportunity to travel for their studies, she says. “Instead of asking them to travel to find this knowledge, I’d like to bring it to them.”

Innovations in teaching: Inside Con Hall with Mike Reid

lanthierj — Fri, 20 May 2016 17:00:06 +0000

Innovations in teaching: Inside Con Hall with Mike Reid lanthierj Fri, 05/20/2016 - 13:00

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All photos by Johnny Guatto

Krisha Ravikantharaja

Author legacy

Krisha Ravikantharaja

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

In just a few weeks, Convocation Hall will begin hosting graduation ceremonies for an expected 13,500 University of Toronto students.

But during the school year Con Hall also serves as the largest classroom at the largest university in Canada.

So what’s it really like to learn in a room with 1,500 fellow students? And what’s it like to teach in that famous rotunda?

In this series, U of T News student reporter Krisha Ravikantharaja goes Inside Con Hall to see why some of U of T’s most popular professors and classes can be found under the dome.

“You just can’t be sure. Every day in that class, some student is on the verge of meowing. Or trying to film a Harlem Shake video.

“After a while, you learn to expect it.”

Mike Reid has taught introductory astronomy courses inside Con Hall, the neoclassical domed rotunda that dominates the University of Toronto’s downtown Toronto campus, for seven years. And he has seen it all.

“On the first day of one of my classes, there were two students meowing like cats. They were in the upper balcony, and they were meowing back and forth – and it would get louder and louder and louder.

“I finally just told them, ‘Please stop talking. You're irritating everybody,’ and they quieted down.”

Reid attributed the incident to “a bunch of students who had just had too much caffeine” or just “goofing off,” until a student came up to him after the lecture, and suggested the possibility that the student or students responsible might have had a disability.

“I felt so bad. I thought, ‘What if I had just humiliated a student in front of the entire class?’ So I sent out a note to the entire class, saying ‘if that was you and you have a disability, here’s what you can do.’”

A student posted the email on Reddit, which began a long thread (with comments, in the Reddit way, ranging from supportive and sincere to silly and profane). The attention the note received was embarrassing, Reid says, but he stands firmly behind his commitment to accessibility. The diversity of students in his Con Hall classes with respect to disabilities, age, and disciplinary backgrounds is something he says he needs to be aware of and accommodate.

Reid teaches two classes in Con Hall and says he has to ensure that every aspect of those courses – The Sun and Its Neighbours (AST101) and Stars and Galaxies (AST201) – is worked out carefully in advance.

“I’ve learned to be organized like I never was before. The amount of planning that’s required to do a Con Hall class is vastly, vastly more than smaller courses. We start thinking about our next year in Con Hall while we’re still doing the previous year. It’s a huge amount of work to make those courses run smoothly.”

All that careful planning ensures there is room for spontaneity: Reid always welcomes questions during his lectures. He teaches with a co-instructor, which allows for one person to be on stage, speaking, while the other can roam the hall, handing a wireless microphone to any student with a raised hand.

“We try to emphasize right from the first day that if you want to talk, you’re welcome to talk. What you have to say is important. We try to have a two way conversation.”

Reid disagrees with people who don’t believe that you can teach a large class well, but he says Con Hall does require an instructor to be open to changing teaching styles.

“The old way of doing things is being ‘the sage on the stage.’ You come in and you talk, and the students just absorb all of your wonderful wisdom. I’ve certainly learned that you just can’t do that in a class like Con Hall – not if you want the students to have a good, meaningful experience.”

Students will tune out if they don’t feel a personal connection with the professor in a large class, Reid says, and it’s crucial to make sure students don’t feel anonymous or lost in a crowd.

“If you feel like the experience has nothing to do with you personally, why would you engage?”, he asks.

“I want to create an environment where all of the students feel like they all want to personally engage. They’re paying a lot of money for this, and I want them to get a useful experience out of it.”

Like others who teach in Con Hall, Reid has found that there can be advantages to having such a large class.

“Every time I’m in there, there are always several people in the room who are having a good day. They’re energetic and they’re really there for that class. So if we start a discussion with that many students in the room you can be sure that there will be students that will engage and stimulate the other students.”

Over the years, Reid has learned a lot about what to expect at Con Hall, but he describes Halloween as a time he absolutely dreads. The last time his class fell on Halloween, Reid witnessed a group of Power Rangers run through the hall in their costumes, and had to compete with other students’ incredible make-up and costumes for the attention of the class.

Reid vividly recalls an incident involving a student dressed as Slender Man that day.

“In the middle of the class, he got up, walked up onto the stage, and just stood in the middle of it. I’m horrified because my co-instructor is teaching, and she’s never taught before in such a big room.”

Reid says his co-instructor handled the situation impeccably, however.

“She didn’t miss a beat. She just went up to him and leaned on him like he was a podium, and kept delivering her talk exactly as she had intended to as though he wasn’t there, and the class thought this was hilarious.”

For Reid, teaching such a large class is a way to get as many students as possible excited about his field. He’ll seize almost any opportunity to win students over to astronomy. That Reddit thread? Despite some initial embarrassment about the attention, Reid joined the thread himself to encourage more students to take the course.

“While we're on the topic of my course: if you're a student at UofT or thinking of becoming one, hey, why not take my course?” Reid wrote. “Clearly people like it enough to reproduce my e-mails on Reddit, so you can't go wrong.”

Early Career Teaching Award spotlight: Q & A with astronomer Mike Reid

sgupta — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 10:22:44 +0000

Early Career Teaching Award spotlight: Q & A with astronomer Mike Reid sgupta Mon, 10/19/2015 - 06:22

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“My favourite thing of all is when students come to see me in my office with some burning question,” says Mike Reid

Brianna Goldberg

Author legacy

Brianna Goldberg

Topic

Our Community

Our Faculty & Staff

Undergraduate Education

Undergraduate Students

Undergrad

Teaching

Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics

Awards

Astronomy

Michael Reid

Subheadline

“There's nothing better than seeing students tap into their curiosity about the cosmos and use it to power personal development”

Mike Reid serves as coordinator of public outreach and education at the prestigious Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics. He’s also a lecturer at U of T – where he quickly makes an impression on undergraduates.

“Mike conveys the sort of enthusiasm you dream about from all teachers,” said Jesse Hildebrand, a recent U of T alumnus and founder of Science Literacy Week. “He shares many inspiring opportunities, such as looking through a telescope at the rings of Saturn. My favourite university experiences happened in his class.”

Reid is one of four teaching leaders receiving the first-ever University of Toronto Early Career Teaching Awards this year. They are:

Aarthi Ashok, associate professor, teaching stream, department of biological sciences, UTSC

Fiona Rawle, associate professor, teaching stream, department of biology, UTM

Michael Reid, lecturer, department of astronomy and astrophysics, Faculty of Arts & Science

Kyle Smith, assistant professor, department of historical studies, UTM

U of T News will be running features on each of the winners, who are set to receive their certificates at the University of Toronto Excellence in Teaching Reception on Tuesday, November 3rd from 5:00pm-7:00pm in the Common Room at Massey College.

In this first instalment, Reid talks about his love of “highly engaged” teaching and solving problems with his students.

What drew you to teaching?

Students! I first became interested in teaching when I was an undergraduate. I deeply loved learning about physics and I realized that by explaining it others as a teaching assistant, I learned it better myself. As a junior graduate student, I did planetarium shows and realized that I liked talking to people about science as much as I liked actually doing science. In the first year of my PhD, I was given permission to teach an introductory astronomy course. I loved talking to students and seeing them light up as they discovered that astronomers can literally look back in time, or that the atoms in their bodies come from the explosions of dying stars, or even just that something as ordinary as a spring can be understood in a simple, elegant way.

What do you love most about it?

I love students who are curious about the world they live in and things beyond their daily experience. My favourite thing of all is when students come to see me in my office with some burning question. I had a student a few years ago and right from day one she would come to me after every class, and in nearly every office hour, with questions that went way, way beyond the scope of the course. You could see her brain was just lit up with curiosity, with a need to learn. She was a first-year non-science major, but she would really challenge me. I would have to race home at night and read up to be ready for her questions the next day. Sometimes she still stumped me because she would press right up to the frontier of our understanding of the cosmos.

For me, there's nothing better than seeing students tap into their curiosity about the cosmos and use it to power personal development.

How would you describe your teaching style?

I aim for what I call "highly engaged" teaching. To me, the way we conventionally approach education is very strange. We would never think of training students to swim, play music, or speak French by having them sit in a classroom and watch videos of swimmers, musicians, or French speakers. So why do we think we can teach them astronomy, economics, or linguistics by making them passively watch someone talk about those subjects? For the majority of students, learning entails doing.

When I was an undergraduate, I watched professors copy notes from their notebooks onto the board, and then I copied them into my notebooks. I learned nearly nothing that way. The real learning happened later, when I camped out in the lounge with my classmates and did problem after problem, running upstairs to ask professors for help when we got stuck. I try to replicate that experience. I ask students to do the readings on their own time and then, in class, I explain the hard stuff, they ask questions, and we solve problems together.

Why is integrating research and teaching important?

I'm not just teaching astronomy that's written in the textbook, I'm teaching the work my colleagues and I are doing right now – about papers published last week, about the discoveries we are on the cusp of making. I think that goes a long way to motivating students to learn: they want to know the things they are learning have relevance right now, that they are being prepared to understand and shape the world of today, not the way it was when the textbook was written.

What have you learned from your students?

More than I can hope to summarize. But I can start with patience, gratitude, and the love of learning.

Why have you chosen to teach at U of T?

I'll be honest: teaching at U of T is intense. There are overwhelming numbers of students and never a moment's rest during the semester. But there are a lot of things I love that I haven't encountered elsewhere. The first is the variety of opportunities. When I need help with some new innovation I want to implement, there are people I can turn to. If I need funding to study better teaching methods, there is funding. If I need inspiration on how to teach better, I have no shortage of role models.

On top of all of that, I love the diversity of the students. Their diversity, in terms of interests, aptitudes, cultures, religions, languages, and attitudes makes for a really lively, stimulating environment. When a student walks through my door during office hours, I never know who I am about to meet!

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Michael Reid

U of T astronomers to help students in West Africa reach for the stars

Read more about Ikape at CBC News

Innovations in teaching: Inside Con Hall with Mike Reid

Early Career Teaching Award spotlight: Q & A with astronomer Mike Reid