Last Update: 11 June 2002
The author summarizes his views of what makes a good University Physics teacher. It is based on an experience of 30 years in teaching undergraduate students at the School of Physics of the Tel-Aviv University.
It is mostly intended for young faculty members of Physics Departments, who are seeking to improve their teaching skills. On the other hand, in view of many similarities with other Exact Science departments and Engineering, it could be useful also there. When I started my career, I was eager to learn from the experience of others, but unfortunately only very few were willing to share that. If the present document could fill this gap, I'll see it as a big achievement.
If you want to improve your teaching abilities without investing time and effort, you are reading the wrong document. On the other hand if you are ready to give it a try, then you may even enjoy teaching.
The author is not claiming to be an expert on Didactics or Psychology, but the material presented here is based merely on common sense and experience. Most of it consists of techniques, which can easily be adopted by anyone. However, some of us may need to make personal modifications. After all, we physicists are also human beings and differ from each other in many aspects.
Please contact me for any questions and comments. I would like very much to update and improve the present document.
Copyright © 2002, 2001, 2000 Samuel Dagan.
The author hereby gives general permission to copy and distribute this document or parts thereof in any medium, provided that all copies contain, in a manner appropriate for the medium, an acknowledgement of authorship and the URL of the original document, i.e. http://alzt.tau.ac.il/~dagan/teaching/main.html .
The permission granted above does not imply permission to distribute this document in a modified form or as a translation. Please contact the author to discuss the conditions for such actions.
Each paragraph contains emphasized expressions, which can be used for a quick search and scan.
There are words used in this document, whose meaning is different from the usually accepted or could be understood in an ambiguous way. In order to avoid misunderstanding, such words have an asterisk sign attached to the right, which displays the definition if clicked, e.g. lesson*.
I have to apologize to the readers, that I did not take care of using the unisex convention e.g. "her/him", but just "him", the reason not being chauvinism but simplicity.
If you dislike HTML and prefer post-script, then now is the right time to switch to the PS version.
The present document is written in valid HTML version 4.0 and should be readable by any browser using this version or higher. In order to display correctly some special signs, any ISO or Unicode encoding should be used. As a test the following expression b² should read b square.
If you don't want to read from the web, you can make your own version of the document by saving all the *.html files which appear listed at http://alzt.tau.ac.il/~dagan/teaching/ to a directory (folder) of yours. Reading this HTML version from the print is not advisable not only since the links (internal and external) are lost, but also - the emphasis of some expressions.
If you are still interested to read this document and agree to the conditions of the Copyright Notice, then move to the Table of Contents and use it as a surfing point. If you'll find it interesting, you may also have a look on the write-up of a complementary talk I gave at the faculty colloquium.
Table of Contents of this document
Home Page of the author