Kenneth Ragan

SALTISE Executive Member

McGill University, Montreal, QC

Faculty

Phone: 514-398-6518

Areas of interestspedagogical change, CSCL - Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, student motivation, learning communities, educational technology, communities of practice, student engagement, active learning pedagogy, science instruction and learning, changing practice

Any expertise I have comes from the practice of science (specifically physics) education at the university level over nearly 30 years. In particular, I have taught large freshman introductory physics courses (enrollments of several hundred students) for more than a decade. This has led me to think about, and experiment with, techniques like active learning, peer instruction, just-in-time teaching, flipped classrooms, etc.

Dart Gun Velocity

By Kenneth Ragan

Battleship Clicker Questions

By Kenneth Ragan

My projects are all focussed on having an immediate impact in MY classrooms – which are currently the large freshman physics courses at a major university (primarily the mechanics part of the curriculum).

Peer mentoring
Using students who have taken the course in the recent past (last one to three years) to actively engage the current cohort in tutorials and in the classroom.
Re-design of undergraduate labs
Using support from a grant from the AAU to redesign freshman mechanics labs to provide for a more intuitive, hands-on, self-directed approach to data-taking and analysis.

2007 the J.D. Jackson Award of Excellence in Teaching (McGill’s Department of Physics)

2011 the Faculty of Science's Leo Yaffe Award for Excellence in Teaching

2013 the Principal's Prize for Excellence in Teaching

2016 Pedagogical Innovation and Lifetime of Contribution Award

SALTISE Conference 2016