February 2025: Andy Gavrin

About Andy

I have always loved teaching, though my students have not always loved me! As far back as high school, I often helped classmates with math and science, earning myself the now-coveted "nerd" label. I enjoyed my role as a TA in grad school (except for grading lab reports) and looked forward to my first real teaching experience. Arriving at IUPUI (now IU Indianapolis) in the fall of 1995, my students and I mutually discovered that... I wasn't very good! According to my first teaching evaluations, I was pedantic, boring, and had a "superiority complex." The day I received those comments, I was not a happy guy, and a colleague, Gregor Novak, noticed.

Gregor was generally regarded as the best teacher in my department. After I explained my issue, he invited me to lunch to talk about teaching. I don't recall much of what we discussed that day, but there were many more lunches over the next several years. One thing for sure is that Gregor introduced me to the AAPT and to the existence of literature on physics education. I attended my first AAPT conference at U. Nebraska, Lincoln, in the summer of 1998.

Since 1998, I've attended the vast majority of AAPT's national meetings. AAPT has become a second home for me in the sense that it provides a wide network of people I know—people with whom I share interests and can work productively. I started out as a friend and then became a member of two area committees: Computers in Physics Education and the Instructional Media Committee. Never heard of those? That's because in around 2001, during my first term as chair of the IMC, I worked with Bill Ploughe (then Chair of CIPE) to merge the two committees, forming what is now the Committee on Educational Technologies (CET). I'm not sure, but I think it may be the only area committee merger in AAPT history. Since then, I've been a member and occasional chair of both the CET and the Committee on Physics in Undergraduate Education. These positions helped me expand my network within AAPT and motivated me to serve my campus in similar ways. I've joined (and chaired) technology committees at the school, campus, and university levels and served as both chair of my department and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs.

As a faculty member, we are expected to teach, provide service, and, of course, engage in scholarship. Initially, my scholarship focused on magnetic materials and remained largely separate from my teaching. However, after several years of lunch with Gregor, we started translating what we had done in the classroom into a well-defined pedagogical system: Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT). Working with collaborators (many in AAPT), we published two books, more than a dozen articles and chapters, and gave hundreds of talks. Over time, and as part of taking the aforementioned administrative roles, I shifted the focus of my scholarship entirely to physics education, particularly on the use of technology in education. In addition to the work on JiTT, I’ve published on the use of online forums to encourage student-to-student communication, teaching remotely during the COVID pandemic, and incorporating computational methods into the undergraduate physics curriculum (thanks to my PICUP colleagues!).

Overall, AAPT has been a central part of my professional life. The people I've met through AAPT have been among my most valued collaborators. I can't name them all here, but they know who they are! Finally, no summary of my interest in teaching would be complete without acknowledging my students. Without students, there is no teaching. Thanks to all who have learned from me over the years.