One of my biggest goals for this year (if I have a job) is to continue down the path of less notes and more inquiry. While I was pretty happy with how things went last year in my first full year of teaching, it was easy to identify areas for improvement. In particular, I thought that in Physics 12 we spent too much time doing notes. Physics 11 was more collaborative but perhaps too de-contextualized.
I have been reflecting on how I taught Physics 12 last year, and I’m not super happy with how much lecturing I did. In the big picture it probably wasn’t too bad and I didn’t give a lot of notes (which is a good thing). I used peer instruction from time to time, and I liked how that turned out. In contrast to this, Physics 11 is much more inquiry based course, which is great.
Last week I had my first try at implementing Problem Based Learning (PBL) in physics. We were about to study Heat Energy and it seemed like a natural fit for presenting an authentic problem. I chose to make a scenario that was based on my previous work as a mechanical engineer. Have a look below…
PBL - Heat Energy
From what I understand, PBL should be based on authentic situations where the solution is non-obvious such that the students need to engage their meta-cognition.
Last week in Physics 12 we finished mechanics. From here on in it will be electricity, electricity, electricity. Shocking, I know….
To finish off mechanics, I gave my students a mechanics baseline test for the second time. The first time was during the 2nd week of school, back in September. The results are in, and I suppose that in some ways these results are a measure of:
time spent on the topics teacher effectiveness student engagement tutor effectiveness (many of my students have tutors) student aptitude in the time frame and conditions given For 51 students, the overall average in September was 40%.
It had been about ten weeks since I started teaching fulltime and I thought I should reflect on how my classroom assessment is going. I am constantly thinking about assessment but sometimes I think it helps to write things down in order to get better clarity of whatever it is I’m thinking about.
My overall assessment plan is different for my senior physics classes and my grade 9 science classes. For physics I have implemented a standards based grading scheme, whereas for the grade 9 I am using a more standard model.
Yesterday I had a pretty good night of viewing with my 6" newtonian telescope. I managed to see many galaxies including M51 (the Whirlpool Galaxy), M101, M106, M31 (the Andromeda Galaxy) and a cool look at the pair of M81 and M82. The Ring Nebula (M57) wasn’t very clear but the Dumbbell Nebula (M27) was decent. M13, the fantastic globular cluster in Hercules was easy to find in the NW, and I think the highlight of the night was the double cluster NGC869 and NGC884.
As part of a research proposal I am putting together for my ETEC 500 course, over the past week or so I have read a lot of papers that deal with the topic of conceptual change in science students. Although not all articles showed the same causal effect of addressing common misconceptions of students, the evidence from these papers makes it very compelling for teachers to implement some type of conceptual change model.
One thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is how peer instruction or other attempts to get away from pseudoteaching can be applied to junior science classes. For example, yesterday I started a Grade 8 science unit on Water. I really like this unit because it has a lot of relevance for the kids and a good number of opportunities for both lab inquiries and outdoor experiential trips. However, I can’t help think that the actual learning of the topics is firmly grounded in reading and scientific literacy.
One of the best lessons I’ve done in Physics was an introduction/inquiry into friction. It was one of those classes where the students were doing something meaningful and were part of a process of discovery. Certainly the lesson wasn’t perfect but being able to reflect upon it will give me the chance to not only improve it, but also transfer ideas and methodologies to other lessons and contexts.
I should definitely point out that the overall idea of the lesson was lifted from an article written by Campbell and Neilson (2009).
In the past couple of weeks I’ve come across some blogs/articles that talk about open ended questions on physics tests. A great example of this can be found here at Physics! Blog! I think the idea behind this is to allow the student to showcase everything that they’ve learned and demonstrate a deeper understanding of the topic by applying their knowledge. I think this would correspond about 1/2 way up the cognitive domain in Blooms Taxonomy.
