An undergraduate student I work with gave the following problem to a bunch of students enrolled in two different calculus-based physics course.

An object undergoes constant acceleration. Data from the object’s motion is shown below.

How far did the object travel during those 5 seconds?

First:

I’m curious, how you initially think about / approach this problem.

Second:

I’m curious what you would predict are all the different things students did (both correct and incorrect).

Third:

I’m also curious if there are any viable methods that you think were not likely be taken by students.

In the intro physics course I teach, students take FCI on first day of class, and then again just yesterday. I don’t expect very high gains.

Although, there are many interactive features of the classroom (e.g., clickers, white-boarding, small-group discussion), the course content, materials, and pacing is very traditional. Thus, the same old physics course has been dressed up in reforms, but very little has fundamentally changed.

Often, interactive classrooms can facilitate three kinds of changes to content:

• First, they can facilitate a transformation of what physics content is. Often this begin with a teacher who is starting to reconceptualize what that content is, and the interactive features of the classroom serve as a catalyst to drive that “content-reconceptualization” reaction.

• Second, they can facilitate a change in the relationship between students and that transformed content. By giving students places to create, share, and negotiate the meaning of physics content in public ways, the possibility emerges that they become authors of content, not merely passive consumers.

• Third, they can facilitate a change in the way teachers view the relationship between themselves, their students, and the content. Whether it be a view that students arrive in the classroom with misconceptions that impede learning or they arrive with resources that are assets for learning, the views are one in which students are viewed as already having a relationship with physics content–one that must be attended to as part of their learning.

These three changes are all about physics content–What the content of a physics course is? Who makes the content of a physics course? And where the raw materials of physics content lie?

This is the biggest obstacle I see for this course–not what new reforms practices to put in place, but how to begin a transformation of the content of the course. The three transformations above speak to different entry points to such change–changing teachers views of content, changing the contact students make with content (curriculum), and changing teachers views of learners of that content.

Last night, my 6-year-old niece and I were outside in the country on a clear night, looking at the stars, telling stories. Here is what she had to say:

“Stars are bright because they visit the sun during the day, and burn bright throughout the night.”

“Stars like to be in certain places more than others. In some places you can only see three of four stars, but in other you can you see a hundreds, or a million and three.”

“Stars hide whenever you turn on a light. But when you turn off the light, the stars come back out to dance, like at a party. Let’s pretend we are stars. First, we’ll turn off the light and hide behind the car. And then we’ll, turn it on and dance in the street.”

“When you look at the stars from the edge of the yard, they are over there, but then when we move to the house, the stars move. This happens because stars move in circles. See.”

“That bright star is from aliens–aliens that like to hop. They don’t hop too high, just little hops. Aliens grow and play. ”

“The moon isn’t out here, because it’s probably at my house.”

“Why are they called stars? They don’t look like the stars. Like the ones I draw. They just look like points. This is how you make a star. Those stars look nothing like stars.”

“I heard cows jump over the moon, but I don’t believe it… I don’t believe it, because cows are lazy.”

A very thin hoop is placed at the top of a ramp. Will the hoop (start to) roll without slipping?

Without doing the experiment, what would you want to be able to measure to help you decide? Why would these measurements help? How would you go about measuring them?. Once you’ve measured these things, how will you use those measurements to help you decide.

Only 7 of the million things I am realizing this year:

#1: Organization. I need to become better organized. In past, when most of my job was mostly being a researcher or student with teaching just on the side, I could be pretty dis-organized about teaching and it had few consequences. Once teaching became most of my job, organization has become key, but I’m way behind the curve on this one.

#2: Teaching Colleagues: Teaching an inquiry course like the one I am trying to do with the future elementary school teachers requires a lot of time and mental effort, and it really benefits from having teaching collaborators.  In the past when I’ve taught this kind of course, I was either co-teaching it or had plenty of people around who had taught a similar course. This year, this course I have is a lot harder to teach by myself, without colleagues to talk about the student ideas’ I am hearing. I am finding myself much worse off because I can’t engage in nearly daily discussions about where we might go and what we could do next.

#3 Evaluator/Teacher: There is a bit of me that really likes the fact that I don’t write the exams for my physics course, and there a bit of me that hates it. I like it, because it clearly puts me in the role of teacher and not evaluator. It’s my job to help them learn.  It’s someone else job to write a test that tries to assess that learning. I don’t like it, because I don’t feel like the tests are a good measure of learning.

#4 For students, especially students from other countries and certain minorities, academic and social isolation can be a big problem. I don’t know what to do about it, but it is something I am more and more aware of being here.

#5: I was really, really lucky not to have to work and go to school at the same time during college years. This was in part due to scholarships and in part due to my parents. So many students I know here work full time. Sure, I wrestled full-time in college. But wrestling was something I loved and I did it by choice. If I stopped wrestling, I wasn’t going to evicted or starve. Oh wait, I did starve myself often due to wrestling.

#6: It is a struggle to find time and mental space for research. This is both because I am teaching more, and teaching new classes. But it is also a struggle with fewer colleagues around. I am very very thankful for colleagues who keep tabs on me: Those who ask me to be part of writing or reading groups. Those who offer to help getting a paper out the door. Those who ask if I want to work on writing a grant together. Those who invite me to give talks. Without those people, it would be easy to disappear.

#7: In teaching, a lot of things matter in the day-to-day management of a classroom. Sometimes it’s the big things. Sometimes it’s the little things. I’ve learned that even if you have a handle on at a lot of the important stuff, it is still easy for things to go bad and go bad quickly because one small thing. Having established some rapport with your students (as individuals and a class), especially, about who you are as a teacher and how you care about your students as learners, can go a long way toward not letting a slip become a fall.

I am planning out a course that I’ll be teaching next semester for called, “Teaching Physics”. A major question I am wrestling with is, “What do I hope these students to walk away from this class knowing and being able to do?” Some thoughts that crossed my mind today.

Less than two years ago, Andrew Heckler opened a colloquium at the University of Maine with his take on the most compelling and important contribution of physics education research. From my best memory, he said something like this: “Our community is coming to the conclusion that it’s impossible to teach physics well without knowing how your students think and relate to physics content.”

Several decades ago, J. Minstrell wrote that it is a necessary part of teaching physics for “you and your students to know their initial conceptions before commencing a unit of study… Both the teacher and students must be aware of, and verbalize, students’ initial ideas.”

David Hammer wrote in the lates 90s: “A curriculum succeeds, not by guiding the flow of learning and instruction, but by helping to establish an arena of activity rich with opportunities for student and teacher discovery.”

There is something particularly interesting about Jim Minstrell’s recommendations for getting started in teaching physics. He doesn’t suggest you go out and start reading Physics Education Research articles. He doesn’t suggest you start using research-based curriculum materials. (Although I doubt he would recommend you not do these things). What he does suggest is this: Start by listening to your students’ ideas. Start by providing both your students and yourself with opportunities to learn about their ideas. Start by asking questions and constructing activities that engage those ideas. This is also reflected in David’s notion that the curriculum doesn’t succeed because it guides student thinking, but that it provides the teacher and students opportunities to find out about each others’ thinking.

At the end of the day, it is your students you need to come to know about. It is your students’ own mind that they need to know about. Yes, research materials can  help you create opportunities to learn about your students’ ideas. Yes, research articles can help you refine what it is you think you are listening for. But the work of learning about your students ideas is always now. …

What does this mean for my course? I’m not sure, but more and more I think I am committing to teaching this course in such a way that the students in my class experience student thinking– through examinations of actual student work, through observations and reflections of live clinical interviews I’ll conduct in class, through their participation in learning activities with students we invite to class, through interviews they will have to conduct, etc. Yes, we’ll get to reading some physics education research and examining research-based curriculum and teaching strategies, but not until we’ve spent time thinking about our own ideas about what students are thinking and doing, and why they might be thinking and doing those things. I’ll try to provide them with the opportunities to discover student thinking, and I’ll discover what ideas they have for thinking about student thinking. At some point, I’ll invite them to learn about how physics educators and  researchers think and how they have aimed to create curriculum and instruction based on what they think. I hope to do this partially by reading, but partially by inviting those people into our classroom.

I don’t see much reason why we can’t talk to researchers and educators over video. I don’t want the things we experience to be distant. Not distant student data or quotes. Not distant curriculum and curriculum developers. Not distant researchers.

1. Start by listening to your students. By listening carefully and trying to understand their explanations, their predictions, or even the motivation for their questions, you can gain insight into their present understanding.

2. Ask questions that are qualitative. Avoid questions that require the manipulation of formulae and/or technical words unless you specifically want to find out whether they can correctly pick and grind a formula or to find out what a particular word means to them. I believe questions that ask for a qualitative explanations or comparison can be used effectively to probe understanding of ideas.

3. Ask questions that are relevant to common situations. There is a tendency to try to think up some bizarre situation to “trap” students into displaying their “alternative” conceptions. This isn’t necessary. In fact, it appears that many students have more trouble describing or explaining a common situations, probably because it is so similar to situations for which the initial conceptions were developed.

4. Ask questions that require inferential thinking. Once I know my students clearly know the observations, I want to know how they structure the phenomena to give them meaning. I typically ask for a prediction, a generalization, or an explanation. “If you do this, what will happen? Explain why you think that will happen.”  “You’ve now made several observations of … what can you say in general about the situation? What do all the observations together tell you about the nature of…”   “Explain how… happens.”   “We see that … happens. How would you interpret that?”

5. Clarify the observation first. Prior to probing their organization of thought, you may want to ask for their observations. Frequently, I find their perceptions were different from mine. In other words, before you ask them to explain or interpret, you may want to find out whether they saw the phenomenon as you did.

6. Listen (or read) carefully in a non-evaluative way to the answers given by your students. This is probably the most difficulty aspect. As teachers, we are prone to jump in and steer the students straight by telling them what to think. Students are prone to look to teachers for feedback as to whether they have the “right” answer. Fight this, if you want to know what they think. Be neutral in your comments about what students say. Help the students clarify their ideas, but do not evaluate those ideas yourself. Get them to evaluate their own or each other’s ideas. Students will be more willing to say what they believe if they are not graded on their specific answer early in the development of their ideas. There will be a time for grading later after ideas have been developed and used. When you are reading quiz or test results, rather than simply classifying answers as right or wrong, try classifying them as to the type of argument. What I find is that students often get the wrong answer for very good reasons, and they sometimes get the right answer for very weak answers.

Conducting these investigations in the classroom has changed the nature of my instruction. The focus is now on developing the understanding of ideas and applying ideas, ideas that are related to students’ own thinking. We are not matching through a textbook interpreting the ideas of some distant authority; we are building our own ideas.

An incomplete list of changes for next semester intro physics:

(a) Capitalize on the first day more. The first day was syllabus / take FCI day. Next semester, I plan on doing a two quick “mini-labs” and one problem-solving activity. I have 2.5 hours and I plan use it all to set the tone. … Also, a required HW after the first day is to find my office and to write their name on the whiteboard outside my office.

(b) Get away from current reading quiz system by doing a mini-SBG system. Instead of having a 5 multiple-choice quiz on reading, I am going to have 5 standards per week. I’ll explicitly assess those items (probably each twice) that week, but students can re-assess later weeks (details to be figured out). Each week I am supposed to give 2 reading quizzes each worth 5 points. In my new system 5 points will come from students showing mastery of those skills (at any time). 5 points will come from students filling out an online form where they have to write about “What was confusing from the reading?”, which must be completed before each class. This way I accomplish three things: I keep the incentive for students to read, I get feedback before class about what students think was confusing, and the assessments are more geared for diagnosing and learning.

For example, Week 1 might be

I can convert units

I can finding slope of a line given a graph

I distinguish distance, displacement, and position

I distinguish average velocity from average speed

I can interpret a position v. time graph

(c) Have warm-ups each day that make contact with content we initially learned earlier in the semester. Right now, the class runs like a freight-train. We need some reminders about what we were supposed to have learned along the previous stops. I want to keep these short.

(d) Use these quiz assessments and/or warm-ups to give more individualized feedback to students. I don’t find the computer exercises to be the most useful thing for students to do, but in the mean time they give students something to do while I write down individualized feedback on student work. In the future, I’ll hope to have better things for them to do during this time, but I think for now the computer exercises will have to do.

(e) Students will bring their clickers to my class. Right now students just bring them to lecture, which is one hour a week. Right now I am doing a lot of peer discussion-style stuff without clickers, so this is a no brainer.

(f) Manage lab activities with more scaffolding early on and organize lab time as to capitalize on dynamics between whole class and small groups. For example, I want do to the first lab activity together as a class. It’s a measure circumference and radius of different pipes to make a plot, to find slope to get an experimental measure of pi. Instead of just sending them off to do it, I want each group to measure one pipe (a different one) as accurately as they can, to find a value for pi based on their measurement alone, and to determine their percent error. At front of the class, there will be one giant plot, where each group will come up and add their data point. We’ll talk about the graph, and different ways we can get a better measure of pi by using everyone’s data— averaging everyone’s data and finding the slope. Each group will have to do the average method and the slope method to find pi and percent error, and use that to decide which one gives us a better estimate. As a class, we’ll report back what we found and learn and I’ll help students understand why the slope method works — it helps to get rid of any systematic error (i.e., look at the intercepts of the graph).

(g) Instead of checking labs in notebooks,  students will do (most of) their labs on their whiteboards. Data on board, graphs on board, calculations on the board. They have to run me through what they did, and I check them off.  Some labs, however, are supposed to be graded more closely. For these, I’m not sure what I’ll do, but I think I’ll do a group check out plus individual check out on paper, which will focus on procedures students need to know how to do, such as fractional uncertainty, weakest link rule of error propagation, how to linearize data, and how to interpret slope. I could maybe make this more SBG as well.

(h) Continue having students work problems on large wall whiteboards. This is going well. I want to use a combination of a whole-class discussion and group-group conferencing. My new job next semester is to have clearer goals in mind for what students are supposed to have learned from doing that problem, and to make sure those issues arise during discussion or conferencing.

(i) Give students clear time frames to work within, and use a timer to monitor time. I’m OK using more time when needed, but I want to explicitly make that decision, not just forget about time. This is mostly about using class time efficiently. I have 2.5 hours with them. We can get a lot done, but I have to be vigilant about squeezing the most out of the time we do have.

(j) Differentiation and balancing individual vs. group work. After students finish their whiteboard problems, I want to give them the option of doing another problem together or doing their second problem “flying solo”. For “solo” problems, I’m gonna steal from Frank and have answer key in the back of room, where students can give themselves feedback on the problem. While those students are flying solo, I can attend to those students or groups who are still struggling.

(k) Lastly, I want to make sure I have a one-on-one conversation with every student after the first exam. Not sure, how I will do this, but it’s important. I’m also going to email absent students with a note saying something like, “Hey, we all noticed you weren’t in class today. Hope to see you on Thursday!” I already started doing this with my most frequent absentee students, and it has dramatically improved their attendance and likelihood to come talk to me about physics.