I always post these, because they help me to process when I write them, but it’s also interesting to share. I’ve been sharing these ever since I started, so I figured I keep it up.

What do we do in class that is helpful for your learning? Why specifically do you think it is helpful?

– The group work is helpful because it provides the input and collection of ideas, by solving the problems together.

– Whiteboard exercises and emphasis on showing all work and graphs. Good tool for working together and talking through each and every step. Coming around and questioning our methods and helping us understand why. The emphasis on showing work is great and help you learn more solidly. Before I used to zoom right to the answer, but I know I write out every formula, process, and graph and it has spilled over into my other classes, improving my grades.

– Test example questions are helpful because they give a clear view of what to expect.

– For me, having to work out problems step by step helps me because I can go home and have those guidelines to do HW. This is helpful b/c I have a hard time memorizing things quickly. The labs are helpful because I learn things better by doing hands on activities than from reading.

– Thorough explanations are good, needless to say.

– The amount of practice each class session we get. Working as a group helps other to catch up.

– Working out and explaining problems on the board, because it allows one to see if they actually understand the problem and if not they see where they don’t understand and can ask questions.

– Group work is good way that helps me a lot in this class. I always ask them when I face a problem I don’t understand and they help me out. It seems to me that the problems you give us to work are helpful.

– I don’t like group work, however I find it aids the learning process greatly. Group works puts everyone in that group in a teaching role at some point, which is a better way to learn something.

– Whiteboard problems, worksheets, reading quizzes. All these provide repetition, Practice makes perfect. With the LAs on Fridays we also have the ability to work problems with most of our questions answered.

– The most helpful thing is coloring the different quantities different colors.I

– Not only do we work problems on the board while you guide us, we also work in groups. This helps because any questions I am stuck on, someone who is learning something new can help me understand how they did it. All of the extra practice problems and being able to apply physics to real life in labs helpme

– Working in groups and whiteboard problems, we support each other and drawing is fun

– Working together for about 45 minutes is so helpful, save in time plus more and more things to learn from the group.

– Hands on Labs and working in groups. This is helpful because we help each other learn.

– Solving a lot of problems is one of the most helpful things. Also,the LAs who come to class to help on Fridays are so helpful.

– Group work seems to be helpful because you can get other people’s ways of solving problems. With different ideas, I think that is a helpful way for me to learn.

– Having problems worked out with the group is beneficial to me because if I don’t understand the problem or mess up one of the steps, I can turn and talk to one of them to figure what I did wrong.

– Working in groups is nice. Not just doing lab after lab as well, LA, time, and worksheets change the pace. I also think that the amount of work given is helpful.

– Working out problems on whiteboards are helpful, because it keeps the group on the same page and doesn’t let one be ahead of the everyone else of behind.

– When you go through problems step by step and then allow us to go back to our desk (to try to do it on our own). It allows us to break down a long problems into more “simple”steps.

– I enjoy working on practice problems in class, because it helps understand what different parts of the problems are and it’s more practice.

–Working in groups is helpful because it’s like a system of checks and balances.

– Group work, whiteboard problems, labs, etc.

– Worksheets help me because they give me problems to work in class, however, they also give me problems to work outside of class.

– The most helpful is when the instructor starts explaining  a problem and then he gives us a similar problems.

– I think when all of us roll up to the board, it’s very engaging.

What do we do in class that is NOT helpful for your learning? Why specifically do you think it is unhelpful?

– Nothing specifically I can think of… but a slower pace of problem-solving would be more effective. I think sometimes we are rushing.

– Everything is helpful. The only less-helpful thing is getting around the front board to watch your work a problem. I already understand most of the material, but I can see how it is needed in this class and will be helpful for me in the future.

–Color coding problems. I already have to remember how to solve the problem. I feel that trying to remember what each color means is just added stress.

–I am having a hard time in my new group–they are catching on quicker than I am and they rush through the problem. When I ask for clarification, the problem is explained, but too quickly. I felt like my first group worked much more as a team than my current group.

– Can’t think of anything.

– I cannot think of anything

– Whiteboarding and color-coding. I can’t work with others on the test, and I can’t use color pencils on the test, so it it seems like a waste of time and resources. I suggest everyone work by themselves.

–Everything we do in this class related to the main idea, so nothing is unhelpful.

– I feel like my first group had a great dynamic, and I can understand how others might not want to stay in their first group. I felt so comfortable with my first group, which for me helps the learning process.

– Sometimes we go at too fast of a pace than I can handle. I know we have  a  schedule that is set, but sometimes it’s hard to grasp certain concepts in the designated time.

– I find some of the labs to be less helpful, because the problems tend to explain themselves. But I guess I know some people learn more through actions and visualizations. So I guess they are helpful.

– Everything we do is helpful in some way.

– Switching groups. I can work easier with my first group, because I was accustomed to their way of thinking and working. That made for a good learning environment.

– We should have a quiz toward the end of class, so we can be more confident and have an indication of what we learned that day, or if there is still progress to be made.

– Working in groups can also not be helpful a times, because we don’t always work at the same pace. Some could work faster and sometimes people do not feel like slowing down.

– Counting off  a lot of points on labs is not helpful.

– Certain days, we rush through topics because we have too many activities to do. We buzz on from one thing to the next, and sometimes I hardly understood the first. Maybe we could only do one thing at a time.

– Everything that we have to do in lab in one class is too much to get finished before the end of class.

– Mandatory group changes. I had a real solid and helpful group at the beginning.

– Always doing group work is not helpful, because when I get home by myself, there is not one to get feedback. I know it’s my responsibility to work independently outside of class, but I feel group work is making me too dependent on others.

– Working in groups all the time. Sometimes my group understand something better than I do and finishes the work before I even know what’s going on.

– Nothing is unhelpful.

– I can’t think of anything.

– Nothing really.

– Sometimes working in groups is confusing. This can be unhelpful when I get home and have to work alone.

– Nothing is unhelpful, but we could work in groups a little less, because I feel I just want to finish the problem instead of understand everything.

– Nothing.

Is there anything you want to tell me? Something that’s been on your mind?

– Slow down a little sometimes?

– Nope

– (Blank)

– I am enjoying your class and it’s challenging me.

– It helps me when I am given deep, complete explanations as to “Why?” Once I understand something intimately, I know it. If we do not understand the murky depths, how could we hope to venture?

– This is the best lab I’ve had for a long time.

– I like the LAs, because I’ve appreciated having women in the classroom to teach us, they help keep our attention on topic a little more.

–(Blank)

– I wish we had more coffee. Never ending coffee. This 8:00 AM business is crazy. Coffee.

– As of now, things are going well.

– This class does a good job of teaching to different learning styles. I happen to be fond of math, so I tend to pick up the problem without the extra help, but I’m still enjoying the class even if it sometimes seems repetitive.

– I wish you had more office hours.

– Nope

– You rock, Frank!.

– I understand why you grade labs the way you do, I just wish you didn’t.

– No

– Everything seems to be OK. I do enjoy the content and challenge of this class.

– Nothing is on my mind about how this class could be different.

– Group changes. I enjoyed working with my friends. Reading quizzes should start 10 minutes later, to give grace to those who are trying to get here, but are having one of those days. We also need morning incentives, like coffee. Once a week? We need more than a lab activity to get us here on Fridays.

– Nope!

– (Blank)

– Nope 😉

– No

– Nope =)

– I wish we had more problems solving, because that’s what the test consisted of.

– (Blank)

– I’m confused about LA activities versus Lab activities, so I sometimes get the reading quiz questions wrong when it’s about what we are doing today.

This semester I am back to teaching first-semester physics. One thing I have noticed about myself this year is how much more direct I am with students about my expectations for collaborating in groups and for the quality /care that should go into whiteboards.

Beyond just communicating expectations more explicitly, I am assessing more and intervening as necessary. I have noticed myself deploying three different kinds of interventions:

– Discussing with students that collaborating over intellectual work is a skill that one develops with practice and that it’s a specific goal I have for them. In these conversations, I’m not only reiterating expectations and communicating that I am serious but I am trying to situate it within a growth mindset. I try to be sympathetic but firm with students here. When I see them making efforts or progress here, I specifically let them know they what I am seeing.

– Modeling and providing specific talk moves. There is a range here, but a common one I model and give them is simply for one person to verbalize their thinking and then someone else has to either affirm (agree) and say why, or ask a question back about what they said, or disagree and give reasons. Often times I do this after I’ve helped facilitate such a dialogue. For example, I’ll ask one student to explain something and then reflect that back to the group. Another student agrees and I probe them to say why. Then I’ll recap what happened with group, pointing out the good contributions that each made, and talk about how they could have that same conversation without me.

– Making analogies to help students get in the right mindset for noticing each other’s bids for collaboration and being kind to reciprocate. The two I’ve been using are dancing and conversation with a friend. The friend analogy that has come up is when you are really trying to get something across to your friend and then all they say back is, “yeah” or “ok”, and you sort of feel like, “well they don’t even really care, or weren’t even listening.” We talk about how a good friend conveys they were listening and that they care by stating back the gist of what was said, and by perhaps affirming or acknowledging parts of the story. The dancing analogy has mostly been about how it takes more than one person to dance, and that both partners have to be attentive to each other to make it go smoothly. After this conversation, I might walk by a group and notice a student verbalize their thinking and no one looking up from their own work, and just say in passing, “Wyatt is asking someone to dance…”

Some students have told me that they are not talkative, implying that it’s a burden or just won’t happen. I realize that there are differences between introverts and extroverts, and a lot of our classrooms can favor extroverts. But I have introverted students who quietly and productively collaborate with each other, so… ?? What I’ve been telling students is that I’m not asking them to jabber jaw or to just be chatty. I’m asking them to practice the skill of talking as you engage in collaborative intellectual work. I negotiate with some groups about the balance between “think, then talk” vs “talk as thinking”. We’ve also talked about how sometimes you need to say, “hold on hold on, I need to think about this for a second.” So far, listening to students concerns, negotiating forms of engagement, while holding my ground, has gone well with students.

Overall, each day we’ve been making incremental progress, but yesterday seemed like a lot of groups passed a threshold, where they are naturally and enjoyably engaging in intellectual work with each other. I had a dozen students staying after class ended to continue working on physics problems, and the quality of work and collaboration made me think that these students could easily be mistaken for physics majors.

I’ll keep tending to the fire.

And I definitely have one group that is not clicking well. I’ll need to devote some time to observing them as they work.

And I need to build in some time where students have choices about how to work–by themselves, with others, on paper, on whiteboards, etc.

On the first day of my teaching of physics class, I asked students what questions / concerns they had about physics teaching and what they hoped to take away from this class.

Here is our list:

1. So far, I’ve been given frameworks for planning individual lessons (and maybe a sequence of lessons). How do I plan for meaningful instruction on time scales beyond a lesson? Like a whole course?

2. I’ve learned that I came out of introductory physics with much my conceptions inadequately addressed. How can I teach in ways that address students’ (mis)conceptions?

3. I know that explaining isn’t all there is too teaching, but there are many concepts in physics I feel inadequately prepared to explain, even to myself. How do I develop my repertoire of explanations of physics concepts for learners?

4. I’ve learned that I will likely teach physics at many different levels–physical science, freshman physics, honors physics, junior/senior physics, AP physics. How am I to adjust instruction and curriculum to all these different levels?

5. What determines the pace of instruction? How much time do you devote to specific topics? When is it time to move on?

6. Is it possible to teach effectively in this era of high stakes testing? Can you teach AP physics through inquiry and prepare them for the AP exam?

I’m glad I did this. Already students seem to be oriented to the class as potentially meaningful and relevant. They have a stake in shaping what we do and what issues our efforts speak to. I’ve left room in my plans to move in on their questions, but I know that we will ultimately address some of these much more than others.

I do plan on asking students to revisit these questions regularly during the semester, and also to add to and refine these questions.

Lastly, I’d love to hear people’s thoughts. Or if anyone feels passionate about one of these questions, I’d love to talk about having you talk with our class.

I really enjoyed reading and thinking about this post: What Computing Education Research does that Engineering Ed and Physics Ed Research doesn’t

One of the claims put forth in the post is the Computing Education Research (CER) community seems to have more lively and stronger focus on broadening participation than either the Physics Education Research (PER) of Engineering Education Research (EER) communities. From that post:

“Carl [Wieman] said that gender diversity just wasn’t a priority in PER. I dug into the PER groups around the US. From what I could find, he’s right. Eric Mazur’s group has one paper on this issue, from 2006 (see here). I couldn’t find any at U. Washington or at Boulder. There probably is work on gender diversity in physics education research, but it certainly doesn’t stand out like the broadening participation in computing effort in the United States.”

I thought I would dig a little deeper, and do just a quick survey of all articles published in Physical Review–Special Topics in Physics Education Research, which touched upon gender, participation, or highlighted international research. I should note that the list below is based on titles only–I didn’t read the abstracts or the papers. While this isn’t a thorough analysis, it paints a slightly less bleak picture than one paper published almost a decade ago.

Note: I’m certainly not looking to pick a fight about PER vs. CER or EER. I feel much like the author of the post, who writes:

“I don’t have a deep bottom-line here… My exploration of EER and PER gave me a new appreciation that CER has something special. It’s not as big or established as EER or PER, but we’re collaborative, international, working on hard and important problems, and using a wide variety of methods, from in-classroom to laboratory studies. That’s pretty cool.” 

The authors post has made me pause to think about our priorities and prodded me to dig a little deeper into the data to see what the situation is beyond just trusting Carl’s Wieman’s comment and a quick examination of just two research groups.

Note 2: I also added relevant presentations from most recent PER Conference.

Gender Studies

Gender gap on concept inventories in physics: What is consistent, what is inconsistent, and what factors influence the gap? Adrian Madsen, Sarah B. McKagan, and Eleanor C. Sayre Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 9

Comparative analysis of female physicists in the physical sciences: Motivation and background variables .Katherine P. Dabney and Robert H. Tai Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 10, 010104 (2014) – Published 3 February 2014

Female physicist doctoral experiences Katherine P. Dabney and Robert H. Tai. Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 9, 010115 (2013) – Published 10 April 2013

Factors that affect the physical science career interest of female students: Testing five common hypotheses. Zahra Hazari, Geoff Potvin, Robynne M. Lock, Florin Lung, Gerhard Sonnert, and Philip M. Sadler. Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 9, 020115 (2013) – Published 22 October 2013

Preliminary investigation of instructor effects on gender gap in introductory physics. Kimberley Kreutzer and Andrew Boudreaux. Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 8, 010120 (2012) – Published 4 May 2012

Gender disparities in second-semester college physics: The incremental effects of a “smog of bias” Lauren E. Kost-Smith, Steven J. Pollock, and Noah D. Finkelstein. Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 6, 020112 (2010) – Published 3 September 2010

Characterizing the gender gap in introductory physics Lauren E. Kost, Steven J. Pollock, and Noah D. Finkelstein. Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 5, 010101 (2009) – Published 8 January 2009

Gender differences in the use of an online homework system in an introductory physics course Gerd Kortemeyer Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 5, 010107 (2009) – Published 26 May 2009

Reducing the gender gap in the physics classroom: How sufficient is interactive engagement? Steven J. Pollock, Noah D. Finkelstein, and Lauren E. Kost. Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 3, 010107 (2007) – Published 5 June 2007

Participation Studies

How do they get here?: Paths into physics education research Ramón S. Barthelemy, Charles Henderson, and Megan L. Grunert. Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 9

Physics teachers’ perspectives on factors that affect urban physics participation and accessibility Angela M. Kelly. Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 9, 010122 (2013) – Published 19 June 2013

Educational trajectories of graduate students in physics education research . Ben Van Dusen, Ramón S. Barthelemy, and Charles Henderson. Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 10, 020106 (2014) – Published 21 July 2014

Toward equity through participation in Modeling Instruction in introductory university physics

Eric Brewe, Vashti Sawtelle, Laird H. Kramer, George E. O’Brien, Idaykis Rodriguez, and Priscilla Pamelá. Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 6, 010106 (2010) – Published 20 May 2010

International Studies

Secondary implementation of interactive engagement teaching techniques: Choices and challenges in a Gulf Arab context G. W. Hitt, A. F. Isakovic, O. Fawwaz, M. S. Bawa’aneh, N. El-Kork, S. Makkiyil, and I. A. Qattan. Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res 10, 020123 – Published 6 October 2014

Introduction of interactive learning into French university physics classrooms Alexander L. Rudolph, Brahim Lamine, Michael Joyce, Hélène Vignolles, and David Consiglio. Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 10, 010103 (2014) – Published 27 January 2014

Validating the Japanese translation of the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation and comparing performance levels of American and Japanese students Michi Ishimoto, Ronald K. Thornton, and David R. Sokoloff. Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 10, 020114 (2014) – Published 19 August 2014

Effectiveness of Tutorials for Introductory Physics in Argentinean high schools J. Benegas and J. Sirur Flores. Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 10, 010110 (2014) – Published 24 March 2014

Introducing Taiwanese undergraduate students to the nature of science through Nobel Prize stories Haim Eshach, Fu-Kwun Hwang, Hsin-Kai Wu, and Ying-Shao Hsu. Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 9, 010116 (2013) – Published 25 April 2013

Student effort expectations and their learning in first-year introductory physics: A case study in Thailand U. Wutchana and N. Emarat. Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 7, 010111 (2011) – Published 24 June 2011

Other

Validation study of the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey at a Hispanic-serving institution Vashti Sawtelle, Eric Brewe, and Laird Kramer Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 5, 023101 (2009) – Published 28 August 2009

Presentations at 2014 PER Conference:

Exposure to underrepresentation discussion: The impacts on women’s attitudes and identities by Geoff Potvin, Zahra Hazari, Robynne Lock

Female Students’ Persistence and Engagement in Physics: The Role of High School Experiences by Zahra Hazari, Eric Brewe, Theodore Hodapp, Renee Michelle Goertzen, Robynne M. Lock, Cheryl A. P. Cass

The Impacts of Instructor and Student Gender on Student Performance in Introductory Modeling Instruction Courses by Daryl McPadden, Eric Brewe.

The Long Term Impacts of Modeling Physics: The Performance of Men and Women in  Follow-on Upper Level Physics Courses by Idaykis Rodriguez, Eric Brewe, Laird H. Kramer.

The Experiences of Women in Post Graduate Physics and Astronomy Programs: The Roles of Support, Career Goals, and Gendered Experiences by Ramon Barthelemy  Melinda McCormick, Charles Henderson

Discussing Underrepresentation as a Means to Increasing Female Physics Identity by Robynne M. Lock , Zahra Hazari, Reganne Tompkins

Exploring the gender gap in one department’s algebra-based physics course by Twanelle Walker Majors, Paula V. Engelhardt, Steve J. Robinson

Race and Gender and Leaving STEM: Preliminary Results of The Roots of STEM Project by Melissa Dancy  Elizabeth Stearns, Roslyn Mickelson, Stephanie Moller, Martha Bottia

Concluding Comments:

I’m not sure what this mean, if anything yet, but that’s what I did this morning. Making this list doesn’t prove anything about our fields priority in these matters–we’d have to look at funding, impacts, white papers, etc. But for me, it’s a beginning in looking into it

If you feel I missed an important Physical Review paper or PERC 2014 presentation, let me know in the comments.

We just came into that week in Physics Licensure–the week where students start asking, “Did I learn anything in Physics I?”

As I’ve talked about before, Physics Licensure I and II are very much a band-aid sequence of courses for our future physics teachers–helping students to develop the reasoning skills and conceptual understanding they didn’t have much opportunity to learn our introductory physics sequence.

Students are really struggling with reasoning about Newton’s Laws. The course, being a band-aid, isn’t really providing the right kind of opportunities either. We go through tutorials each week, students do tutorial homework, and they have to write brief reflections each week. In addition they work some AP physics problems, and they have to make ongoing concept map to make connections among what they are learning. In all that, students get a fair amount of practice building concepts and reasoning, but they don’t get enough opportunity to explore and grapple with actual phenomena.

We’ve encountered many days where students seem to follow along with a guided line of reasoning stemming from Newton’s Laws (not easily).  At the end of it, someone will say, ‘That makes no sense”. In that, they are understanding and can produce the logic of the argument, about how if N2nd Law and N3rd law are true, it implies that some other conclusion must be true. To students, N2nd and N3rd law are not ideas they “own”; they aren’t using these ideas to discover puzzling implications about the world. Rather, the guided reasoning they are asked to follow coerces them into concluding things they’d really rather not say and definitely don’t believe. They aren’t happy about it.

My sense as a instructor is that many of our students still largely think that force is in the direction of motion, that you have to push harder than friction (or up against gravity) to keep an object moving steadily, that pushing harder will result it moving faster. Sure, you can remind them of Newton’s 2nd Law, and they can be coerced into saying something more correct, but it’s definitely coercion.

That’s how we’ve gotten to the place where students are saying, “I think I learned nothing in Physics I”. These students need a lot more experience with phenomena and grappling with their own ideas, the ideas of each other, etc. Right now, I don’t think I’m providing what they need.

Yesterday, we had a break from the pace in Physics II, Instead of introducing new material, we had a day to review what we had learned about blackbody radiation and the photoelectric effect. So far this semester, most have my warm-ups have been forward looking–the aim being to prepare students to maneuver more efficiently and confidently through the rest of the day. But today, the warm-up was backward-looking.

The warm-up consisted of a table I had constructed at the front board. The two columns were, “Blackbody Radiation” and “Photoelectric Effect”. The rows of the table were the following questions

– What is being emitted? Where is it being emitted from?
– What causes this emission to occur?
– What physics quantity (or quantities) characterize how strong the emissions are? (words, symbols, units, any relevant equations)
– What, if anything, does “color” have to do with it? (words, any relevant equations)
– In the situations/problems we’ve discussed, what’s typically happened to the emissions after being emissed?

Students were in groups of three and were asked to discuss each question as a group, and then to write their response on a sticky note. Groups populated the board with their responses, and were asked to look over other groups responses.

Students took to the task pretty well–seriously engaging in the questions and in the efforts to compare and contrast what’s happening in each case. What was nice is the range of “correct” answers. For example, with the photoelectric effect someone might say,”Light is emitted” or “Electromagnetic radiation is emitted” or “Photons are emitted”. For what causes this, someone might write, “Light that is incident on metal,” or “Photons colliding with electrons”. For what happens to blackbody radiation, students might say, “It spreads out and gets less intense”, or “It goes off and heats up a planet =)” While some of what students was more vague or more precise than others, very few things were way off the mark.

After they were done, I mostly just reviewed the things that students had written and helped connect their ideas to the more precise ideas and quantitative relationships they had learned. The one place we needed to talk about the most was the role that “color” played in the photoelectric effect. I asked students to talk about that one in particular back in their small groups. Back in whole class discussion, the main idea that came up was, “Bluer light tends to be more effective at ejecting electrons from the metal”. When I asked how we knew that was true, there were two different ways that students offered for making sense of this. First, was reference to observations with the PhET simulation, that we found that UV light almost always emitted electrons but red light almost never emitted electrons. I added how, when the light got even bluer, the electrons came off faster as well. Another student worked through the reasoning that bluer meant lower wavelength, and that lower wavelength meant higher frequency, and that higher frequency meant more photon energy, which meant larger lumps of energy to give to electrons” That chain of reasoning, of course, involves drawing on several different relationships and chaining them together, so I did some work to clarify that. Looking back, I could have slowed down even more on that reasoning, asking students to go through that reasoning careful amongst themselves in groups.

In general, the warm-up went well, with student engagement being high; contact with important disciplinary ideas being high; and students expressing that they felt like it was a valuable activity from which they learned a lot (and being able to articulate what they had learned). It’s a good day when you get all three of those things. I think it’s fairly easy to get either of the first two–engaged students but not with important disciplinary ideas or a lesson that should put students in contact with disciplinary ideas but they aren’t engaged. And then, even when you get both of those things occurring, it’s not necessarily true that students leave class feeling like they have learned a lot and can express what learning took place.

Two other things on my mind are these:

– The activity went well, in large part, because of the students. I more and more see how–despite the fact that I do have a strong influence on student engagement–a good classroom is really a mutual activity in which the teacher and students coordinate their activity to achieve engagement and learning (or don’t). In particular, this activity of writing on sticky-notes and putting them on the board is not something we typically do in this class, and it might have been easy for students to think it was juvenile or just weird, and disengage as a kind of passive resistance. For whatever reason, that didn’t happen. It makes me think about Dewey’s notion of submitting to an experience–letting the experience happen to you.

– Compare and contrast is not a strong part of our curriculum. Students are rarely asked to think about how ideas or phenomena are related. We just march through… one thing to the next. I’m hoping that by asking students to do more compare and contrast that students can, to a limited extent, experience a more coherent curriculum. Not sure, exactly how it will unfold, but returning the comparison contrast makes sense as next week we encounter atomic spectra and nuclear radiation. Many of the same questions above are relevant…

I’m following up my previous post about warm-ups in Physics 2, where I’ve been trying to use warm-ups as a venue for extracting more value out of class without giving up much time. So far, the experiment seems to be paying off.

But, what do I do on a day when I really don’t have much time to give up to warm-ups and I really don’t have much time to plan a whole activity? For this, my go to move over the past few weeks is to just look at some of the tricky mathematical or procedural aspects of the problems we will be solving and make them warm-ups.

For example, we were doing problems with diffraction earlier this week. I know that students struggle with unit conversions in these problems because the exponents are large. For example, in diffraction problems you are dealing with nanmeter wavelengths, micron apertures, grating densities described in cm or mm, lengths describes in m or cm, and diffraction patterns described in mm. I also know that students do not know or remember anything about the small angle approximation, which comes up in a our lab. So there you go, two warm-ups for the day– a little bit of practice doing unit conversions with a focus on talking about different strategies, and little mini-exploration of how tan, sin, and theta compare for different triangles. I actually pick values for them to practice that show up in my example problem, their problem, or the lab.

During class, I realized another warm-up that we needed was thinking about how to relate “slit density” to “slit spacing”. Not sure exactly what that warm up would be, but that reasoning is always a struggle for students. It’s the same reasoning that shows up elsewhere in physics, so I’ve seen students struggle this and resort to memorization of formulas like T = 1/f.

All and all, the key I think to these “obstacle” warmups is to emphasize the reasoning and strategies, and this alone helps makes them pretty good warm-ups even if how I structure the warmup isn’t all that great. By front-loading some of the obstacles well before they encounter them in the midst of problem-solving, it makes the classroom more manageable. Without warms ups, I’ll often get six of out of eight groups stuck at the same spot at the same time. With warmups, maybe only one or two groups will need some help from me on those areas, and usually it’s just a reminder of the strategies we talked about in the beginning. Students feel a little more equipped to tackle the problem.

I imagine you could certainly go overboard, trying to frontload all the obstacles and that would be a mistake. I think my goal is to front-load the obstacles that obscure thinking about the underlying physics.  I could also think about front-loading such obstacles for pre-class assignments, but then I think it would be harder to focus students on the reasoning and strategies.

Note: I think one reason I’ve been thinking about this part of my planning so much is this: I want to be able to circulate around the room and have interesting conversations with my students about their understanding of the physics, but that just doesn’t happen if my students are frustrated, or bogged down in things like unit conversions, or all simultaneously stuck on the same part of the problem. My best attempts at proximal formative assessment (e.g., listening to students, asking good probing questions) get destroyed if I am circulating around the room putting out fires.

I’ve known for a long time that planning has always been the weakest part of my skillset, having written almost 4 years ago:

“I will say that my weakest area is as architect (choosing tasks to use with student as well as deciding how those tasks should be carried out), especially thinking about the design of a whole course. I haven’t had a lot of experience designing courses, but I think I am also weakest here because I am a decent enough in the other areas that I get away with not being a good architect. In this sense, the willingness and ability to improvise is both an asset and a liability.”

I think now that I wasn’t getting away with anything. And I even think my thinking about planning (or warmups more specifically) now is nothing unique or special, and not even particularly great. What I think is amazing is how much even small improvement to my planning (and my thinking about planning) can make a difference.

Our second-semester introductory algebra-based physics course is jam-packed with labs. In 13-14 weeks, we do 22 labs! Combined with the in-class problem-solving students are expected to work through, I found it very difficult to find time for meaningful discussion questions or mini-activities that help build conceptual understanding or connections with the everyday world. 

So, this fall is my second semester teaching the course, and I have been taking the route of using warm-ups as an opportunity to build in a few discussion and mini-activity opportunities. The constraints in doing so are the following:

• The discussion questions or mini-activity must flow into problem-solving or lab fluidly so as to be coherent to the students’ overall experience in class. It should emphasize key ideas they need that day, not just be enrichment ideas that I think are valuable in the big picture.

• The discussion or mini-activity cannot take up much time, because we are pretty squeezed for time. Furthermore, the activity should be designed to actually save me time later. In reality that means, I get some of the invested time back, but not all of it. So, a 10 minute mini-activity might mean students take 5 less minutes struggling with the problem or mean I can take 2-3 less minutes with a particular part of my sample problem. 

An example of the kind of things I’ve been aimed for is this:

On Thursday, I was supposed to model how to solve a thin-lens problems, and then have students work together on a thin-lens problem, and then have students take data for a thin-lens lab. I had the following warm-ups:

– The opening question revolved around getting students to think about what they know about a camera, a projector, and a magnifying glass.  On the front whiteboard I had made a table, which prompted students to consider whether or not the each of these technologies involved (i) capturing an image on a screen or viewing an image through a lens, (ii) whether it typically involved creating an image that was bigger or smaller than the actual object, and (iii) whether the image was viewed relatively close or relatively far from the apparatus. I had students discuss briefly in groups and then quickly collected student responses on the board in a whole class format. To make links to the their reading and later problem, I introduced the relevant vocabulary (e.g., virtual and real image, magnification, and image distance). 

– The 1st mini activity involved giving students a converging lens and giving them the challenge of using the lens, a whiteboard, and some power point images to emulate a camera, a projector, and a magnifying glass. We turned off all the lights, so the only light was coming from the powerpoint slides. The slides were just a small, medium, and large yellow arrows. I circulated around, being more helpful than I should, due to need to keep the activity compressed in time. We then added one more column to our table, which was whether the image was right-side up or inverted. I then linked this again to concept of magnification and its sign.

– The 2nd mini-activity involved a powerpoint slide at the front of the room with nine different paths that a red laser light took through a lens. The optical axis and focal lengths were shown (but not in words). Basically, there were three examples of each of the principal rays. I briefly explained what the images were showing (a red laser light shining through a lens), and students were prompted to “Discuss what they notice” and then “See if they can come up with any generalizations or rules ” I circulated around. To keep time down, I didn’t collect responses. Rather, I talked about the patterns like, “One pattern I heard come up while I was circulating was concerned Image B, E, and F… In each of these cases, we see.” I then had a quick power point slide that summarized the three principal rays.

– Afterwards, the day proceeded as normal. I modeled how to predict where an image will form using ray diagrams and the Thin Lens equation. My example was a camera situation. Students’ first problem was a projector situation, and then their extension problem was a magnifying glass situation.

So, how did the warm-ups go in terms of my goals and constraints?

– The opening discussion took a little too much time, but I could easily tighten up my facilitation. It didn’t drag on per se, but it needed a quicker pace. It definitely helped students have a concrete understanding of the concepts of real/virtual and magnification, and help them see how what they were doing was related to their everyday world. It was easy to follow up with students, asking, “So is this situation like a camera, a projector, a magnifying glass, or none?” This prompted students to interpret the meaning of their work, which is good. This activity may not have paid back time, but it did pay back in terms of engagement (because students felt what they were doing was relatable) and in terms of sense-making (students had a feel for the important features of an image and what concepts describe them).

– The “Notice and Generalize” activity went quickly. My sense is that this paid off in terms of time in two ways. First, when presenting my example problem, I wasn’t introducing the principal rays in the middle of the problem. This saved me a few minutes. Second, I think students procedural fluency was bolstered just enough that it took them significantly less time to draw correct ray diagrams. During the problem-solving, there were no groups whose hands were up signaling they had no idea how to proceed and no groups that had diagrams that were way off the mark. 

Both of the activities clearly supported students needs for learning that day, so I think we met the first constraint pretty well.

My memory is that each of the warm-ups took about 10 minutes, which means I invested up 30 minutes up front (within a 2.5 hour class). I think, we made up about 15 of those minutes. I think my goal should be invest 20-25 minutes, and hope to get 10-15 minutes back. 

Final Note: What I find pretty interesting about my own learning to teach recently is this. More and more, I find myself being able to throw together warm-ups like this with very little time investment in planning. Before I might spend hours planning a warm-up that didn’t go very well or went well but didn’t pay off. Now, I can drum up a warmup that is fairly effective in less than 30 minutes. And while I know I must *know* things that allow me to do this, almost none of seems very conscious. I actually that I think plan most of these activities in my sleep, because I’ll some half-baked ideas when I go to bed, and then I wake up, sit down in front of the computer, and its done in about 10-15 minutes. I’m not saying my activities are gems, but teaching becomes a lot easier when what you throw together in 15 minutes is better on average than what used to take your hours. 

Final Final Note: 

OK, I partially change my mind. I think that my activities have gotten a lot better because I care more about the coherence of students’ learning experience. By that I mean, my activities are almost always designed to slip into the flow of the curriculum I have to follow.   Previously, I would want to take too many side trips–to destinations that I felt were important to understand the material. And while I do take some detours, I use them sparingly. I’ve let go of some ego which says, “I know best what’s needed for students to understand this material”, and instead accept that, “The curriculum we are working with needs them to understand these things in this manner”. I’m much more willing (and able) to enhance students’ experience of a learning trajectory that I don’t necessarily think is so great. And the truth is, working to make the overall experience more coherent is way better than trying to sprinkle on top what I think is best. Within that analogy, I think it’s been better to try to improve the existing cake batter than to smatter it with fancy ingredients from a different recipe.