Schizophrenic Student Mode

It's been observed more than once in this workshop that I have a "schizophrenic student mode".  I'm sure it's true... I have a hard time being one consistent student.  (I'm also a terrible actor / role-player.  I took music classes rather than drama, and I've never been very good at pretending to be anyone but me.)  My student mode is me trying my darndest to channel a student mindset, but I definitely have multiple student personalities jumbled up in my head.

Sometimes the "student" I'm feeling is one of my more concrete ninth graders.  Sometimes the "student" who speaks with my mouth is one of my more precocious, deep-thinking eleventh graders.  (It's worth noting that even as a K-12 student, I definitely had real learning experiences as both those students.)  And occasionally it's current me grappling with bits of basic mechanics I learned by the "trained monkey" approach a long time ago and haven't gone back and conceptually "fixed" since then.

I think the tension force and elements of force diagrams both fall in that last category.  Which is humbling for someone with a freakin' Ph.D. from a well respected doctoral program.  My favorite learning experiences from today were:

1.  The moment Bryan cut the string from which we were hanging an object and stuck a spring scale in the middle of it to measure what was going on with the tension force in the middle of the spring.
2. Working through the N3L force diagrams -- I've been thrown by the boxes side-by-side before, I think because I wasn't being careful enough about separating the force diagrams for the two different objects while simultaneously connecting them by making sure the N3L force pairs were the same length. 

Both of those moments touch on subjects where I've definitely had students stewing in confusion, but they were also moments that nibbled away at areas of my own personal less-than-total-physics-clarity.  

Favorite quotes from today:  

• "What the physics?!?" (JP) 
•  "When students are working on whiteboards is not time to check email.  Check email during the discussion."  (Bryan)
• "You just have to shut up and let students talk." (Bryan)
• "It's not about getting a touchdown every time; it's about moving the ball down the field."  (Laura)

I'm looking forward to seeing the N2L labs play out tomorrow.  I've done a super qualitative version with my freshmen (scooters!) and the modified atwood versions with my juniors (kind of a mess), so I'm excited to see ways to make the lab experience and follow-up discussion more productive in both my classes.

Forcefully Losing My Marbles

The marble "discrepant events" today were interesting.  My teacher brain predicted them correctly, but using energy rather than kinematics.  It would have helped me wrap my head more around how to use them in the acceleration unit to see how the discussion at least started to play out in student mode.  This will probably get mentally filed under "fun if I have time" or maybe "save for energy unit warm-up".

The theme of today was forces (mostly static) and I think I've managed to pre-absorb more modeling ideas about this than I'd realized.  My students know that a force is an interaction between two objects, and name it F^{type}_{actor}_on_{victim}.  We've worked our way through a (slightly materials-limited) version of the bridging analogies for normal force (is there a reason we're not calling it the normal force yet?  will we ever?).  And we do a whole-class version of the Weight vs. Mass lab with which we ended the day.  And I've picked up along the way the distinction between inertial and gravitational mass, and the distinction between the 9.8 N/kg gravitational field strength and the 9.8 m/s/s gravitational acceleration, and I try to help my students see the distinction.

On the other hand, I've tended to be very loosey goosey about force diagrams, especially with my ninth graders.  Which has, I think, made components I lot harder for them to grasp.  It felt a bit like jumping in the deep end of a very cold pool to do Unit 4 WS 1 and start doing slanty, component-y force diagrams on only #4.  I have tried to teach graphical addition of vectors and force components, and I think I've mixed it in with the force vectors in such a way that students' confusion ends up compounded.  (At least based on my very high rates of retesting my components objective.)  I'm curious to try the physical model of #8 to help with building students' concept of components -- my approach to components in the past has, I think, been was too abstract.  I'd love to give each group of students two strings, a hooked mass or two, and have them work through the example Laura showed us for themselves.

I've typically done the weight vs. mass lab very quick-and-dirty by having each table pair weigh one hooked mass and plot the observed force against the nominal listed mass on a projected graph that everyone used to recreate the graph for themselves in their own lab book and come up with a best fit line.  We usually get something quite close to 10 N/kg, and then use that line to make the F^gravitational_earth_on_object = 10 N/kg * mass equation.  The advantage of this approach is that it's fast (20-30 minutes for the whole thing), and each student pair gets to make one measurement for themselves.  The disadvantage is that they don't experience for themselves a range of masses and notice the different spring compressions / extensions.  On the other hand, they've already done that with a different Hooke's Law lab... Not sure if the extra time gives a big enough pedagogical payoff to do it the way we did today.  Will see how the semester plays out.

You're in charge here (but I'm really in charge here)

Last Wednesday was an exciting day!   The bowling ball force exploration is fabulous, and has renewed my zeal for the quest to acquire a set of 7 or 8 for myself (although it's worth noting that a local bowling alley let me borrow that many balls for a week, if acquiring them outright is too challenging an initial goal).  I've only taught the bowling ball activity once, and I think (as with many of these learning activities) my debrief of what students figured out from it could have been a lot more meaningful and in depth, based on what Bryan started to do with it at the end of the day.  I love the idea of working in some video analysis and timing multiple segments of 2 meters when bowling the ball down the hallway to verify and reinforce the constant speed motion.  I'm interested to see if/when the phrase "Newton's First Law" comes up in the discussion on Monday.

The Ramp-n-Roll activity is something I've tried to do with students before and had a huge flop.  The UI was confusing, my students didn't have a strong enough conceptual basis to get far with it beyond guess-and-checking, and I was trying to do it as an independent activity while I was consulting with subgroups on Cedar Point projects, which meant I wasn't available to help guide their efforts.  It was eye-opening and fun to see that it was challenging even for two confident physics teachers in teacher-mode to get the details of the three models right.  I think I'll try it again, but with more respect for its challenges to students and teachers, and with a stronger conceptual foundation, being more careful about where I place it in my lesson sequence.

I'm also super excited to dig into diagnoser.com more.  My initial impression is that it's a fabulous tool for quickly checking more for myself what misconceptions students might have about a particular topic as I prepare for discussions.   And I'm intrigued by the pre-test / post-test possibilities for working with students.  (And more emergency sub plans are always good.)

Wednesday some of us also got to take our first try at facilitating a discussion in this workshop.  I had the opportunity to take the lead when my group was facilitating, and it was fun!  And easier with teachers in "student mode" than real students, in my experience.  I, for one, was helped a lot by "Student Eric" spontaneously writing down ideas other students suggested on his whiteboard.  My real students have done this exactly never.  (Although maybe they will once I am a Super Modeler?)  

The aspect of it I found most intriguing was how much I was accessing the "student mode" part of my brain as I was facilitating.   My new slogan should be:  "Student mode -- not just for playing a student".   I have tried to whiteboard physics problems with my students in the past, and I am usually trying to draw students beyond the presenting group into the conversation (rarely as successfully as I'd like, at least in part because I'm usually rushing things and not consistently enough giving time and space for alternate approaches to the problems).   The sensation of working in student mode to control the pacing of the presentation and put myself in the quiet students' shoes was new and super helpful.  

There are obviously a ton of things to talk about in the Modeling reading we were assigned this weekend.  (As a side note, I have read a lot of scientific papers and a fair number of education journal articles in my time, and this is strikingly the most elegiac of them.)  The part of the article I think I'm having the most resistance to is this idea that a guide-on-the-side, facilitator-not-teacher "never acts as an authority or source of knowledge"  but simultaneously "remains unobtrusively in control of the agenda".  

It seems disingenuous to simultaneously tell students directly or indirectly, "I'm not in charge here -- you have to figure this out for yourself" and simultaneously tell them, "But here's the learning activity we're doing today, and I'm going to steer the discussion to get us where we need to go".  I see why we need both the students to take control of their own learning and the teacher to make sure things don't go too far off the rails.  But adolescents are expert, super-sensitive hypocrisy detectors.  How do we get them on board with "you're in charge here (but I'm really in charge here)"?   

Maybe I need to be clearer about what we're each in charge of?  Another question I'm pondering after reading the article is:  What's the difference between a "physics coach" and a "physics teacher"?  I've never been a sports coach.  But it seems like the coach's job is to help the players build skills and strategies so that they can go out and perform independently at a higher level.  And the coach giving too much physical help with the conditioning or skill building exercises does no good to the student when they go to their competition and the coach is relegated to the sidelines.  So maybe I need to think of it as, "the students are in charge of building their own physics questioning, experimental, reasoning, and conceptual skills; I'm in charge of providing them activities and guidance that will give them the opportunities to build those skills"?     

How do y'all think about that dichotomy:  we want the students to take charge of their learning… as long as it follows our agenda?

"But what's the answer?!?" (I hear my students cry)

(Note:  this blog is posted a day after it was written, as my internet connections as down last night.  Also a really big tree came down in my neighbor's yard Monday night, and our willow tree has several fewer branches than it did Monday evening.  These phenomena may or may not be related.)

I found myself resisting the open-ended, cycling, somewhat repetitious and jumbled nature of the modeling whiteboard discussions today (Tuesday).  

At one point I thought, "I'm not sure I would have enjoyed being a student in this kind of class -- do students learn to enjoy it?".  I was mostly reacting to the frustrating sensation that there is almost never just a simple answer or conclusion to any question.  And the prompting facilitator questions sometimes feel like the "guess what the teacher's thinking" game.

I guess a follow-up question would be, "How important is it for learning to be enjoyable?"  I suppose there's an argument to be made for building moral fiber by persisting in unpleasant tasks.  On the other hand, I found it a lot easier to eat my spinach once I discovered forms of it that I find tasty.  (Slimy nasty canned spinach of my childhood - no.  Fresh spinach leaves in a salad, or sauteed with garlic, or made into saag paneer - yes, please.)  

So, what makes the circular, repetitious, jumbled nature of these discussions palatable to students who are familiar with, comforted by, and good at the traditional approach to teaching and learning, where the teacher sometimes (often) provides answers?  (Or are the discussions less circular, repetitious, and jumbled with real students?  Doesn't seem likely, but may our student mode is failing?)

As we were deep in the weeds of whether motion maps show instantaneous or average velocity with their velocity vectors, I thought to myself, "I love physics and I am bored by motion maps right now.  What will keep my students awake?"  I suppose it will be somewhat a matter of tailoring the discussion to the level of my students.  But are students really engaged by questions about whether the dot should have an arrow on it or not?  Does it depend on how deeply we're tying it to the details of the actual, real-world, physical motion?  (I did love the graphs Bryan put up at the end showing how the acceleration arrows could be pictured as the vertical side of the slope steps on the a v-t graph, adding to or taking away from the velocity lines at each position.)

I'm excited to have workshop participants try leading whiteboard discussions tomorrow.  If I'm called on to do it, I think my biggest struggle is going to be restraining myself from "giving answers".

Constant Velocity Model -- Summary and Implementation Reflection

My current impression is that the constant velocity model is a tool for describing and solving problems related to objects moving with a constant velocity.  Two common examples of such motion would be much of our motion in cars between stop lights and falling objects that have reached a terminal velocity.
  It includes several complimentary representations of motion, from which the speed, direction, and (often) starting point of the motion can be determined:

•  a verbal description of the motion (the object moves a constant distance in each unit of time, in a constant direction)
• a diagram of the motion in the form of a motion map with equally spaced position dots at each "snapshot" of equal time intervals and equal length velocity arrows starting at each position dot and pointing in the direction of the motion
• a graph of position vs. time, with the vertical-intercept representing the starting position of the object (relative to a designated reference point) and the slope representing the speed of the motion through its steepness and the direction of the motion through its sign
• a graph of velocity vs. time, which by defintion of this being a "constant velocity model" will be a constant value whose magnitude and sign correspond to the slope of the position-time graph
• an equation that comes from the position-time graph:  x = vt + x0, where x is the position relative to the reference point, v is the velocity of the object, t is the time elapsed since the beginning of the motion, and x0 is the starting position of the motion.

It can be developed by a inquiry activity in which students track the position of a constant-velocity vehicle from a variety of starting points as a function of elapsed time, graph that position-time data, consider the significance of various features of the graphs and equations.  It is then, within the modeling instruction materials, additionally translated to the motion maps and velocity-time graph representations through Socratic small group and large group discussions.  (Is this an operational definition of creating operational definitions?)

I have previously done parts of this modeling-building process with both my ninth grade Physics I and my advanced 11th grade Physics course.  In general, my students seem to get comfortable with the position-time graphs quite quickly but struggle much more with the velocity-time graphs and figuring out how to go backwards from the v-t to x-t graphs.  And the idea that the area under the v-t graph tells the displacement, and the difference between average velocity and average speed are fairly fuzzy to many of them, at least in part because I'm not as careful about differentiating position, distance, and displacement up front as I could be.  Based on my experience in this summer's modeling workshop, I will be strongly considering the following alterations next year:

• I will try my best to steal a (possibly shorter version of) Laura's discussion leading to operational definitions of position, reference point, distance, and displacement.  
• I've done the Buggy Lab with both my courses.  However, each time I prescribed that everyone do two identical runs, one forward from the reference point (ish) and one back towards the reference point from high positions.  I loved the combination of similar first runs with a broad variety of second runs for different groups (different starting positions, speeds, and directions, in various combinations) to bring interest and richness to the succeeding whiteboard discussion of the results.  I will definitely do that next year.  
• I haven't really used Predicted Graphs before -- I like the idea of asking students try to think through the relationships between factors graphically.  I have traditionally had them make "If, then, because" hypotheses verbally, and I wonder if you lose anything by not having students write out the verbal explanation of their thinking.
• I also finally feel like I understand the 5% rule enough to try introducing it to my classes, although I remain concerned that it will creep into my IB students' externally moderated lab reports in places it doesn't belong.
• I wonder about alternatives to reserving one of my school's two laptop carts every time we do a lab and the students want to be able to fit lines for 5 or 10 minutes per group.  I think I should educate myself on how they can do it with the graphing calculators many of them bring, the Open Office distribution on the linux desktop in my room, and maybe the free Logger Pro Lite software I could have the students with laptops download.  (Does the free version do curve fits?  I'll have to check.)
• It was very helpful to see the model development and summary through the unit.  I will be more conscious about explicitly generalizing and publishing the consensus of the classes on the graph and the associated equation after the buggy lab discussion next year, and adding to it as we add further representations (motion maps, v-t graphs).
• I've explained motion maps by first asking students to try to come up with their own system for diagraming motion, and then guiding them into invention something similar to motion maps, illustrated with the motion maps reading.  I feel like my introduction of that was relatively effective this spring, although I love the blinking open-close kinesthetic experience.  I asked my students to image a flash photo taken in the dark once per second, and that worked pretty well for them, but I think adding the blinking will help clarify it.
• I loved "walking the graph" (and think it's also helpful for walking the motion map, and probably for walking the v-t curve, too) -- wish I'd thought of this sooner.  I think it will really help make the graphs and motion maps more concrete for my students.
• I've used most of the worksheets in Unit 1 with my students, but I've been very guilty of underutilizing their discussion and conception clarification potential.  I think I often take for granted that my students are using language the way I hope they will, and don't ask for additional explanation often enough to realize where they're not as clear as they seem.  I've also been super guilty of glossing over the highly useful ambiguities in the worksheets ("Is away from the detector always in the positive direction?", "What happens between the dots on a position - time graph we're given without actually seeing the motion for ourselves?").
• I try to whiteboard most of the worksheets in some form, but I usually let student groups choose which problems they do, and usually each problem is done only by one group.  I'm still getting used to the "assign two problems per group" strategy that seems to be much more common in the workshop, but I can see some advantages of it.  I'm willing to try it, although it will require getting a lot more whiteboards than I have now.
• I've already mentioned that I have a huge crush on the "Movie Shot" end of unit lab.  I will be stealing this.  

What is physics? (And who are you asking?)

Mid-afternoon Friday, I tweeted:  "What do you do with / for the student who zones out during discussion? The one always saying, "What did you say?" #semimodphys14 #metoday".  I don't know if it's being short on sleep, the Friday-ness of it all, or a real problem with spending most of the day whiteboarding worksheets, but I did have a really hard time focusing on Friday.  And I do have students who have an equally hard time focusing on a discussion that I and some of my students find engrossing.  I wonder what happens to those students when whole-group whiteboard discussions become a primary mode of instruction.  Maybe they make up for it in the small-group discussions and catch up with the model summary at the end of the discussion?

Reading this weekend, I found the Hammer "Two Approaches to Learning Physics" article VERY useful.  I hadn't previously thought to step back from individual physics concepts to the overall concept of what it means to learn physics and do physics.  The two example students made it really concrete for me, and it gradually became clear to me that I, Dr. Jekyle and Mr. Hyde-like, teach two different conceptions of physics.  With my ninth grade class, I have a lot of leeway on content coverage, I've deliberately and repeatedly chosen depth over breadth, and I think I do a reasonably good job of having students develop the qualitative concepts before the equations (especially fall semester, when I do CASTLE and we don't really get any equations until November or so).  With my 11th grade class, which I taught for the first time this past year, I felt very pressured to cover a large syllabus of content to prepare my students for the IB Physics exam, and I think I've slipped into physics = formulas mode much more than I like to contemplate.   The idea of pacing as a marker for how much time is allotted for independent reasoning and sense-making was a revelation to me.

As I started the second article, Mestre on "Learning and Instruction in PreCollege Physical Science" I noticed the 1991 publication date.  Then I went back and noticed the 1989 date on the Hammer article.  I remarked to my husband how depressing it was that all these amazingly true and useful ideas about teaching and learning physics were published 25 years ago and yet haven't seem to have any impact on the mainstream approach to teaching physics at any level.  My intuition is that this is at least in part because Mestre's list of science education reform stakeholders at the end of his article excludes some of the most important players.

At the beginning of my education program and the University of Michigan, we pulled out the Michigan High School Content Expectations for our subject area and went through them.   We were taught that the processing of designing instruction started with those standards.  Most science teachers I know would love to take a deeper, more conceptual, more student-driven approach to learning, but feel that their primary responsibility, the job on which they are being evaluated, is to teach their students as much of the HSCEs as they can in the time available.  And they feel that the traditional transmission method is the only chance they have to come anywhere close to that.

You can argue that the traditional transmission method is actually less efficient at achieving real learning than a slower, more constructivist method.  I think that probably depends very highly on what instrument you're using to measure the learning.  If it's individual interviews or written explanations of scientific concepts, I believe that the constructivist approach is more productive.  If it's a very facts-driven standardized test like the MEAP, I suspect that (much as the formula-driven student did better in her physics class) the transmission method instruction gets higher scores.   But I'd love to see data that proves otherwise.

Which leads me back to Mestre's list of stakeholders who should be involved in physics education reform.  It includes teachers, scientists, and textbook publishers.  It does NOT include the state or federal departments of education, the legislature, or parents.  And yet, they are the ones who "pay the piper" through taxes and appropriations, and thereby "call the tune" by setting standards and evaluations of both student learning and teachers.   Maybe the Next Generation Science Standards relax the breadth requirements and allow more breathing space for students to construct their own understandings.  I haven't read them closely enough yet to have an opinion on that.  But I also have doubts that they will be easily adopted by Michigan, given the resistance to adopting the Common Core and replacing the MEAP in the legislature over the past year or two.

We're inviting our school administrators to come visit this workshop.  That's important.  But maybe we should also be inviting our local state senators and representatives?  And the heads of our PTOs?  Are we spreading the research-supported view of a better conception of what physics (and science) is to the right people?

Lights, Camera, Action!

I really enjoyed the last half hour of the workshop today, when we did the constant velocity "action movie shot" practicum lab.  I've done a much less exciting "race prediction" version of this with my constant velocity buggies, and even that was fun,  But the variation on the different scenarios and the dramatic window dressing made it a lot more fun and funny, as well as more challenging in applying the different concepts for this unit.  I will definitely try to incorporate the "Chase Scene", "Get Away Crash", and "Blind Collision" scenarios and the "We have to get the perfect shot the first time -- if you get it, you're a Hero, if not you're a Bum who's never work in this town again!".  

Practicum labs in general seem like a cool, fun tool for application, extension, and assessment that I've underutilized.  I hope we do more of them.