One of the favorite things about this year is that I get to teach two groups of students the same physics lesson each (odd block) day. Last year during my first year, for reasons I'm still trying to understand, there were only 32 students in a school of 2500 that were enrolled in AP Physics, and 35 students enrolled in regular physics. I say "only" because our rival school, with albeit a student population with slightly more access and opportunity to educational resources at school and at home, hosts at least 2 AP Physics classes and 4 regular physics classes each year. I collaborated extensively with the physics teacher there and it was a wonderful experience for me to learn from someone whose taught physics for several years and believes in an inquiry-based student-centered approach to teaching and learning physics. Working with her made me realize how excited I am about increasing enrollment at my school, ultimately increasing access to quality physics learning for all students. Although this years enrollment increased and there were enough that signed up with physics as an alternative to have three sections, ultimately it was someone else's decisions to determine how many students would be taking physics at my large urban public school. Alas, my two little sections of physics.
Now, with two sections I have the opportunity to actually compare how I work with one class over another. I am so excited for this!
Day 10 we started to build our first physics model. This year, I will be closely following the modeling curriculum outlined by Kelly Oshea and the materials provided as part of the American Modeling Teachers Association (AMTA) workshop I attended this summer. As the initial learning activity for building the "Constant Velocity Particle Model", students engaged in a lab that investigated the relationship of position with respect to time of a "Tumble Buggy". These are $10 constant velocity cars that I actually got thanks to a KSTF materials grant!
The launch started off by having students observe an "event". After instructing students to begin a new lab layout on a clean sheet of graph paper (I provided), I demonstrated a tumble buggy's motion on the front lab counter. I asked them to record their observations.
Last year, I didn't use much of the whiteboard. I depended a lot of previously created, or haphazardly thrown-together-the-night-before powerpoints as my primary way of relaying notes and instructions to my students. For some reason, writing on the whiteboard intimidated me my first year. I hadn't had much practice and I wasn't spending enough time preparing notes ahead of time. My penmanship (markership? expoship?) isn't the greatest, and I wondered about how effective it was for students with poor eyesight or simply bad seating. I hadn't tested out each and every seat in my room for viewing capability. This is also something I wonder about.
Motivated by the excellent "chalk talks" from college, and by some feedback from last year's students, I decided to take on more whiteboard writing this year as a way to guide students through lab write-ups.
Anyways, back to Day 10. I had students write observations, and I collected some ideas during a whole-class share-out. I wrote some on the board. I then asked students to think of possible things they can measure about the event, called measurables. I tell students that this word is synonymous with "quantities". I add on "cantidades... things we can count". I collect more student ideas and write them on the board.
Now what students are not aware of yet is that at this point there are specific variables I'm hoping they identify. For this lab, I needed them to say something along the lines of "clock reading" (time) and "position". Once they identify these as variables, then we can move onto the problem statement: "How does position depend on time?" We discussed a little bit about what it would mean to switch the variables to say "How does time depend on position?"
Following the problem statement, I realized I was beginning to lose some students. It seemed as though to some, the pace of think-pair-share into whole group discussion seemed to take a long time. It's important to me that I engage as many student ideas as possible at this stage, and that I stick to the objectives I had set out before starting the lab.
I instructed students to design an experiment to test for this problem statement using the tumble buggies. I hinted that I also had metersticks, tape, and pennies available. Students had to show me their experimental design and prediction before they can pick up supplies. Although previously I assigned lab groups, I told students they may choose their lab partners this time, as long as groups were not larger than 4 students. With 10 tumble buggies and 36 students this worked out perfectly.
Before I let them loose, the final component I modeled for them at the front of class was the data table. I did this with some success because many students didn't understand how to collect the data, therefore not understanding what kind of data they should look for in order to best answer the problem statement. There were many, many misconceptions about how to design the experiment so that the car must run continuously while tracking position.
I loved seeing the creativity in the students as they brainstormed ways to keep track of the car's motion, once they understood the problem statement. Although it took time, I was glad I required students to get my confirmation before picking up supplies. It was a worth-while investment, although somehow there were still a couple groups in the day that ended up collecting data that would not lead to a conclusion about the problem statement. It worked out though because one of the groups was able to return during lunch, and the other offered to continue to collect data from home, granted I let them borrow a car.
There is also something fantastic about seeing kids problem solve, work through questions, and move around as part of their investigations. Students began to shape their questions, for example, from (directed to me) "Are we suppose to measure from the front of the car?" to (directed towards their lab partners) "Where should we measure from?" I hoped that by doing this lab early in the year, students get the message that they are at the center of their learning and that we will be interacting with each other and our physical environment to learn physics.
Next steps:
Monday I plan on holding our first whiteboard meeting. The goal of this is to have students present their findings using the four representations embedded in modeling instruction: graphical, mathematical, verbal, and diagrammatic.
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