The Evolution of my Teaching

Over the past years I have been re-thinking my approach to teaching.

The focus of my evolution as a teacher is on the shifting of ownership. After all, who is supposed to own the learning?

I am in the process of evolving from having a teacher-centered classroom where I am the provider of knowledge and the designer of assessments to focusing on developing and supporting my students learning autonomy. I strive for a learner-centered environment where students actively participate to construct their knowledge and reflect on their learning process.

As part of my teaching evolutionary process I have taken some elements to focus on each year. Last year I focused on ways to engage my students through connections. You can read my blog posting here: Engage = Connect.

Focus: Assessments
For this school year, my evolution focuses on assessments.

What is the objective of assessments?
Is it how well my students can regurgitate facts or how well they can find the “formula” to solve a problem? What if the day before an assessment a student had a cello recital to prepare for or they had a basketball game and arrived home not until 10:00 pm? How can a grade on a quiz or a test reflect their best?

The word assessment has a Latin root: assidere. It means to sit beside. In an educational context, the process of observing learning; describing, collecting, recording, scoring, and interpreting information about a student's or one's own learning. 

I see assessment as an ongoing process that informs me and my students and gauges the learning progression. I partner with my students to facilitate their learning and they appreciate not being constrained by fixed deadlines and dead-end quiz scores as they have ample opportunities to demonstrate that “they can” accomplish every single one of our Learning Objectives.

Authentic Assessments

I like to offer a variety of authentic assessments in which students are asked to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential physics concepts and scientific skills.

The most important feature of authentic assessments is that they provide multiple paths to the students’ demonstration of their learning.

This is an example from our kinematics unit. The students were presented with a Lab Practicum challenge:

‘At what position will two cars moving at different speeds collide if they are released from opposite ends at different times? Cars are 2 meters apart and one car is released 3 seconds after the first one.’

Instead of writing a traditional lab report, students created a video of their lab by engaging in a collaborative approach to the construction of knowledge. Take a look at one of the teams presenting their video as a TV show reporting on a train accident. The team used the experiment as a model to investigate the incident and demonstrated their understanding of kinematics through multiple representations of knowledge:

Another assessment asked the students to pose a question and apply their knowledge of kinematics to answer their question. Within the final product they had room for different modes of expression. Here are a few examples:

Trey's Project: If baseball was played on the moon, how far would a Ian Kinsler home run go?

Hannah's Project: How does my free-throw shot compare to Coach Schroeder's shot? 

Dylan's Project: When the blue bird in Angry Birds splits into three, do the speeds change? 

McKenna's Project: What's the initial velocity at which I was thrown in a cheerleader's cradle?

The class also completed a series of Performance Task Assessments where they were presented with context rich scenarios that required a meaningful application of the concepts. Context-rich tasks discourage the ‘plug and chug’ approach. These multi-step problems are constructed as a short story in which the main character is the student.

Evaluation
At the end of the trimester I gave the class a thorough class evaluation. It was meant to help them look back into the first three months of class and think deeper about their learning.
Selected questions and student responses can be seen below:

So, where are you in your evolution as a teacher?

Credits:

Image Creative Commons license by Stefan 
Image Creative Commons license by toolstop 
Ideas:
Thank you to Kelly O'Shea and John Burke for inspiration in creating the evaluation questions.

21st Century Science Teaching: Getting Students beyond Formula Hunting Strategies

In AP Physics (and many other science studies) the journey to find an answer to a problem is the most important component of the learning process – not the answer itself. Our need to make sure students think deeply about the subjects they study is one key reasons the College Board AP Program is undergoing revisions of several courses and exams in history, science and world languages.

The science course changes are driven by data from the National Research Council Report (2002) and aim to implement improvements in content and pedagogical approaches that represent best practices in teaching and learning.

The curriculum frameworks for the new science courses are organized around subject specific ‘Big Ideas’ with a strong focus on scientific reasoning and inquiry. The courses will emphasize depth over breadth and will include cutting edge areas of research within each discipline. The College Board recently released the Biology curriculum framework.

For students to be successful in these courses, teachers will need to use instructional strategies that require higher-order thinking skills that help develop a deeper conceptual understanding of the topics.

This is the first post in a blog series that will explore how the AP Science Practices can be integrated in the 21st century science classroom with a variety of strategies for the implementation of digital tools. While the primary focus will be in physics, the series will have relevance for other courses such as biology, chemistry and environmental science and could be used at the middle and high school levels.

Scientific Problems and Representations

The first science practice states:
The student can use representations and models to communicate scientific phenomena and solve scientific problems.

Problem-solving is a major part of a physics course. When confronted with challenging problems it is common to hear students say: “If I had the formula, I could solve this problem.” After all, finding the right equation is a key element in most textbooks’ problem-solving strategies and is often reinforced in the classroom through lectures, quizzes and tests. In most cases, by using appropriate equations a student is able to find the correct answer, but I will argue that finding the correct answer to a problem does not necessarily reflect a deep understanding of physics concepts. There are several studies in Physics Education Research that substantiate this claim. See the works cited on “An investigation of introductory physics students’ approaches to problem solving”

Effective Approaches to Problem-Solving

The ability to relate physics concepts to the situations presented by problems and questions is fundamental for success. A powerful strategy in developing a deep conceptual understanding is the use of Multiple Representations of Knowledge.

The diagram (*) below is an example commonly seen in kinematics problems. This example demonstrates how physics equations are only one representation of knowledge.

The Power of Multiple Representations

Here as an analysis of each of the representations and its usefulness in helping the students deepen their conceptual understanding:

- The real situation is the context of the problem; i.e., a car moving down a hill. It is common to represent real scenarios with a pictorial representation such as a sketch. It helps the students that have a preference for visual learning.

- A verbal representation could describe the motion of the car in the context of the problem, in this example students could say that the car speeds up as it travels down the hill, or the student can describe the energy transformation that occurs. It helps the students articulate what is happening in the given scenario to specific physics principles.

- The equation that describes the velocity in an inclined plane is the mathematical representation. This equation is usually derived from a free-body diagram by analyzing the forces acting on the car while it is accelerating.

- The situation can be represented in a numerical representation by providing data of position and velocity with respect to time. Data acquisition is often done in physics labs where students have to opportunity to gather the information in a hands-on experiment.

- The data obtained can be represented graphically in a velocity versus time graph. Graphical representations are commonly constructed from data collected in a lab experiment. Through graphs students can obtain information from the slopes, intercepts and areas under the curve. In this example the slope of the line represents the average acceleration and the area under the line yields displacement.

- A motion diagram can be used to illustrate the velocity vectors. This is another example that helps the students visualize the situation (a car speeding up) =i.e. increasing arrows as velocity vectors.

Students can demonstrate a deeper level of understanding of physics concepts by their ability to translate (move back and forth) between different representations of knowledge.

Multiple Representation Resources

Rutgers University Physics and Astronomy Education Research (PAER) group has written a document with the rationale about using multiple representations in physics, how to implement them in the classroom and how to score them: Multiple Representations in Physics

You can also download power points with multiple representation exercises:

1. Mechanics: kinematics, dynamics, energy, momentum and statics

2. Electricity and Magnetism: electrostatics, DC circuits and magnetism

Digital Tools for Multiple Representations

Verbal Representations

These tools can be used individually or in collaboration among students

Google Docs

CrocoDoc

SpringNote

Pictorial Representations

Image Editors

Sketchcast (Record a sketch with or without voice)

Pixlr

CoSketch

Google Sketchup for 3D Modeling

Mathematical Representations

Google Docs includes an Equation Editor

Equation Editor

Graphical Representations

Google Docs: Spreadsheets

LoggerPro: software for data collection and analysis through graphs

Create a Graph

ChartTool

Another powerful tool that helps with the implementation of Multiple Representations is the use of virtual simulations. In the next posting of this series I will be describing effective strategies for using simulations and a variety of resources for simulations in all core areas of science.

(*) Figure adapted from: Redish, Edward F. Teaching Physics: with the Physics Suite. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2002

Cross-Posted at Voices From the Learning Revolution (PLP Network)