The Tao of Modeling

Today was our first full day of the workshop and things are off to a great start. First, we have a great group of teachers (24 in all) enrolled in the first year physics workshop. Even with the torrential downpour that we started the day with, each of them showed up eager and ready to begin. I’ve mentioned this in earlier posts about the workshops, but spending three weeks with a group of people who want to learn how to get better at their job is invigorating. It energizes you. And this time is even better, because I get to help them learn how to do that. Teaching teachers turns out to be really cool.

After paper work, introductions and FCIs, we got down to business and walked the participants through the ball bounce lab as a way to introduce model building. They did a good job as students – sometimes too good of a job – and kept the discussion moving along. They were a bit overwhelmed and had questions about all the things that everyone new to modeling has questions about: time, classroom management, textbooks, etc. My co-leader and I ended the day with some extra time in teacher mode to address their questions. As we fielded each one, I began to realize that I was responding with the same question I use on my students…”I don’t know. What do you think?”.

See, modeling is not a set curriculum, like say a textbook might be. It’s a framework or skeleton that can be used to build any scientific curriculum. How each teacher constructs that curricula differs according to their personality and classroom needs. There are a number of ways to guide students in the development and deployment of new models. For instance, I don’t use the ball bounce lab in my class while my co-leader does. He grades deployment labs while I’ve moved away from that. Whiteboarding might involve every group’s board going up for discussion or we might put all the boards up at once to look at patterns. There are as many ways to implement modeling instruction as there are teachers that practice it.

That’s one of the big lessons that I hope the participants take away from the workshop. Success as a modeler means finding your individual way…your path…your Tao. It means knowing your students and what the technique and tone for asking them questions is, because I know you have to question them, but I can’t know your kids. It means finding what is important to your class as the time crunch starts to force you to drop topics, because every modeler has had to (since meaningful reflection takes time), but we don’t know what standardized testing you face or what your principal will challenge you on. And it means deciding how to give your kids feedback, because I know you have to, but I don’t know how tightly you, your kids or their parents cling to grades. All I can do is share my way and hope it provides some insight to the teachers that will be trying this for the first time.*

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* – Contrast this with the highly scripted, one-size-fits all explicit direct instruction (EDI) methodology that seems to be the newest form of pseudoteaching.

Modeling Workshop: Behind the Curtain

I’ve been using modeling instructional methods for the past five years in my physics classes. My first experience was in a one-day teaser workshop, which I followed up with the full first year mechanics workshop. A few years later, I returned for the second year advanced workshop which focuses on teaching you how to take the modeling framework and use it to develop your own materials. Now, two years after that, I’m back again, only this time, I’m co-leading a mechanics workshop in Columbus, OH.

The idea of introducing a room full of my colleagues to modeling instruction and teaching them how to use it in their classrooms is intimidating and exciting at the same time. Tomorrow is the first day of the workshop and it primarily involves introductions, the distribution of materials and paperwork, but we may have time to start on the ball bounce intro lab. Our plan for the next three weeks looks something like this:

Intro Modeling Units (Ball Bounce and Pendulum)

Constant Velocity Model (Buggy Investigation and Game of Chicken)

Constant Acceleration Model (Cart on Ramp and Police Chase)

Balanced Force Model (Hover Disk, Modified Atwood Machine and Force Table)

Unbalanced Force Model (Wiggling Force Detector, Modified Atwood Machine and Atwood Machine)

Energy Transfer Model (Kelly’s Intro to Energy and Energy Transfer Lab)

All pretty standard, but that’s because it’s all great stuff and it works to introduce new folks to how their classrooms will change.

One of the great things about modeling workshops is the distinction between student mode and teacher mode. For much of their time here, we ask the participants to work in student mode, acting as if they were students in a physics class, making mistakes and asking questions that they think their own kids will in the fall. We, the facilitators, use this to show how to navigate the issues raised by students (including pushback). By going through this themselves, the participants see how to transform their students from passive sponges to active participants in their own learning. We give plenty of time for teacher mode though, in which the participants reflect on the experience and how it will need to be modified for their own classroom setting. The three weeks we spend together here can be intense, but I’m hoping that each of the teachers, who have chosen to give up part of their summer for this experience, finds it rewarding and transformative.

Screencasting (Proof of Concept)

Inspired by the awesome ways in which Andy Rundquist has been using screencasts with his students (here, here and here), I decided to try to adopt this technique with my small class of six AP Physics students this year. I’ve always likened grading to a strange form of archeology, one in which the teacher works to unearth understanding from the artifact of student learning that is a written assessment. Too many times, students have come to me with a marked up paper and said “But I really meant….” or I see a final numerical answer that is correct and it is built on incorrect physics concepts. Instead of relying on only the written work, screencasts require the student to present their written work and narrate their solution. You might think of it as an asynchronous oral exam.

I’d decided to pilot this now as our school is transitioning to a 1-to-1 laptop program. In another two years, all of my students will have this technology available daily and I want to find meaningful ways to utilize it. For the first test run, I assigned a lab problem involving the Flying Pig (available from Science Kit & Boreal Labs).

In class, I set up the flying pig, timed it as it made 10 revolutions and then put the stopwatch in my pocket. Given a meterstick, the students made measurements of the pig and it’s motion. For their first screencast, the students had to determine what the reading on the stopwatch was. The students signed up for Jing accounts and executed the assignment without any real trouble. They reported that the act of talking to themselves was awkward and that their nervousness caused them to spend time practicing the presentation, so that overall the assignment likely added about 10-15 minutes of extra work.

We had our second run at these two weeks ago. After introducing the dynamics of simple harmonic motion, I assigned a pretty standard AP problem (Knight, Chapter 14, #49) that involves a box attached to a horizontal spring on a frictionless surface. A second box rests on top and the students need to find the coefficient of static friction between the boxes that is required to keep the top block from slipping off as the system oscillates. This time, I specifically asked the girls to send me only the link to their screencast via email. The results were again great. This time, they were less nervous and had navigated the setup of Jing, so the screencast took less time and the narration sounded more confident. In both cases, I was able to pick up on some misconceptions including ones that might not have come across only in written work.

For the second run, I also made screencasts providing feedback for the work they did on their screencasts. As I listened to the student’s narration, I scribbled down notes, sometimes including timestamps, and then simply checked these off as I recorded feedback. The process of “grading” these screencasts was quick and easy, but I ran into some snags with the workflow involved in sharing the feedback-casts with the students. As it stands now, my workflow looks like this:

• Receive link to screencast from student by email.
• Watch their screencast, making notes as I listen.
• Open Jing, record feedback with their original screencast open in the background.
• Upload the feedback-cast to my account.
• Get the link for that cast.
• Reply to the original email with the link to feedback.

The process felt cumbersome as I worked through the class, so I’m looking for ways to make it more efficient. The shuffling of emails back and forth will have to go, as that is not scalable if I want to expand this next year to include more of my classes. Downloading the .swf files to my computer only to upload them to a Dropbox or Haiku (our LMS) leads to folders of files that I’d like to avoid. However, I may decide on a folder for each student that is on a shared drive or available via Google Drive. As the year progresses, the student and I could build a “set” of screencasts for each assignment – her original and my feedback which she could refer to throughout the year or even use in a digital portfolio.

The other thing I’m trying to figure out is how to implement these in class. Right now, I’m thinking about a screencast per week involving a challenging homework problem, perhaps randomly selected from that week’s homework. The problem would correspond to a learning objective and be scored. Of course, this starts to bring up the possibility of students working together outside of class, so I still need to sort that out. I’ll see if I can post an example of student work and my feedback soon.

Guest Post: Student Research Journal

I want to give this space over to a student of mine for a guest post about the amazing work she has done. Anamika, a junior in my honors physics class, is the founder and editor-in-chief of a student-led, peer reviewed research journal and website. The work she has done is amazing and I’m proud of her not only for following her passion for science, but finding a way to help other kids follow theirs too. I’ll turn the rest of this over to her. Please take the time to visit her site, look around and share this with your students and colleagues.

I am Anamika Veeramani and I am the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of En Kephalos Science Journal for high school students. En Kephalos Science Journal (ekteenscience.com) is a start-up science journal in which high school students are given the opportunity to publish – and publicize – their work in and knowledge of scientific research. Because virtually no other journal like this exists for this audience, our publication is set to be unique and will take the level of research exposure beyond science fairs and into a broader scientific community. Please refer to our website for examples of published articles and feel free to contact me at anamika@ekteenscience.com for more information.

 If you know of students who would be interested in having their research writings considered for publication, please encourage them to send any of the four types (listed below) to submit@ekteenscience.com for publication consideration; if you think that they would be more interested in filling a position on our editorial board, please have them send an email to apply@ekteenscience.com for an application.  Submissions should be the original work of the author and should not have been previously published elsewhere or be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Please remember that all of the submission types except for articles do not have to be on the original research work of the author; only the writing is required to be original.

 Submission Types Accepted

• Letters (not to be confused with letters to the editor) are original short descriptions of important current research findings that are usually fast-tracked for immediate publication because they are considered urgent.
• Research notes are original short descriptions of current research findings that are considered “less urgent” than Letters.
• Articles are usually between five and twenty pages and are complete descriptions of current original research findings. The research conducted has to be the original work of the author.
• Review articles do not cover original research but accumulate the results of many different articles on a particular topic into a cohesive narrative about the new research in that field. Review articles provide information about the topic and also provide journal references to the original research. They may be entirely narrative, or may provide quantitative summary estimates resulting from the application of meta-analytical methods. 

Website: http://ekteenscience.com/

Standards Based Grading Presentation

This year marks the third year of standards based grading (SBG) in the physics classes at my school. Each year, my colleague and I have modified and refined the particulars of our implementation of SBG and I’m optimistic about how the students will receive it this year. The introduction to SBG, that moment when you have to sell the class on this “different” way of doing things is always tough. I spent a good nine months reading, researching and preparing before jumping in, so I’m not surprised that it take students some time to warm up to the idea.

To help with the initial communication of what grades look like in our classes, we’ve moved from a lengthy two page document to a Prezi that guides students (or parents that want to watch it) through three central questions:

1. What does a grade mean?
2. How do you calculate grades?
3. How do I improve my grade?

What’s in a Grade? (Sorry, WordPress won’t let me easily embed a Prezi. Click through and you can watch it.)

Take a look at it and if you have any feedback on the structure or flow of information I’d love to hear it. I’ve made it public, so you can copy and modify it as you wish. I should probably add attributions for the pics, but it’s late.

A New Year

I almost titled this post A New Hope as that’s how I feel after the first week of classes – hopeful. Then I thought that nerdy joke wasn’t really that funny, but now I’ve told you anyways, so it definitely wasn’t funny…ah, forget it.

Today marks my first week back – both to the classroom and to blogging. Last year was really tough. It was full of rocky classroom dynamics, the loss of a student and an unwanted shift in my job responsibilities. I stayed away from more long form writing as I didn’t want this to turn into a blog full of frustrations and complaints. The point of blogging is to be reflective though, so I need to write about what went well and what didn’t last year. I’ll get to that eventually, but for now, I’m looking to reflect about this first week back and why I’m hopeful.

One of the things that has me most excited is the new class I’m teaching – astronomy! I’ve patiently waited for five years to teach this class as it “belonged” to another colleague who really did a great job with it. With his retirement, my time in the batter’s box has come to an end. This being my first time planning the course, I had a million ideas about what I wanted to do in the single semester allotted to me. Astronomy has been a passion of mine since I was a kid and I wanted to convey that sense of awe and wonder that comes with understanding the universe around us. The course is an elective though, so a portion of the students take the class just to fill a science elective. I knew that I had to hit them early and with something they weren’t expecting, so I decided to lead with the Space episode of Radiolab.

It was a hit. Ann Druyan talking about falling in love with Carl Sagan during the Voyager project, Neil deGrasse Tyson pointing out that we are “a speck on a speck on a speck” and feeling connected to the universe because of that, the story of an elementary classroom’s seeds and how they were touched by not one, but two, shuttle disasters – these are the stories of people who seek to understand the universe and their stories touched and inspired a number of my students. Many of them reflected on this during our discussion and I think, I hope, they are starting to see astronomy (and all of science) as just one more human endeavor that they can take part in.

This year has also brought some changes to my implementation of standards based grading (SBG, SBAR, LOBAR, just pick your favorite acronym). I’ve been at it for two years now and have learned a lot. First, it’s challenging to shift the focus of students away from grades and on to learning. It’s especially difficult to do it with juniors and seniors for whom grades are one of many keys that will unlock the door to their hopes, dreams and first-choice college. Secondly, I think I did a crappy job of implementing SBG during the first two years. My version was plagued by too much subjectivity, too much back pedaling and not managing the student-initiated assessment procedure well enough. So, two years are behind me, but I’m feeling good about this year. Up until this point, it’s only been myself and @mjbrogers riding the SBG train in our physics classes. However, in these past two weeks, I’ve had the chance to speak with four other teachers about how they might use SBG in their classrooms. Each is at a different stage and wants to try different things, but the possibility is there. It gives me hope that others not only see similar deficiencies in traditional grading, but that they are willing to act to change things. That hope makes my first steps into my third year of SBG a bit lighter and a bit easier to take.

There is a ton more I want to write about – the second year of physics teacher camp, my move to being department co-chair, the view of STEM in all-girls schools, piloting screencasts of homework in AP (Superfly style) and more. I’m pacing myself though. This post was a warmup and it felt good to write again. I’m promising myself that I’ll be back here once a week. Think of it as a #36blog, as I can’t seem to manage a #180blog. I think it’s going to be a great 36 weeks.

Theory v. Experiment

Ah, it’s an age old debate in physics departments – theory or experiment? When I was in college, it became clear to me that you needed to stake your claim as either a theorist or an experimental physicist. While both camps utilize tools of the other, they clearly each have preferred means of investigating and learning about the world. Usually, we ask our students to engage in both activities equally. First, they write up the background in their lab report, then perform some experiment, and then draw conclusions. This week, I decided to purposefully split the class into these two camps, each utilizing only half of the tools they typically have at their disposal.

The problem at hand was a classic conservation of energy problem involving a pendulum released from a height equal to its length. The pendulum swings down, encounters a peg directly beneath its support point, and then swings in a smaller arc around this peg. There’s a nice visual here. The AP Physics Lab Guide calls this the Turning Point lab and asks how high the peg can be placed so that the rope remains taut as the object swings up and over the peg. My students had this as a homework problem, so they’d had a chance to familiarize themselves with it prior to class.

I started class by explaining the theory/experiment divide amongst physicists and then splitting them along those lines. The theory group was essentially limited by not being able to make measurements. Whiteboards, diagrams, and equations were their tools. They split into smaller work groups, each trying a different approach. As they became stuck, they consulted with one another and ultimately wound up working together on a large whiteboard at one end of the room, ending up with the following results:

The experimentalists were forced to rely only on measurements. Searching the room, they found materials to build a pendulum which they began to modify. First, they overcame the trouble with the pendulum running into the string by releasing it off center. They then requested my phone so that they could level all of the components. Each time I thought they were going to get caught by some bit of uncertainty, they found a way to minimize it. Their procedure amounted to finding a lower bound where the string was definitely taut and an upper bound where it wasn’t, and then narrowing that range with multiple measurements. They used the camera on my phone to record the swings so that they could review them. Here is the apparatus that they devised:

After each group had worked through their individual methods, I had them choose a spokesperson who then presented the group’s results to the class. I gave them instructions that if asked questions, they could (and should) share the load of answering them with their group members. I found that I was able to ask some pointed questions of the group that was listening as a means to keep them engaged and responsible for understanding the work of their classmates. At the end of it, the experimentalists determined that the location of the peg was 28.5 ± 0.5 cm as measured from the support pole while the theorists found that it should be placed at 3/5L, with L being the length of the pendulum. For this particular setup, that gave a result of 27.9 cm. Success!

Some thoughts on this activity

Pros

It’s fun and a different way to approach a lab. Rather than reading through a bunch of identical lab reports myself, the class was able to quickly (2 periods for the entire process) develop an understanding of how to solve the problem in two different ways.

I like that it put some focus back on good lab technique. This is an AP physics class and the folks that write the AP test have made a recent push to ask questions about experimental design. In the report out, students were able to probe sources of uncertainty in the experimental design and hear about different sources of uncertainty that they may not have considered if they had written their own report.

The more I try pulling problems off of the page, the more I like doing it. If I can keep these to two periods, they would make a great way to really investigate some of the classic physics examples that we see in texts. These can become quick lab practicums and be graded or just done for the joy of learning. (I didn’t grade this.)

The collaboration was great even with girls being pushed outside of their comfort zone. Given the choice, many of my girls would self select into the theory group, but this forced some of them to think about ideas and work on skills they might ignore if given the choice.

Cons

Group size. I have my biggest class of AP physics ever this year at 13. With one student absent, I had two groups of six. And while everyone was engaged, I would want to shrink the groups to perhaps four. I’m not sure how well this would scale to a larger class of say 25 or 30. I think decreasing group size would also lead to more voices. In this instance, half the class already agreed with one another when it came time to present, so it was really only two voices that we needed to hear from.

I’m a bit worried that not every problem will have the right blend of theory and experiment. This one seemed to work well as both groups were finishing around the same time. I’m not sure how many problems will strike that balance as well as this one seemed to. What do you do with half the class if they are done in 15 minutes?

I’m looking forward to giving this a try again when I find the right problem to investigate.