Retrospective Amnesia

It’s easy to become so familiar with concepts that they seem trivial. It’s difficult to remember when you didn’t know, but a little retrospective amnesia can go a long way.

(SOCS-P Arnold Arons: Teaching Introductory Physics)

Class demos can serve a purpose but it is important that students be involved in the thinking process. The punch line of the demo is the thinking, not "because of inertia" 

(SOCS-I Arnold Arons: Teaching Introductory Physics)

Value in the Struggle

Omissions and simplifications of challenging concepts is disrespectful of student abilities. They can do it if I can provide meaningful experiences and Socratic guidance.  There is value in the struggle.

(SOCS-P – Arons. Teaching Introductory Physics)

Relinquishing the Spotlight

It is evident that passive learning is ineffective. It is my goal to give my students center stage - allowing them to articulate and defend their understanding. I'm a guide.
(SOCS - I: Wells/Hestenes/Swackhammer)

One of the most challenging things for me this past year was making sure the discussions were meaningful and consistently helping students bring the discussion to a "timely and satisfying closure."
To this end, the types of questions I ask and the way I ask them are very important. Students need to buy in that my questions are going somewhere, rather than viewing the discussion as a game of 'guess what's in my head.'

Another thing I need to work on is patience. Allow for silence sometimes, as uncomfortable as it may be at first. Students are not used to their new role in the spotlight. I need to give them time to acclimate rather than taking the spotlight back because they are uncomfortable.

I also need to be patience with myself. After trying it for a year, I know that modeling is not easy. Just as with most skills, it takes practice. A lot of practice. I've been told it takes 5 years to become a good teacher. Actually I was told "you will suck for 5 years." This article told me I will suck for 10 years. I need to be ok with that, and diligently work at 'sucking less.'


 

Time

Real learning takes time. Students need opportunities and time to grapple with abstract ideas. Recursion allows students to assimilate concepts as they reencounter them in new and increasingly rich contexts.  

(SOCS-I: Arons, Arnold Teaching Introductory Physics)

What is Physics?

It's a warm summer's evening... (Big Bang Theory reference anyone?)

Students’ enter class with preconceptions of physical concepts as well as predetermined ideas of what physics (or learning in general) entails. Left unaddressed, the latter is as much an impediment to learning as content preconceptions. 

(SOCS- I: Hammer, Mestre)

To students, physics is a collection of formulas (handed down from on high) to be memorized/manipulated. Unfortunately our textbooks and traditional teaching methods can serve to reinforce this. As a result students develop ineffective problem solving strategies that center on finding the right equation rather than invoking experience-based intuition or some underlying conceptual understanding. 

Capturing the Fleeting Instant

A comprehensive understanding of motion is predicated on understanding the concepts of instantaneous position and clock reading. Without these, we cannot develop concepts of average velocity, instantaneous velocity, or acceleration.

(SOCS-C : Arons, Arnold. Teaching Introductory Physics)

Making Learning Contextual

SOCS-C

Guiding students to articulate operational definitions for concepts such as area and volume elevates student thinking beyond memorization and formula manipulation and opens the door to the arithmetical and ratio reasoning.

(Arons, Arnold. Teaching Introductory Physics)

SOCS-P

Students must be provided concrete experiences upon which they can develop operational definitions. They need a context in which to learn the content and in order for long term learning to occur, our goal as instructors should be to make learning contextual.

(Arons, Arnold. Teaching Introductory Physics)

FCI 2.0

While I am familiar with the FCI, every time I take it I am struck by the difficulty of the assessment despite the absence of any calculations. As I was going through the test, I was focusing on the incorrect responses and trying to think like a student that would choose one of those responses (not an easy task).

In doing this I think I understand a little better why the test is such a good challenge - for each answer choice there is a logical argument that could be made or an experience students could recall that would lead them to an incorrect response.

It seems a number of the incorrect answers are historical misconceptions - once held and (logically defended) by some great thinkers in physics (see Aristotelian ideas such as object memory and the natural state of objects).

I would think students rely as much (if not more) on personal experience as they do on logic in answering these questions. When students make a sharp turn in a car - what do they experience? They slide to the outside. When students let go of a spinning merry-go-round, what do they see? The merry-go-round gets further away. With this experience, some of the incorrect responses begin to make a lot of sense.

To me, this highlights that it is a delicate task to correct such misconceptions as they can be deep rooted in experience and/or the product of students really having spent some time thinking about what they have observed.

Learning about Teaching

I just arrived at an AP Physics conference and will be starting the Physics Modeling workshop all in one week. I'm so excited to learn and get better at this thing. @n3lfp.blogspot.com