I spent this morning visiting Kelly’s classes and in the afternoon she came to see mine. It was wonderful to spend the day collaborating about physics teaching. One idea we discussed was asking students to work on problems straight onto the whiteboards. That way, during the discussion time, the “audience” will be more invested in the discussion since they’ll be deciding on the best thing to write down. I tried that in my last period class today and it definitely improved to the conversation. I just need another set (or two) of whiteboards so that we’ll have enough for each group to work multiple problems on whiteboards. I’ll also have to figure out a method for deciding who will present the whiteboards (since we don’t need/want every group presenting each problem that we do). The Five Practices come to mind as a method of managing the presentations.
Today in one class I did the CVPM paradigm lab asking students to measure position instead of distance. The beginning was a bit rough, but with Kelly’s help as an extra resource for the students, most of the groups got data that looked linear. We’ll discuss it in that class on Monday.
segal180 