This week has felt a little weird. Coming back from break, we’d gotten some messages to be ready to shift to virtual learning and all week the number of students and staff out went up, so everyone felt like we were in limbo. Near the end of my teaching day today, we got word that next week will be remote.

Physics: Values & Beliefs About Physics Learning

We started this week with a version of the values and beliefs lesson from Kelly O’Shea. There wasn’t as much discussion within groups as I was hoping (and it probably didn’t help that I was giving groups more space than usual to try and reduce my COVID exposure), but students had some great insights and really interesting things to say on the individual reflections I had them complete. One thing I felt like was missing in how I implemented this was some conversations about the costs and benefits of different views of physics and physics learning. One of the last things I had students do in their groups was pick some values or beliefs they think we should aspire to, and a lot of groups said we should aspire to do a better job of valuing memorizing facts and equations. I wonder if giving more space to why certain values and beliefs are or are not given a space in a particular classroom would have helped with some conversation about why they see memorizing as important and whether that is compatible with our classroom.

After two days of that, we spent the rest of the week on some problems about pushing cardboard boxes based on problems in Matt Greenwolfe’s More Models in Modeling materials. My goal was to refresh students on velocity vs. time graphs and free-body diagrams before we dive into momentum. There was a lot of great discussion, with lots of animated arguments. I was also really pleased at how often I could have students simply add a diagram, such as a system schema, to identify and fix their mistakes. I still need to work on how to facilitate a good whole class discussion with these problems, but I think part of the issue is I approach these problems with what I call consensus-building discussions, where I have every group whiteboard the same problem, then we try to resolve differences, but I don’t do this type of discussion very often so students don’t have much practice with it.

AP Physics 1: Energy

This week, we focused on going from LOL diagrams to doing calculations with conservation of energy. We started by doing a lab to find the equation for spring potential energy, which gives us all of the major energy types, then did a card sort that included equations based on just the types of energy and equations based on measurable quantities like velocity, mass, and height. The card sort made for a very nice bridge between the two types of mathematical representations.