Day 117: Kirchhoff’s Laws, Problems, & Balancing

March 25, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

AP Physics 1: Kirchhoff’s Laws

Students used PhET’s circuit construction kit to look for patterns in series and parallel circuits. Students were pretty successful at noticing the things I wanted them to notice and I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s discussion of the results.

Physics: Problems

Students worked on some problems using the spring period equation. We also spent some time on whole-class discussion about the motion graphs for an object on a spring, and tested a lot of ideas using a motion encoder cart hooked to a force sensor with a spring.

Chemistry Essentials: Balancing Reactions

Students used PhET’s balancing chemical equations simulation to start figuring out what it means for a reaction to be balanced. Students were pretty successful at working out the significance of each of the tools the PhET activity provided, along with what it means to be balanced. Even though I didn’t assign the game, a few students decided to play and ended the hour with a lot of confidence and enthusiasm for balancing problems.

Day 116: Whiteboarding

March 22, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

AP Physics 1: Coulomb’s Law Whiteboarding

We spent some time doing some practice multiple choice problems, then used whiteboards for a gallery walk of yesterday’s problems on Coulomb’s Law and Ohm’s Law.

Physics: Spring Representations Whiteboarding

Students whiteboarded various representations for an object vibrating on a spring, then we did some discussing to come to an agreement on what those representations should look like.

Chemistry Essentials: Mistake Whiteboarding

We finished going through the whiteboards students prepped earlier this week for a round of mistakes whiteboarding. I’m getting excited to start balancing chemical equations with these students next week; several students have started pointing out when the number of a given element changes between the products and reactants as a sign that something is wrong.

Day 115: Board Meeting & Connecting Representations to Observations

March 21, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

AP Physics 1: Ohm’s Law Board Meeting

We had a board meeting for yesterday’s results. One of the things I was really happy about is not all groups used the same approach to dealing with three variables. Some did one experiment graphing current and voltage, followed by a second experiment graphing current and resistance. Others just graphed current and voltage, but did the same experiment with two different resistances.

Physics: Spring Period Board Meeting

We whiteboarded the results from this week’s lab on spring period. When writing the equation, a lot of students had trouble with when to use a unit and when to use a variable, but that’s been tough throughout this year. I think a lot of students are struggling to distinguish what those two things communicate, so I need to give some thought to how to teach that difference.

Chemistry Essentials: Connecting Representations and Observations

One of the things I think has been missing in the second half of this course is students draw very few connections between what they actually see in the lab and the representations they use for chemical reactions, so my co-teacher and I decided to work on that this year. Today, we did a lab where students did several simple chemical reactions, then identified observations that support specific elements of the reaction equation. For example, when students reacted copper (II) chloride with aluminum, they were able to recognize the reddish powder that replaced the aluminum was the copper predicted by the reaction equation.

Day 114: Ohm’s Law, Spring Period, & Mistakes Whiteboarding

March 20, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / 1 Comment

AP Physics 1: Ohm’s Law

Students used PhET’s circuit construction kit to find a relationship between current, voltage, and resistance. It was the first time students were asked to work with three variables at once on a pretty open-ended lab, but they were very successful at coming up with ways to approach the task.

Physics: Spring Period

Students finished their data collection and graphing for the period of a spring lab. A lot of groups went straight to a quadratic relationship to linearize their graph, which makes me think they were treating it as an automatic process, rather than thinking through what their graph suggests. It didn’t take much coaching to get students to switch to a square root linearization, but I’ll need to keep working on what it actually means to linearize a graph.

Chemistry Essentials: Mistakes Whiteboarding

We did some mistakes whiteboarding using yesterday’s problems on representing reactions. Students were very successful at figuring out the mistakes and they are gradually getting the hang of the various details they need to carefully represent.

Day 113: Board Meeting, Spring Period, & Representing Reactions

March 19, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

AP Physics 1: Coulomb’s Law Board Meeting

We had a board meeting to discuss the results of yesterday’s lab. Students were quick to buy into the inverse square relationship and to recognize how their results support that like charges repel and opposites attract. I haven’t found a great way to get at the meaning of the slope, but its at least pretty intuitive that the amount of charge should affect the size of the force.

Physics: Spring Period

Students collected data to figure out what affects the period of a mass oscillating on a spring. Today was one of the days when the progress my students have made in designing an experiment was very apparent, which made it a lot of fun to listen to them plan and troubleshoot their approaches.

Chemistry Essentials: Representing Reactions

Students practiced translating between reaction equations, statements, and particle diagrams. One of the big challenges is my students were in very different places, especially when it came to particle diagrams and switching between names and formulas. About a third of my students took Chem Ess A with me last tri, so they were just extending some fairly recent learning. Another third took Chem Ess A with me tri 1, so have seen these skills, but haven’t used them in a few months. The rest of the students came to me from other teachers who don’t use particle diagrams and several haven’t had chemistry since last year, which gave them a much higher mental load. Most tables had a mix of students from each group, which meant there was a lot of peer teaching today, which helped with the variation quite a bit.

Day 112: Coulomb’s Law, Spring Force Revisited, & Skew Dice

March 18, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

Today was our first day back from spring break and the first day of a new trimester.

AP Physics 1: Coulomb’s Law

I am a part of the Pivot Interactive’s Chemistry Fellows program.

We dove right in with a lab on Pivot Interactives to discover Coulomb’s Law. We’re going to be cutting it pretty close on squeezing everything in before the AP exam, so I was much more direct than usual about what needed to be done by the end of the hour and how long I expected tasks to take, and that seemed to help students meet the timeline I had in mind. I need to make that a habit for the next few weeks.

Physics: Spring Force Revisited

We’re getting ready to start vibrating springs, so today we revisited Hooke’s Law. I asked students to make some predictions about how the slope of two different springs should compare before collecting any data, which was tricky since they haven’t thought about what the spring constant actually means for a while, but I think they got where I want them to be.

Chemistry Essentials: Skew Dice

A lot of my students either haven’t had chemistry since trimester 1 or came to me from the other Chemistry Essentials teacher, so I treated today like the first day of school and tried to set a tone for the term. I tasked students with writing a CER to answer whether skew dice are fair. In the past with this activity, I’ve had some trouble convincing students they need a lot of data, so I started by asking students to collect evidence that a regular dice is fair before we got out the skew dice, and students pretty easily recognized they needed a lot of rolls with the regular dice to get a distribution that makes sense.

Day 111: Tri 2 Reflections

March 7, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

Today was our second day of final exams. While my students work, I’m taking some time to reflect on this term.

AP Physics 1

I’ve been moving a little bit slower than I have in past years, so the week we lost to cold and snow is going to make it tough to squeeze everything in before the exam in May. Looking ahead, I’ve got some ideas to integrate a review of linear mechanics into circular motion and rotation, so I think we’ll be okay, even though I won’t have as much dedicated review as in the past. I feel like I skipped a lot of activities that I did in past years, so I need to think about what slowed down the pace. I think part of the problem is this is the one course where I’m not collaborating with another teacher, which means its the prep I’m the most likely to let slide when I’m crunched for time. I need to make sure I’m managing my time in a way where I stay on top of AP going into the home stretch.

Physics

For the first time, I’ve been generating random groups for students almost daily, and I’ve been very surprised at how effective that’s been. Students tell me they feel like they actually know everyone in the class and I’ve noticed a very strong sense of class community. I need to start expanding the random groups into my other courses.

Chemistry Essentials

I’m continuing to really enjoy co-teaching this course. Its great to have another perspective on how to make the material accessible to the students in this course and even on how to best support individual students who are struggling.

This tri, we did a lot of work on making sure students had a strong conceptual foundation for what they were doing in the class. While we made a lot of good progress, I’ve noticed that while students may be able to connect a particle diagram to a written answer or a calculation, they often struggle to connect their conceptual understanding to the real world. Especially as we move into the second half of the course, which includes a lot of stoichiometry, I’m thinking about what it will look like to help students see how what they are learning relates to things they can actually see or measure.

Day 110: Final Exams

March 6, 2019March 6, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / 1 Comment

Today was day 1 of final exams. The classes with odd hours met today and the rest will meet tomorrow.

AP Physics 1: AP Practice Exam

Students took a practice AP exam from the College Board. They did the free-response earlier this week, and the 90 minute final exam period was perfect for the multiple choice. I really pushed that I’ll be entering this into the gradebook very generously partly because the AP exams tend to have low percentage scores and partly because I want to use it very formatively. My two goals are for students to experience an (almost) complete AP exam and for me to see what topics I need to make sure we revisit before the real exam.

Physics: Lab Practical

For the first half of the exam, students took a fairly traditional individual final. For the second half, they worked on one of three lab practicals; every station asked students to find the mass of an unknown object, but we came up with stations using three different models. While all of the lab practical stations were related to labs we did in class this trimester, I got a lot of questions about how to use the LabQuests. The other physics teacher and I are thinking about what it might look like to have students build themselves a reference for key probeware skills. I also think this would have been a fun one to whiteboard and share results since groups were figuring out the same thing three different ways.

Unbalanced Force on a Particle Model

Momentum Transfer Model

Energy Transfer Model

Chemistry Essentials: Lab Practical

Similar to the physics class, the chemistry students took a pretty traditional individual final, then completed a lab practical. This tri, I had students identify a liquid based on the density. I was really pleased by how many students naturally used other observations to decide whether their result made sense.

Day 109: Free Response & Mistakes Whiteboarding

March 5, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

Today was our last day of regular classes before final exams.

AP Physics 1: Free Response

For my tri 2 final, I like to give most of a practice AP exam. Since our final periods are 90 minutes long, I had my students do the free response portion today. I took out the problems on circuits and rotation since my students haven’t seen those topics yet. Students seemed to feel pretty good afterward; I think they are internalizing that its okay not to nail the problems.

Physics: Mistakes Whiteboarding

We used some problems from the final review for mistakes whiteboarding. Students in this course have really bought in to the value of mistakes whiteboarding and I end up saying very little during these discussions. Its a lot of fun to listen to students during these discussions.

Chemistry Essentials: Mistakes Whiteboarding

We used some problems from the final review for mistakes whiteboarding. A lot of students were having some trouble focusing, which is not unusual for this course at the end of a tri; I think a lot of them are anticipating spring break and the start of the next trimester. My co-teacher and I made some changes to how we talked about particle diagrams this tri to emphasize them as a thinking tool, and it was a lot of fun to see some of that work pay off during the discussion today.

Day 108: Final Review

March 5, 2019 / Marta R. Stoeckel / Leave a comment

AP Physics 1: Free Response Whiteboarding

Students whiteboarded some released free response problems. We also spent some time talking about the scoring guides to drive home that you can do well on the AP exam while missing some, or even a lot, of points. A lot of my students are feeling very good going into the final, which is exactly what I want. There’s also a sense of camaraderie, where the classes seem to see themselves as going into something difficult together, which is also great to see.

Physics: Whiteboarding

Students whiteboarded selected problems from the review for a gallery walk. We didn’t do a great job of spiraling content this trimester, so a lot of the review has been about revisiting old topics so that students are feeling confident and comfortable in their skills again.

Chemistry Essentials: Practice Problems

After doing some problems emphasizing particle diagrams, we worked on a separate review today that gives more standard problems. Breaking the review into parts seemed to help students feel less overwhelmed by the task and starting with the particle diagrams set them up nicely to think conceptually about the problems on today’s section.

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Author: Marta R. Stoeckel