I was chaperoning a field trip today, so no photos and lessons that were easy to leave for a sub.

AP Physics: Assessment Reflection

Students took a test combining forces and constant acceleration today. On tests and quizzes, I’ve been asking students to rate themselves on each learning target and write a short reflection, so I took a few minutes to read over the reflections after the field trip. I like getting a sense of where my students feel confident and where they are struggling before I grade the whole test. It was also fun to see what students wrote. I’ve been trying to improve how explicit I am about what is included in a given model, so I was really pleased to see several students tell me that they started each problem by identifying what models apply, then thinking of the “toolbox” that goes with that model. I also was really excited to see a student who has been struggling write that, moving forward, he wants to shift from trying to understand what they answer is to trying to understand why its the answer.

Earth Science: Movie

The earth science curriculum calls for another movie this unit (I think I’ve shown more movies in Earth Science this year than I’ve shown in physics the last several years combined), and I went with it since that’s an easy thing for a sub. I’ve been using the existing worksheets to go with the movies, which have very factual questions in the order they appear in the movie. The next time I show a video, I might try getting the students to do a little more thinking by adapting some reading response techniques like four square notes or a 3-2-1 response.