I’ve been making major updates and changes to my materials in the intro physics course this year. It is the first year we are teaching a yearlong physics class to everyone (10th graders) in my school as the result of a big curriculum redesign in science, and the first time back to teaching a course… Read More Stacks of Kinematics Curves as a Card Sort
The day-to-day work in my class happens in at tables in an “individually together” manner that I described in the Whiteboarding Mistake Game: A Guide post. Quick summary of “individually together”: Students work at tables on problems in their packets. They mostly work on their own, take a moment to consult and debate with the… Read More Physics Soul-mates
Or, No More Cherry Picking (and How to Stop Doing That) The Goal of Standards-Based Grading (SBG): Use standards to give students specific, useful feedback that will help students know what to practice to improve their understanding and performance and you (the teacher) know how to help the students and what to keep testing. The… Read More Offside Assessments
Next up in whiteboarding modes: The Whiteboard Face-Off (aka Board Meetings*). When we have a Face-Off, every group is whiteboarding the same problem. No one presents. Instead, we sit on the tables (bringing in our circle and keeping people from just doing more work in the packet and skipping the discussion) and all share our… Read More Whiteboard Face-Off
So. Josh* took my Honors Physics exam review activity and expanded it into something bigger and better. As I was reading his post, though, I started thinking about my regular physics classes. They would really like something like that. Of course, I also had to make it my own. I am curating a set of… Read More All-year Goal-less Problems for Physics Class
This idea has been percolating for a while, ever since reading Sophie’s post back in September. When we came back from Christmas Vacation and needed to start flexing all of those now-unpracticed skills that we gained in the fall, the time seemed right to try out this crazy new idea. Instructions for Starting the Date… Read More Whiteboard Speed Dating
aka How to kill . Now that we’re pros (Wheaties box, here we come) at drawing velocity-vs-time graphs, we need to be able to turn those graphs into equations if we want to use them as tools for solving problems. One big stumbling block in solving constant acceleration (CAPM) problems is that, very very often,… Read More Velocity Graphs into Equations
Now that we are out of September, my students have enough work to do outside of class that I don’t need to assign any specific homework. Still, this view of in-class and out-of-class work is a huge paradigm shift for my students. Do they still have physics homework if there’s never anything “due” or that… Read More Effort vs Luck
Last spring, a large number of students at my school observed a day of silence. Since so many of my students wouldn’t be speaking in class, and since I don’t find it very productive for me to do the talking in class, I decided to come up with an alternate plan. I decided to have… Read More Monk Whiteboarding
Sometimes when I talk about the way that I grade (or actually, sort of don’t grade) to other adults, they scoff at the lack of points. They say things like, “If I were taking a quiz that I knew didn’t affect my grade, I wouldn’t take it seriously. I would just write Monkey Monkey Monkey… Read More Monkey Monkey Monkey
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