One of the best things about my current school is that the students push me to rethink practices that I’ve taken for granted in the past. They even push me to rethink practices that I’ve put lots of effort and intention into developing, like my final exams. “Can we have a group test?” I’m in… Read More “Can we have a group test?” Alternative Assessments in Science Classes (Part 1)
I’m really excited to announce the AAPT High School Physics Teacher Camp 2016. The camp will be held on Sunday, July 17th (that’s the Sunday of the AAPT summer meeting) from 8 am – 5 pm at Rio Americano High School in Sacramento, CA. What is Physics Teacher Camp? The camp is a day-long interactive… Read More Physics Teacher Camp 2016
I don’t do lab reports. Maybe that’s a strange way to begin, here, but stick with me. I haven’t found lab reports to be useful assessment tools in the past. Instead, I have claimed that our work in the lab is too important to grade. It’s the basis of all of our knowledge. On the one… Read More Assessing Scientific Abilities
In my college summers, I was a camp counselor at a Girl Scout camp in Michigan. (Bear with me, this is going somewhere.) During my first summer, I loathed having to spend one night per week sleeping outside and tried to find any way out of it. During the staff training week the second summer,… Read More This Class is SO My Class
This fall, I will be starting my 2nd year at a really cool progressive day school in NYC. The science curriculum is in the process of evolving, but the current program has 9th and 10th graders rotating twice through physics, chemistry, and biology (in any order) on a trimester system. This past year, I taught… Read More Circuits and Charges: A Physics Active Exam
I gave a workshop with Mike Pustie in NYC in June and with Casey Rutherford in Minneapolis in July on using a graphical approach to solve kinematics and force problems. I wrote a bit about the content involved in my preview post, and I wanted to follow that up here by making the slides and… Read More Graphical Solutions for Forces and Kinematics (Workshop Recap)
So you’re thinking in terms of physical models now instead of in terms of chapters, units, or equations. Now what? Is there a high-level ordering of these ideas? How are they connected? Are there common themes? One activity that I’ve done to help students build higher-level organization into their thinking is concept maps (which I… Read More Mechanics: 3 Fundamental Principles
