For the past few months, I’ve been participating in a professional development class called “Project Zero Online: Making Learning Visible.” The goal of the course is to help teachers find ways to both document what’s going on in their classroom, and to create opportunities for students to use documentation of all kinds (recordings, posters, boardwork, etc) to make their understanding of the material visible. This visibility helps them to think about their learning from a metacognitive perspective, and helps their classmates (and teachers) to engage with their thinking.
One of the assignments for the class is to write a “learning story” - something that captures the questions you have as a teacher and the ways you’ve noticed things changing in your classroom as a result of the reflection you’ve been doing as a part of this class. This is my learning story.
Stepping Back from the Spotlight
Most of the time I’ve been a teacher, I’ve felt that it was my job to entertain the students. I am constantly worried that they are not having fun - like someone who brings a friend to their favorite restaurant and worries that they’re not liking the food. I know what I find interesting and exciting about physics, and I want to show my students those things so that they can share in that enthusiasm. As a part of this course, I’ve challenged myself to step back from the spotlight and trust my students to follow the breadcrumbs I’ve left, and to tell me what they find interesting and exciting about physics.
Phase 1: I’m doing hands-on labs…but whose hands are actually on the materials?
Students were asked to build a circuit with at least 3 components, and draw the circuit diagram for that circuit. A student had questions about why her circuit wasn’t responding the way she expected. First I walked her through her circuit diagram, helping her trace the path of the current…
…then I took over, fixing the problem in the circuit for her so that she could experience the payoff of it working.
Phase 2: Focusing on documentation, but is there any actual learning evident?
Students were asked to create a 3D model that helps them to “visualize” the electric field around a distribution of charges. Each pair of students were assigned a different distribution, and they were given an example by the teacher first.
These infographics were the product required during a project about household wiring. The students were given a template, so many of the posters turned out looking the same. It was hard to see evidence of individual student learning, and there were very few questions asked by my students during this project.
Phase 3: Push the documentation earlier on in the learning process
In this exercise, meant to give students an opportunity to run through practice problems ahead of a test, there were several stations set up throughout the room. One station had them working through a worksheet in pairs, one had them building physical circuits, and one had them working out problems on the white board with help from their group mates. The whiteboard station, in particular, required one student to make their thinking visible by writing on the board so that their group mates could critique their work, catch mistakes, or learn from them.
In this assignment, students were asked to create a poster that we could hang in the hallway that would explain a lab we just completed to 9th graders. The purpose of the assignment was twofold - one, to make their learning visible to the community so that they might be asked about it, and two, to help them figure out what was important (they can only fit so much on the paper) so that they could better organize their lab reports. This was the second lab they did for my class, and the lab reports were a huge improvement over the first round.
Phase 4: Use documentation as a way for students to reflect on their own learning process
For this activity, students were asked to write out solutions to problems we had already solved together in class. The solutions (without the questions) were hung around the room, and students had to figure out which solutions belonged to the same originating question. Then they had to use the solution to try to write the original question - what values were givens, and which were the students asked to solve in the solution? The last step (not pictured) was for them to critique the solution and grade - how could the student have made their reasoning more clear? What made it hard to guess at the original question for this solution. The students enjoyed this activity, especially those whose originating questions were guessed correctly.
Here students were asked to reflect on a prompt silently (a “chalk talk”). The prompt in this case was about the nature of group work, and what was going well (or poorly) in class. My voice is still prominent in this discussion though, as I felt the need to participate in the chalk-talk in order to get students to answer the subquestions I felt were important (e.g. “why do you think one person sometimes ends up doing all the work”).
Phase 5: Use documentation to generate new knowledge without my input
Using the Question Formulation Protocol, I had students generate questions based on playing with the simulator. I told them not to stop to judge the questions, and for the note-taker to write them exactly as they were phrased. They then chose 3 of those questions to prioritize and answer using nothing but the simulator.
This is a screenshot from a PhET simulation. Students were able to play with the simulator, change things, and see what the results were. I did not tell students how to use the simulator, and gave them ~5 minutes to silently observe what happened as they changed the settings.
Once they chose 3 priority questions, they had to write an answer to that question in the form of a declarative sentence. I wrote their answers exactly as they said them on the board. The result was a set of notes in their words that taught them exactly what I would have taught during a lecture. The entire process took a whole 50 minute class period.