Grit

For some reason there's a kind of trendy, TED-talk enthusiasm in the air for this idea that I find off-putting. It's like I can't take seriously any idea that's overly pop-psychologized. Nonetheless, Irene and I have been talking a lot this semester about what we've been calling a lack of intellectual stamina in our inquiry class -- and I'm pretty sure this is the same thing as grit. If students (some) go 5 - 10 minutes without reaching a kind of conclusion they're starting to text, chit-chat, or whine. I'm the kind of person who, as a student, wouldn't humor a teacher -- if I thought what they were having us do was boring or stupid or busy work, I would find something else to do. So I want to be generous with my students and respond to their distraction by finding better ways to engage with the ideas. But increasingly I'm feeling like - for this class in particular - the problem isn't that. It's not that they find the work to be boring/busy-work kinds of things, but they just don't have a stamina for hard questions and extended or tedious inquiry.

I hesitate to say that because it sounds like a deficit model of students and like I'm interpreting their work in one context as representing a broader, context-independent character flaw. Surely there are areas of their life where they do exhibit stamina? (I can think of areas in my life where colleagues would think I lack grit or professionalism, and it's - often - just that I find the area kind of boring or a waste of time. Though sometimes I am being kind of unprofessional...)

But "grit" research suggests there's something to this idea that there's a more context-independent metric of grit, and that it matters.

Anyway. Over the long Thanksgiving break (we won't see them for 12 days) we're giving them a gritty homework (tracking motions in the sky for extended periods and developing physical models), and we're asking them to read about grit and discuss their ability to display (or not display) grit when working on this longer assignment. Very curious how this will go.

What's an orbit?

I had a fascinating conversation with a student who - in the beginning of the semester - was a tough nut to crack. Generally disinterested and disengaged but now really on it.

Her group is interested in gravity and what keeps things up in orbit. She asked - beginning with "I don't even know how to word this" - but essentially asking is an orbit out there and things get "in orbit" the way something would get into a current (they referenced Finding Nemo; apparently Nemo gets into the "East Australia Current" in pursuit of some goal), or is it a thing you get "in" like the way you get in a bad mood? -- a state of being, and not a place of being. And I can imagine a mathematician or physicist thinking of orbits in both ways -- like field lines or something -- a class or group (with an infinite cardinality) of pathways/velocities that meet the conditions for orbit. And I can also imagine thinking of an orbit as a property of an object.

To me, this question sounds like the kinds of things I ponder with colleagues all the time. How should we conceptualize the kind of thing that identity is, or heat, or work? It opens up all sorts of cool questions about metaphor, too, and (as does everything) reminds me of my dissertation research.

Richard (husband) is teaching for the first time and is feeling demoralized (he's sitting across from me grading labs and students found that momentum increased during a collision and report this matter-of-factly); it's so easy for intro physics to be a place where students work hard to do the thing the teacher wants them to do - learn some kinds of symbolic manipulations, say - and really not learn anything at all. It's easy to have weird non-conversations where students are just trying to guess what nouns go in what slots. And I definitely have moments like that when teaching - but the conversation last week on orbits was so genuine and scholarly, it had the feeling like we were on to something interesting and worth knowing.

Students' questions

In Inquiry we let the third "unit' of the semester be students' choice. They chose (after some negotiations) astronomy. ("Dreams" was a top contender and Irene and I vetoed it. I think this was the right thing to do, but I'm sad we were so authoritarian about it. "Baking" and "brains" were also contenders that we said were fine. As two separate options.)

I stressed that often when people say they plan to "research topic X" what they really mean is "write a book report on topic X." And while that kind of a synthesis is useful, what we do in this class is not that -- so as they narrowed down the topic they wanted to study they should determine whether or not this is something they can observe/collect data on/etc. I thought they would then realize they needed to choose really simple topics -- phases of the moon, the path of the sun, movement of stars -- but they still picked some more aggressive topics.

But as they got started (one on asteroids/meteors, one on gravity, one on the night sky from different hemispheres (after some helpful suggestions from me), one on why it seems like the sun rises/sets more quickly than it moves at midday, and two on tides) they worked their way to the "right" kinsd of questions.

So the tides group looks at tide tables -- one group wants to find a spot on the earth that has a similar "moon" to us. They think that Madagascar (almost the opposite side of Earth from us) should have the moon 12 hours after us. But this isn't true for the sun (they have summer, we have winter) and so they start getting into really core, simple questions about the moon's path. The other group has looked up tide tables and sees the word "lunar day" (24:48 from moon rise to moonrise) - they can *say* what it means, but then they get tripped up later -- thinking that the moon is out during the day at "certain times of year" (as if it's an annual and not monthly pattern) -- so they'll be making observations about that soon to better understand where the moon is during these tides.

The sunrise/set group has a group member who has always been really great at asking core questions and investigations -- so they're doing great.

The night-sky group I have looking at star trails and they make some sense of the circle pattern and the center of the circle being above the north pole. But it becomes clear they haven't really heard about the north star or at least they haven't made sense of it -- so now we're using iPad apps to watch stars move during the course of our 2 hour class. We'll do night observations soon.

The asteroid group raised questions that I love. There's a yearly pattern to meteor showers, and yet those showers are named after constellations (Leonids are soon, then Geminids) - and I think this can really tell us something interesting about our place in the universe -- as a solar system and more broadly.

The gravity group I didn't spend much time with -- so no updates there.

But I feel like I'm learning this lesson over and over again. Trust students to ask interesting questions; take Polya's maxim seriously: "If there is a problem you cannot solve there is an easier problem that you can. Find it." -- and that skill at doing that is far more useful than being able to identify easily-solved problems that *don't* relate to bigger questions. So now instead of studying the phases of the moon (which one student said she's learned over and over again), we're studying the pattern of the tides... and that forces us to ask really precise questions about the moon -- and those questions come from the students and not from me.

What "counts" as having done science?

Inquiry has been fascinating this semester (not always in a good way). So much going on outside of classes that I haven't given this class enough reflection and attention here. But here's a snapshot.

For the first time, we have two students with a pretty strong background in science -- one with a physiology background (has done an eye dissection and learned the parts and functions - if superficially - we'll call him Trevor); one with a fantastic high school teacher and he knows much of what we're covering (again, lots he could learn, but really gets some important ideas - we'll call him Hunter). On top of that, both are guys -- in a class that's 80% women -- and both approach their role in class as explaining the science to those who didn't understand. The others, assuming that the right answers were a good thing, were just happy to have someone speak up and explain what was going on. It led to stilted discussions and some frustration in the first 4 weeks.

So for our second unit (eye dissections) we separated the guys (5 of them) into their own group, in their own room. On the first day, Hunter is drawing accurate diagrams about what focus is. He explains that light bends because it changes speed. And so on. Trevor lists parts in detail (the fovea/macula/ciliary body). After a homework asking, essentially, what "problems" the eye has to solve (like, if we had a retina on our skin would we see? what else would need to happen?) -- Trevor says "the parts of the eye need to discombobulate all those light rays... nevermind. I don't like that word..." - there was a total shift in his language and talking (he used hedge words and non-science vocab) and I *did* like the word. They worked on the problem of "discombobulation" and how the lens might separate out the rays -- essentially re-drawing the diagram Hunter drew the week before. It was a day before Hunter even realized they *had* re-drawn his diagram -- he never realized that his diagram showed that the job of a lens is to help 'rearrange' light rays so that they are discombobulated and create images.

And yet! after all that, Hunter and Trevor really want to spend their time re-deriving Snell's Law. (They aren't saying it that way -- but it's clear that they remember that some "law" is really important for light -- they've even looked up the law (I'm sure) -- and so they want to somehow re-derive it.)  But a third student... let's call him Cort ... is really thinking. He comes in claiming that sun can't be focused on the back of the eye - it must spread out a little or our peripheral vision would be blurry. He's asking really great questions, constructing diagrams, playing around with materials. He's challenging the other two -- why does this matter? What are you trying to find?

I'm not relating the story well, I think, but Hunter and Trevor, with their more extensive science backgrounds, think that finding Snell's Law will count as having "done" science and reached an important conclusion. As opposed to the law being a mathematical representation of a mechanistic idea (and one they've already articulated, at that!) -- or a way of being precise enough to test a possible explanation for how it is that lenses work -- they're treating "deriving Snell's Law" as the *goal* of their inquiry, rather than a representation of an idea that supports that inquiry. I think there are scientists who might agree with them?-- that E=mc^2 is the achievement/goal of Einstein's inquiry, rather than recognizing that the equivalence principle tells us something about space-time - about bigger stories adn surprises about how our world works. But - particularly in this class - mathematical statements of laws are never really the point.

It's been so rare for my students to *want* to mathematize their ideas that it hasn't really come up before -- this idea that the mathematical statement (F=ma, n1 sin theta1 = n2 sin theta2...) isn't what science is all about, but one tool for the doing of science.

And, alas, we're not taping in the guys' room; just in the larger classroom - so none of this is on video. And sorry that these notes are a little scattered - but I wanted to put them down somewhere before I forgot!

2013 - 2014 Goals

I'll be teaching a 3/3 load this year -- 14 in-class hours and 3 office hours a week. Here's hoping I get a grader!

GRANTS:

1. I'm PI on a Bechtel grant to help integrate instruction in the three courses. (In fact, the only buyout I'm taking this semester is for Bechtel -- no release time for the writing or TE projects.) The emphasis is on creating long-term portfolios of their ideas and work, so that the PSET ideas connect to those in LSET and Geos, and then on into their future teaching careers. I primarily wrote this grant for political reasons -- to better advertise the work that Irene, Julie and I are doing -- and so one of the things I want to do is better publicize the work. Goals: (1) implement our portfolios and assess them; (2) publicize the work - to the College, Provost, and CSU System; (3) position us for more sustained grants from Bechtel.

2. Also up and running is the writing grant with Irene and Kim. We have structures in place to collect a ton of data this semester, and an outline for organizing chapters of this book (teaching writing in inquiry)  - organized around particular strategies/assignments we use (the gallery walk, "silent science," close readings of text, notebooks, peer feedback, etc.). My goal here: be disciplined about collecting and archiving data, draft a chapter for one of these strategies/assignments, keep a beautiful and careful blog.

3. And the grant I'm both most excited about and least organized about is the transformative experiences grant with Brian. I'm hiring on Tony (grad student in English who worked on the writing side of the grant last semester) who I hope to get involved in doing more of an ongoing series of interviews, possibly even get him on a conference trip. Goals: create our best attempt at a survey for light and one for Newton's laws. Interview students in a range of physics classes about TE: majors, non-majors, and preservice teachers (including PSET) and SGSI (pre and post?) -- in particular, ask them about their TEs and imagined TE ("some students report that they do think about physics a lot outside of physics class -- what kinds of things do you think they think about?"). I have $ budgeted for Rachel to come and help out with evaluation -- I wonder when would be the best time to schedule that?  -- one big goal is to be better with organizing and supervising the grad student.

PAPERS:

I have Tuesdays set aside for writing. Here's to reasonable goals and winter break.

4. 5 Laws -- I hope to get a lot of progress on this paper cranked out over a 4-day stretch in Seattle.
5. Inhaling Calories -- ?? -- Hoping to get this out by winter break. The more work that Maryland does, the less relevant/new it becomes! Back burner, though, relative to the other four.
6. EPPTE book chapter: will write a huge chunk of this, I hope, while at the beach next week.  I stay out of the sun from 10 - 2 and I have seven days and I think it will write quickly. Due Sept. 1.
7. ICLS paper??  Dying to go and have something to present. Something responsiveness-related? TE-related? Writing?
8. NOS paper.  (second author) Accepted with revisions. But need to find time to do the revisions.

SABBATICAL PLANNING:

Due mid-September. Will need to solicit letters from colleagues earlier than that.

TEACHING:

Based on the MOOC (and Sharon Farguson!), I want to really make an effort to know, notice and appreciate my students this year. I think I'm pretty good at doing this in a general sense and I *love* writing letters of recommendation so that I can really spend time thinking about what it is I see and value in a particular student. But I want to go so far as to keep a database (seems hokey?) to help me keep tabs -- surely some students fall through the cracks or are less notice and appreciated.

PSET is also a class that is easy to run as-is, and remarkably hard to modify. It takes a chapter (2 - 3 weeks) for students to get into the rhythm - labs aren't graded - but they need to have them done carefully to do well; homework is graded but only on completion; some homework graded more than others; end-of-chapter quizzezs; lectures need clickers, etc. - and adding more apparatus is hard. I'd really love to shift from the I/O and S/R diagrams to energy-tracking representations and energy theater.  Wonder if I can do that in one class and not the other -- and take some data?

TE

two summer TE stories:

1. Got this text earlier this summer "Hi Leslie, it's ___. I just moved and was unpacking old boxes when I doing my inquiry notebook. I am so proud of that thing! I just spent an hour explaining the human eye and pinhole theatre to my boyfriend. I miss you. Hope you're doing well!" (was in class three + years ago)

2. Got this in my inbox just now from a student leading a trip to the train museum - a picture of CMY processing (was in class one year ago):

"Had to share it :)

Planning a sabbatical

I'm eligible for a sabbatical. It's not a given - in fact, it can be really competitive to be awarded a semester-long sabbatical. But I'm told that the year-long sabbatical has fewer applicants than spots (because it's essentially a semester-long sabbatical and a semester of unemployment) -- so I plan to apply for a year of sabbatical for 2014-2015; grant funding can keep me afloat (~80%) for the unpaid semester. But what to do and where to go?

Some constraints: 
1. We cannot afford a mortgage + a rent. So I either need (a) extra income; (b) a free place to stay; (c) to stay in Chico; or (d) be gone for a year and find a tenant. (Given the farm, the 7 chickens, the two dogs, and the amount of rent I'd need to charge to cover our mortgage, I don't see (d) as particularly viable. I'd have to find someone who really loves and knows how to garden. Fruit trees alone can feel like a full time job when they turn ripe.)
2. I would like to be able to write a book.
3. I need structure and people in my day -- wide open time with me to fill makes me a bit crazy.

Some places I'd like to go:
1. Seattle. Because I love the people and the city - and there's enough going on there to keep me feeling productive and connected. Perhaps enough Seattle-ites to bounce from spare-room to spare-room?
2. Oregon State. I'm really intrigued by Paradigms, I feel far removed from physics and would like to revisit those ideas, and it's close by. I also love anything Emily van Zee does, and she's been doing cool things there.
3. Colorado. They seem to have a million things going on and I'd love to see their LA program, meet their new crop of grad students, and be able to sit in on all the various cool projects. (They're hiring four postdocs in PER right now. Crazy!)
4. Tufts. Can't get enough of that David Hammer.
5. Exploratorium. Love SF and love that museum, plus it's close by. But hard to imagine how to make that work financially. I would love to live in the city for a year.
6. Deep Springs. Gorgeous, and I'm fascinated by the place. I could teach a class and have free housing and food, plenty of time to write, and Richard would love it.
7. My parents' place. Which would involve a free place to stay, time with family, and a long cross country trip. I could really love living at the beach for months on end. But not much PER. Maybe pay a visit to UNC-G?

(is your location not on the list? want a visitor? have a place I could stay and interesting things I could do? Let me know.)

... one last thought: I'd like to teach inquiry in the prison system at some point. I don't know how to do this. Any leads?

Blogging the MOOC: Part 3 - Mistakes & Persistence (Summary)

So far we know:

1. Students have strong, often negative, reactions to math. Both 'good' and 'bad' students.
2. Some simple psychological interventions can go a long way: (1) "I believe in you" and (2) values writing. This seems consistent with the ideas of framing - you can shift frames dramatically with simple statements, and framing matters.
3. Brains are really quite plastic and can grow and change - and believing that can help students a lot.

The next session is dedicated to mistakes and persistence. Beginning, again, with some neuroscience data on mistakes "creating" a synapse (this feels like a goofy interpretation of the research to me!) -- though this link seems pretty cool. Again we reflect first on our own ideas and reactions when we make mistakes, and then we see Dweck, who describes this:

 I followed students through two schools over three years, and in one of the schools students are taught traditionally with demonstration and practice and exercises and in the other school students were given big open problems to work on and solve, so that's... known as PBL, or Problem Based Learning. They didn't really know how to solve them, and sometimes they were given choices of problems, they were encouraged always to choose the ones that were difficult for them, and then they just came up with ideas. So they were learning math to solve problems, and if they needed some new math methods the teacher would teach it to them in the context of the problem. So the typical method in classrooms is students taught methods, then they solve problems. But in this classroom students got big open problems, and then they learned the methods to help them solve them. The students started at these two schools at the same levels in maths achievement, but the students at the problem based schools, ended up scoring at significantly higher levels on the national exam. And I was able to follow up and find the students eight years later, and they also ended up in more professional jobs. 

Now back to Jo Boaler, who does the "what the marketplace needs..." argument -- that employers need people who can persist and solve difficult problems, while our schools are set up to:

Guy Brousseau termed the didactic contract. And he pointed out that what often happens in classrooms is this. Students get stuck on a question and they call the teacher over for help, and they want to be led step by step through the work. But that takes out the cognitive demand of the problem, and the trouble is, kids don't expect to struggle and they want to be helped with each step. And teachers in their turn feel an implicit contract that says they should help students who need help. So both the teachers and the students work within this contract, and they work together to empty the interaction of learning. 

She links the need for students to "feel comfortable being wrong before being right, to live in the world as a careful observer, open to different experiences, to play with ideas without prematurely judging oneself or others, to persist through difficulties and have a willingness to be misunderstood, sometimes for long periods despite the conventional wisdom" to the Common Core. That this is what the Common Core is trying to do. And students need to be comfortable making mistakes.

We hear some ways teachers praise mistakes, have students write wrong answers on the board, and similar ideas. We try out a math task that's open ended (interpreting a graph) and think about a message we could give students about mistakes.

The data here was interesting -- application seemed a bit less profound (slogans, praise).

Paper idea: Trajectories

I really enjoyed talking with Ian Beatty at PERC. He is grappling with wanting radical changes in his instruction, but unsure of where to begin. We (me, Brian and Ian) talked about the inquiry class and he wondered if it was okay to let students leave class with "wrong ideas." I said that they *always* leave class with "wrong" ideas (actually I might say something like: "they leave class modeling the world in ways that we know will break down or prove inefficient") -- but they leave on a trajectory that *we* imagine to be productive. So at the end of first year physics we imagine a trajectory of ideas that will take them from Newton's Laws to Relativity and Lagrangians. Or from geometric optics to the wave nature of light.

I gave the example of my students being perplexed by how magnification is possible (focus, we defined, is when all the rays 'starbursting' from one point come back to a point - so then it seems like they should 'spread' a little - not come back to a single point - when magnifying an image) -- which led us to consider whether or not there are more 'points' in one area than another -- and I did a small aside on that (it's easy to prove that there aren't more points in one than another; at least for line segments).  This is a step that we don't take in intro optics. We just take for granted that it is possible to magnify an image. (Ultimately you'll run into problems with ħ -- but not with gaps between points for some other reason.) My students left class not knowing the lens-makers equation; students leave a typical intro class not knowing how magnification is possible.

I feel like there's a paper in there somewhere.

Papert

30 years ago. Papert discussing: falling in love (as a part of learning). embodiment. transitional (boundary?) objects.

Blogging the MOOC: Part 2 - Mindset. (Analysis)

In my mind, the "mindset" book is trendy, so this news shouldn't be super surprising, but then again, it may not be on most physics teacher/prof's radars. It's also one thing to be "on your radar" and another thing entirely to be employed in your courses.

This part of the class is mostly data -- and I'd love to see (as noted in the last post) more student interviews, some readings, or something other than the video lecture.

Nonetheless, we give a lot of lip service to the idea that "all students can learn ___" but rarely do we talk about what that means, why we believe it, and data showing that it's true.

Blogging the MOOC: Part 2 - Mindset. (Summary)

"...the paths of a synapse are like footprints in the sand. They can become firm paths if they're traveled a lot, but without use, they wash away."

We hear about neuroscience research on brain plasticity and the ability to grow your hippocampus (cab drivers do!) or rewire your brain after surgery.  And, given this ability to really grow and change your brain, we should expect that students who are not "good" at math can learn to be good:

So here's the irony, children can develop half a brain or change their brain significantly yet, we think kids can't develop a few neurons they need to learn algebra. Many people think that some kids are capable or smart or high ability or what you want to call it and some are not.

And then she summarizes:

So to recap, brain research tells us a number of things. It tells us every child can excel in mathematics in school from elementary to high school. It tells us about the potential of the brain to grow, no matter where students start from, and that potential is huge. It tells us that every new learning experience is, changes your ability. Even though we think of students of having a certain ability or not being high or low, every experience can change that ability. So we use fixed ability language all the time, high and low kids, and we need to rethink that. So scientists know that kids can develop the wiring to learn any maths in school, but many teacher and parents still believe in a kind of natural ability. And a number of schools, probably most schools, are still set up on outdated models of fixed ability thinking. 

She links this ability to grow your mind to research on "mindset" -- that students who think of abilities as "fixed" are less likely to succeed compared to those who think of abilities as changeable. We continue to reflect on what that means and how it might impact teaching. Then another video with this bit of data:

So we know that after mindset interventions, African American students show the sharpest increase in grades and in valuing school. We also know that a growth mindset eliminates any gender gaps in performance. Even in the highest SAT levels, the very top level where there still gender differences, we know that if we only look at growth mindset students, those gender differences disappear. 

(Sam noted that, to Dweck, all of our educational problems stem from this mindset issue. Which is surely an overstatement. But this is pretty compelling data that mindset matters a lot.)

I find this data really fascinating -- the presentation less so, but it's hard to know what to do besides listen. Perhaps some brief student quotes/interviews in which we gather some evidence for their mindset?

Blogging the MOOC: Part 1 - Psychological Interventions. (Analysis)

So why should Sam (and others) be interested in this?

1. It's a model of PD. And right now there really is no model for faculty PD, short of attending a workshop or going to the new faculty workshop. Our campus "CELT" (center for excellence in learning and teaching) sponsors small faculty grants to improve teaching, and there may (??) be a market for this kind of PD effort for faculty?

2. I love the ideas.

3. I love the structure - the video lectures are short, captioned (mostly I just read those!) and engaging. They are punctuated with reflection exercises. It's fun to read what others are saying. Some of the responses are naive, some great.

4. It's intriguing to think about what it would take to do something similar (a MOOC like this) in physics. What would our research base be? What would be our compelling videos? Do they already exist, or should I interview students about their experiences in introductory physics? (Brian's student's comment is heartbreaking -- http://teachbrianteach.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/teaching-by-telling-a-student-perspective/ -- faculty should hear this.) I feel like some videos of my students' incredible ideas (elementary ed students connect magnification to the problem of the cardinality of infinite sets!) would be inspiring - faculty would realize that their students could do a lot more if they employed different methods.
...

Stay tuned.

Blogging the MOOC: Part 1 - Psychological Interventions. (Summary)

The course begins with Jo Boaler suggesting that - while math teaching is incredibly complex, difficult, and important work,

"what we now know is that small moments, small conversations, and messages to students can make a huge, huge difference."

That's intriguing. But then she postpones that conversation and asks us to consider this statistic, and what might be driving this:

"Currently in the US, 50% of students are in two-year colleges. 70% of those students are placed into remedial maths courses. Basically, repeating the maths they took in high school. And, only one in ten students complete those courses. For the other 90%, they actually leave college. That, they don't get through those maths course and that's the end of their college career."

It's a powerful start to the class. Of the students who are pursuing higher education, a good fraction (~30%) will fail to complete "high school level" math.  Moreover (next video, after reflecting on that statistic), students who DO succeed and pass their courses and graduate often still have deep wounds when talking about their math experience. After these anecdotes, we are again asked to reflect on those - more personally now - is it a surprise? does it connect to your own reasons for taking the class?

After this, we hear from interviews with Stanford students (where she teaches a course that addresses "why math is so traumatic for people, why is it so inequitable?"). I love watching interviews with students. And they report:

• for high school it was mostly just like,... basically for the most part they gave you the formulas, and you just have to plug that in. 
• For me at least, I always had trouble with math in the sense that, it never quite reached me, I always found there was a disconnect in the classroom, for example Why would someone go to the store and buy 300 apples? I would never do that. So I would always think of math as like, this fairy tale land. Which I would never use. so I think that there's a pretty big disconnect for me. At least in that sense. I was kind of, discouraged as a kid, growing up.
• Now when I think about math, I kind of cringe and feel anxiety just thinking about it. Those feelings I felt when trying to do that math this quarter. So I hate it a lot. It's boring and dry, and it's a lot of work. 
• The first thing that comes to mind when I think of math is just a series of formulas and equations.
• I feel very stupid, like I don't belong in that academic world, when I think about math, it basically drives me away from pursuing higher education.
• I think a lot of people said to me "Like we know math isn't your thing, but that's okay because something else is your thing." And while that's true, I think personally, it was pretty detrimental for my experiences in math, especially in high school.
• Growing up it was always me in a class full of a lot of males. And so the teacher tended to favor these students who were good. And so they didn't talk to me at all. And when I looked at that. When I looked at my sophomore, year, my junior year. Just, being excluded. Like, I wasn't worth talking to. That felt the worst. And it just. Totally was different from, like say, an English course, where they would talk to every student. In like, my math courses, completely ignored, and I just felt not important. So, when I think about math, I generally tend to think about my past experiences. Especially my sophomore year in high school, where I felt the lowest. And it just totally drove me away from pursuing anything in math. I feel very dumb and like, inadequate when I think about that topic. And I don't feel good enough.

You watch these students and you *feel* for them. Either sad that they don't really enjoy math, or (especially) sad when they talk about it in such emotional terms (anxiety, feel stupid, don't belong). It's powerful in a way because it IS Stanford students-- students who we can't write off as students who don't try -- but I'd also love to see other, more middle-of-the-bell-curve (Kanim!) students, too.

After this intro (in which we learn that many students are not succeeding, adn even those that do are traumatized) we look into stereotype threat -- immediately targeting the idea that success in math is not simply a measure of ability, but other messages in the air about who should and who shouldn't be good at this thing. There is some powerful data (Sian Beilock included!), links to good articles and books. And we start considering what we as teachers and parents can do to counteract that.  First we jot down our own ideas, and then we see some experimental work:

they divided students into two groups in English high school classrooms. And everybody got diagnostic feedback on an essay, which was critical but really good feedback. half of the students randomly also got a sentence. which was this, I am giving you this feedback because I believe in you. The teachers didn't know who got that sentence. What they found was those students achieved significantly better in the essay, they made more improvements. They also achieved significantly better a year later - particularly the black students. So white students improved, but African-American students they made significant improvements, from that one single statement. 

We were asked to reflect on that -- and I immediately thought of three high school experiences that meant the world to me -- for example, Mary Boone was my private lesson teacher (and in the symphony) and she was showing me a weird flute fingering and said something like "you'll only ever use this fingering in this one piece. But every orchestra audition will ask you to play this one piece, just to see if you know this fingering." It was the first time that a professional musician seemed to take for granted that I would be a professional musician. Every correction/suggestion/critique from then on I interpreted through that lens. It makes me wonder if my students would be similarly encouraged by me treating them as future teachers? (There was something so unobtainable about being a professional musician that it seems particularly encouraging to hear that message?)

The second little intervention that we see is a 'values' writing - similar to what they did at Boulder (right? or was it in BC?).

 the minority students who completed the writing, so it's about their own values, closed the racial achievement gap over the next year by 40%. So, we know that students with the greatest detachment from their schools and the least trust that people believe in them in a school environment. that's minority students. It can be girls in man's environments in similar ways. It's those students that gain the most from these interventions that really target social belonging.

And then we reflect on something we could do in our classes. For me, it's targeted feedback that subtly presumes for students that they are beginning professional teachers - and tracking that feedback to make sure that all students are receiving genuine feedback along those lines.

This brings us to the end of the first session. Jo notes:

All of these interventions are psychological interventions. They're not about content and they're not about pedagogy. But pedagogy and content are extremely important, and we're going to be thinking about those for pretty much all of the later sessions. 

Responsiveness MOOC

I'm really loving Jo Boaler's MOOC. It's sending me to teacher's blogs (Dan Meyer, Fawn Nguyen), curriculum websites, research papers, a list of references, etc. I see videos of classrooms and reflect on what's going on and how I could do something similar. She links it to the common core/NGSS. It's really excellent.

I wonder if it would be possible/timely to have a similar kind of class for responsive teaching in science. Primarily as a way of disseminating really good work. I don't think we're there yet -- meaning, the research base that Boaler talks about is extensive and we don't have that (I don't think) -- but I would love to try to make a similar class, link it to Fred's website, Hammer & van Zee's work, my class, great blogs in physics education, etc.

And - no joke - physics faculty should be required to take continuing education/PD courses.

More MOOCing

"So they gave grades, grades and feedback and just feedback and they found, that again, it was the students who only got feedback who outperform the others and those who got grades and feedback did the same as those who just got grades. Because it turned out that once you give a grade, the student just looks at that. They thought it might be the best of both worlds to get both.  But they found that the very best thing you can do for students is to ditch the grade and give them diagnostic feedback. And that feedback, helps them understand how they can improve."

I wonder if I could do that. Ditch the grades, I mean, until some kind of summative assessment.

"So assessment for learning makes use of diagnostic feedback. And its main focus is on helping students become aware of where they are and where they should be in ways that help them bridge the gap. And that awareness is often built through self and peer assessment. Teachers set mathematical goals for students, not list of chapter titles or contents. But, details of the important ideas and how they are linked. And they can be given a statement, sort of very clear and communicate the point of the work that they are working on. For example the students could have the statement, I have understood the difference between mean and median and know when they should be used. Very clearly tells them the point of that lesson or piece of work. The students then assess their, or their peers, work against the statements. And as time goes on, something really important happens. Students start to take more responsibility for their learning as they become aware of what they should be learning, and what the important ideas are. And in studies of self-assessment in action, researchers have found students are very perceptive about their own understandings. And they don't over or underestimate it."

I don't do that in inquiry as a matter of principle -- I want students to help work out what it is they need to work out. But I wonder if, on days when I'm trying to get at a point (like how to use diagrams to make predictions), I can articulate that?

MOOCing

I'm taking this:
https://class.stanford.edu/courses/Education/EDUC115N/How_to_Learn_Math/

So far the ideas are not new, but I'm enjoying the class, class structure, and experiencing a MOOC.

IAMNOTATFFPER (notes to myself on what is done, and what needs to be done)

So far this summer:
1. book chapter to Responsiveness folks. Was reminded that a deadline does wonders for productivity. It was miserable getting it out in time!
2. TPT article submitted.
3. One PERC paper written.
4. Digging into the Inhaling Calories paper again (kind of stuck. chopped most of it and now it seems kind of trivial. blech.)

As second author:
1. One paper back (accepted pending revisions)
2. One more PERC paper written (need to give feedback)
3. One PERC in the works.

It's been intense, actually, and I'd really love a break.  (and to anyone who is planning a conference this summer -- FFPER, Responsiveness, PERC -- *thank you.* What time consuming work, and so valuable and - I think - undervalued.)

This week I work closely with Kim and Irene on our NSF Writing grant.
The week after that is work with Julie and Irene on the Bechtel grant.
The week after that is the Responsiveness Conference !! SEATTLE !!
The week after that is AAPT/PERC.

Then 10 days with *nothing* scheduled. -- I'll need to use those days to prep for the semester and hopefully take a 3 - 5 day backpacking trip.

Then a week with the family in NC.
Then two weeks in Seattle.
And then school starts.

TE, Expansive Framing, Transfer

Working on a PERC paper and trying to tease apart transfer and TE. I think TE is a specific *kind* of transfer (Pugh agrees)-- and so this suggests that Engle et al's work on expansive framing, and its role in transfer, can be leveraged to consider how certain classroom strategies/practices can encourage TE.

Below are quotes from Engle and Pugh:

Transfer occurs when “learning to participate in an activity in one situation [i.e., learning context] ... influence[s] (positively or negatively) one’s ability to participate in another activity in a different situation [i.e., transfer context]” (Greeno, Smith, & Moore, 1993, p. 100).

Whereas transformative experiences "have been defined as those experiences in which students actively use science concepts to see and experience their everyday world in meaningful, new ways" (Pugh, 2004). In particular, it includes:

(1) motivated use: a type of transfer that refers to the application of learning in a context (including out-of-school contexts) in which such use is not required (Pugh & Bergin, 2006).  

(2) expansion of perception:  a result of motivated use and occurs when a person uses a concept to see some aspect of the world in a new way (that is, a result of transfer - it seems to me that transfer (not motivated use) is important - that is, I don't see that the use needs to be "not required" to count as expansion of perception)  

(3) experiential value: the valuing of content for the experience it provides (I think that content that allows one to pass an exam for med school is not the kind of 'experiential value' that I'm interested in... but I think Pugh still considers this a weak kind of experiential value)

So transfer is critical for TE - but that transfer must be not required, causes you to see the world in a new way and value the experience.

Engle, et al., have argued that expansive framing ("students are positioned as actively contributing to larger conversations that extend across time, places, and people) promotes transfer, and suggests several mechanisms by which that happens:

How expansive framing may promote transfer ... Expansive framing may: (a) foster an expectation that students will continue to use what they learn later, which may affect the learning process in ways that can promote transfer; (b) create links between learning and transfer contexts so that prior learning is viewed as relevant during potential transfer contexts; (c) encourage learners to draw on their prior knowledge during learning, which may involve them transferring in additional examples and making generalizations; (d) make learners accountable for intelligently reporting on the specific content they have authored; and (e) promote authorship as a general practice in which students learn that their role is to generate their own solutions to new problems and adapt their existing knowledge in transfer contexts.

All of those (a - e) relate to (1) (motivated use); connections to (2) & (3) are less clear -- it seems (kind of) clear to me that transfer and expansion of perception MUST be the same thing?

Expansive framing (somewhat) stands in contrast to what Pugh suggests (2 approaches): "The job of the teacher is to identify the significant elements of a concept. Why is the concept important? What anticipation might it foster? What can the concept explain, reveal, or illuminate? What experiences can it create for students? And then focus instruction around these elements. In this way, the teacher can craft an idea out of a concept as an artist crafts a sculpture out of rock."

Alternatively, he suggests an apprenticeship approach: "The goal would be to create a context where particular ways of experiencing the world through concepts are displayed and valued and to help students come to participate more centrally in these experiences...the teacher would display how a concept functions as a true idea for him or her by modeling everyday use of the concept to more fully perceive the world and by modeling the excitement or satisfaction that comes from doing so. The teacher would also provide supported opportu- nities for students to use the concept to expand perception, first in-class and then out-of-class. The goal is to help students move from having in-class, supported experiences with the concept to having out-of-class transforma- tive experiences."


All of this to say: there is good reason to suspect that expansive framing - since it promotes transfers and TE is a particular kind of transfer - will promote TE.

IAMNOTATFFPER & Productivity!

So far this summer:
1 chapter written for the Responsiveness Conference
1 TPT article written, shared with colleagues, and ready to submit
1 accept-with-revisions received (Sci. Ed. article with Irene)

To do: 
1 PERC paper to draft (this week)
2 PERC papers to co-author (next week)
1 PERC poster (2 to help with) (July 11 - 15)
1 AAPT talk (July 11 - 15)
1 review to write (past due! crap!)
2 annual reports due this summer (one this week, one in July)
1 Inhaling Calories paper (ongoing)
1 5 Laws paper (August)
prep videos for Responsiveness Conference (first week of July)


IAMNOTATFFPER is my online writing group this week - we check in again in <2 hours and I need to make some progress. Goals for this week are:
1. PERC paper drafted and to Brian for feedback.
2. Regular progress on the Inhaling Calories paper

Will be posting here as I work on those.

Sigh.

Just received four separate emails with four separate ads for an upcoming "reunion" for people who graduated with science degrees from Chico State.

Here they are:

Flat Stanley and TE

I can't believe I haven't posted this here yet.

Flat Stanley - a children's book character - visited Chico (courtesy of my 7 y.o. nephew) to learn all about the climate and geography. For a week, he went with me to classes, the park, the garden, etc., snapping photos and having a grand old time: http://flatstanleychico.blogspot.com/

I really loved it - it wasn't some contrived schooly thing, but instead felt like I had a 7 y.o. boy with me-- I had to see Chico through his eyes and remember what kinds of things about California are novel and interesting to a 1st grader. It was eye-opening and fun. I was particularly proud of myself when I thought "ROCKS are different here! We should photograph volcanic rocks!" I have no idea if Liam (nephew) would agree that volcanic rocks are cool, but I suspect so.

Tony (grad student) and I started calling this a "Flat Stanley" moment - when your relationship with someone or some thing gives you a new lens on the world.

For example: I have a facebook friend - one of Richard's childhood friends - who only ever posts weird photos and comments on facebook. Mostly I find it bizarre. But today I saw a half-eaten french-bread sandwich on top of a manila folder with information on lifestyle medicine laying on the curb. I thought "Helmut would love this!" and snapped a photo.  (Exhibit A, below.)

One of the goals of physics instruction should be such "flat stanley" moments, we think. That the class gives you a new lens on the world and reimagine what you're seeing.

One of the quotes I liked (which, oddly enough, I found b/c Helmut posted it to facebook) - is by Ian MacKaye (punk/post punk musician), who notes:

"Skateboarding is not a hobby. And it is not a sport. Skateboarding is a way of learning how to redefine the world around you. For most people, when they saw a swimming pool, they thought, ‘Let's take a swim.' But I thought, ‘Let's ride it.' When they saw the curb or a street, they would think about driving on it. I would think about the texture. I slowly developed the ability to look at the world through totally different means."

What next?

The Science Education Department was an initiative by a former dean. He created the department because courses for future teachers were given low priorities by the science departments. There was little investment in terms of lab equipment, they were taught by lecturer faculty, and by no one with a background in k-12. We now have a department to advocate for these students and classes -- which is great because there are a LOT of future teachers here -- but the culture of the college did not change. So our advocacy only goes so far: we have not been granted classroom space (just one classroom for the department), stockroom space (we have a closet shared by 3 faculty), a stockroom/materials manager, sabbaticals, or money from student learning fees (fees collected by the college to fund the labs). Classroom materials are primarily purchased with start-up funds or grant funds - very little support from the school - and managed by us. 78% of our students are taught by lecturer faculty, most of whom do not have even a master's degree in science.

We requested two more hires for the next year - noting that we cannot sustain a department with so few faculty and so many students. When the ranking came back of what departments will be able to hire, we were ranked 7th (there are 8 departments). Only 4 hires will be moved forward to the provost, so we get no hires again. One of my colleagues is going to leave.

We're going to tell the dean (Friday) that we were quite serious when we said we could not sustain the department; I will request to go back to the physics department. (It's not actually clear how much my contract and retreat rights allow for this, but we'll see.) Our chair will inform the dean that she's leaving. Not sure what will happen next.

Silent Science

We use a strategy (stolen from my english colleagues) that we call "silent science" -- we sit in a circle and everyone, say, diagrams light going through a lens or writes an explanation for something, etc.  Then, after 10 minutes or so, you pass it to the right and they read your work, offer questions, ideas, feedback, etc. Pass again. Pass again... then, after 30 - 40 minutes of that, you get your work back with lots of comments, ideas and suggestions. Plus you've seen 4 or 5 other sets of ideas and considered and commented on those. Then we chat.

One of the reflections that came back today reminded me of the think-then-talker:

The combination of “silent science” and peer review was most helpful to me. We all got a chance to explore our own ideas more wholly before we started to share with the group. I think “silent science” leads to more productive conversations and better peer review then a lot of methods we used in class. It was a lot easier for me because I could understand my ideas first instead of listening to other people’s thoughts while simultaneously forming my own.

Love it.

Some TE Data

Brian and I (emphasis on *I*) need to be working on our Responsiveness Conference paper - but with data coming in and graphs to make, we've been playing around with the TE data.

These are two Chico State classes, both teach light & optics. One for future engineers, one for future teachers. N for both samples is 38.

The TE survey -- more or less! -- asks about their experience in class, out of class, and then a kind of super-out-of-class.  (For example: I talk about these ideas in class..., I talk about these ideas out of class..., I talk about these ideas just for fun... ; or I notice examples in class, I notice examples out of class, I seek out examples out of class.) You would expect (perhaps) that these should drop -- you think of science most during science class, a little less at home, and even less often are you going out of your way to think about these ideas. -- Brian's been noticing that, while this 'drop off' in TE is true, it is MORE true for the standard class than for inquiry.

Some cool data ... not sure if it will be visible on this blog!

Two cool ideas

Grading final papers - describing how the eye works - for inquiry and came across two ideas that I love. Should have copied them so that I have students' words - but here is my description of their ideas:

1. You'd think that as light rays travel they would get smaller and dimmer. Distant objects look small and dim. But a light ray doesn't change at all. Something else must explain why distant objects appear small and dim.

2. The speed of light is slower in the eye than in air and this helps model why light bends as it enters the eye. You'd think that this means that everything we see is in slow motion, but it's not. It takes longer for the "movie" to show up on our retina/screen, but it isn't any slower when it does show up.

Energy Theaters

Class continues to plug away at making energy theaters.

Here is the (nearly final?) Gaussian Gun - with commentary - possibly ready to go (which is good b/c we have just two days of class left).  If it was up to me (and it is, but not entirely because the semester is over), we'd go back into this over and over-- see if we can get a better sense of how speed is changing and a better approximation for the equipotential lines. Play around some more with representations of MPE (we did explore, a little, locating MPE between the ball and magnet - that was their first impulse). This is still a bit handwavey, and I think trying to improve it would be worthwhile.

Something we realized today working on the bicycle was that the energy being transferred must somehow move faster than the links.  Meaning: if the energy in one link moves 'backwards' one link at the same rate that the link itself moves forward by one link, we could not account for the motion correctly. It reminds me all the more of the circuit, in which electrons do not travel anywhere near fast enough to 'deliver' energy to the resistor. It also starts to feel like, if you can say 'this energy here' then there really is something to treating energy as distinguishable.

Bike chain and energy* udpated video

So the top of the chain has more energy than the bottom of the chain. This has been wildly perplexing.

How can a chain, as it moves past the thing it is turning, GAIN energy?

I rephrased this today, saying, it's like someone comes into the room with a little money, leaves the room with a lot of money, and, as they walk out the door, the person at the door didn't give them  money -- that person also gained money! How is that possible?

This analogy turned out to be just perfect.  Here's how it goes:

We're sitting in a room with two doors (we actually are, which made orchestrating this easier) and imagined a circle of people walking into the room and out of the room (this is the bike chain). The people outside have $1 each (this is the 'slack' bike chain on the bottom of the bike - has less KE and less SPE). The people inside have $2 each (these people are the links in the chain on the top). And as the people move from having $1 outside to $2 inside, the person monitoring the doorway (this person isn't part of the chain) GAINS a dollar. At the other doorway, as you walk past, you go from having $2 to $1 -- and, as you do, the person monitoring the doorway LOSES a dollar. Seems impossible.

BUT the direction of $ flow is opposite the direction of people flow.

The rules of the game are:

you step forward and you hand all of your $ to the person behind you. As you pass through the rear doorway, there's a tax and so you can't send it all to the person behind you -- you have to give one to the door monitor. But as you pass through the front doorway there's a bonus.

They need to energy theater this, and they also need to show the build-up to this steady state. But I took a crack at it, too, just because it's fun. Hope this video works. (and while the video looks simple, this was ridiculously hard - not just for them but for me!)

Co-authors? Acknowledgments?

I'm trying to give my Adv Inq students a kick in the rear by requiring them to submit a group article to The Physics Teacher using their Stop Motion Energy Theaters (which, so far, are not very impressive).  I'm writing the intro, drawing on the Energy Project PRST PER papers, and then have clustered students into groups of three to create an energy theater and write it up - talking about broader themes that this particular scenario represents. So it will be an intro (me), three particular scenarios with themes, and a conclusion.

Scenarios are:

bike chain/gears (connects to tension more generally, and circuits in a very cool way)

gaussian gun (connects to exothermic reactions and the presence of energy in teh absence of force)

hot air balloon (connects to a lot of balancing/equilibrium kinds of things -see-saw in particular - and raises questions about fungibility of energy)

Our thoughts on these are hugely informed by others, of course--

Gaussian Gun is classic Energy Project 

Hot Air Balloon is tied closely to the basketball scenario from Energy Project

Bike Chain is hugely informed by Brian Frank (chain accelerates as it speeds up the gear!)

How do I acknowledge people fairly? 

Do any of you readers feel like you'd like to be involved?

One thought is that - if so - I'd have my students share a draft with you, the way I share drafts with writing groups, and you'd Skype and edit and be a co-author along with them on their section?

or am I needlessly sensitive about sharing authorship?

"focus"

Angie Little is coming to visit me and talk about defining. Jotting down recent topics/ideas/terms that might be worth talking about.

Today in class I'm really pushing us -- I really want them to have powerful models for how lenses and the eye work, and there are a few generative ideas out there, so I pushed. They pushed, too. We spent the day with just two groups' diagrams.

One idea that's been powerful is the SeuratSpot (Cassandra) -- when thinking about the pinhole camera, we thought about the world as drawn by Seurat, and each spot would reflect light rays in all directions -- which Adam called the "Half Disco Ball" theory.

We've noticed that lasers sending parallel rays will "cross" one another, and one group calls this the "flipping point" (Katie).

We've modeled how a maglite will have its rays 'bent' back together - so that they go through a lens and are brought to a focus (my word- they aren't there yet) - and this point where the rays from one point cross are called (courtesy of Estefan today), the "Seurat Spot Flipping Point." (SSFP)

A group who has been thinking about the lens and its muscles -- which we called the Lens Tethering Muscle during the dissection -- said that they think the job of the LTM is to adjust where the SSFP is (Amy's idea).

This naming of things caught on and Adam said that a closer (?) object will need to be more 'dished' - I wasn't sure what he meant by 'dished' - flat like plate? - no, more "height of concavity" or HOC.

All of this feels really powerful. the *naming* - not yet defining.

for Rachel and the entropy gang

I'm not taping my advanced inquiry class. But this semester we've been looking into describing kinds of transformations... like K ->G (any time an object moves further from the center of the earth); K -> T (friction/contact initiated)... etc.

the T -> K transformation seems like it raises entropy questions. So far we've got that T -> K happens with expansion. (Can you think of counter examples?)  It's like randomness (TE) is exchanged for more volume (KE).

It relates to the "pressure energy" idea. And I keep hearing whispers of entropy, but I'm really not sure... it feels generative.

Weird discoveries

A blue laser through a lens...

What's going on:
(1) the blue laser is not very monchromatic. It contains green light.
(2) glass isn't perfectly clear, it contains impurities (iron? and not even sure that's an 'impurity'?) which (I think) scatter green light.
(3) having an index of refraction doesn't only make light bend, it makes light reflect.

Why this is the wrong cool thing to notice right now...
(1) we've been describing lasers as reasonably monochromatic light.
(2) we're modeling our eyeball lenses on these lenses and it's kind of convenient to assume all colors of light do the same thing in the lens. No chromatic aberrations and no weird scattering of green.
(3) some people have started trying to describe why lenses flip images as having to do with these double reflections of light and it's not very generative...
(4) we have a week left, and I do want some normative ideas.

Maybe this would be something to think about in responsive teaching?

Of interest: Kim's reaction to the discovery v. mine.

What is solar energy?

I came to office hours today and a student I've never met was sitting in the hallway. She has a project on "solar energy" for her communications class and needed to interview an "expert." I have no idea where she got my name.

Her first question:
What is solar energy?

I felt completely unable to answer this. I thought "there is nothing I can think to say that would not be wildly misinterpreted or misunderstood."

After I made some dumb comments about wiggling charges in the sun making electrons on earth wiggle and trying to make those wiggles cause a current to flow, I showed her the new PhET sim with sun + photovoltaic + heater. She seemed like this made it all clear.

I don't think there's much area in our overlapping venn diagrams...

Papers I'm Trying to Write. Or: Why I Need a Sabbatical.

Papers in progress — well underway:

(1) Responsiveness Conference (due May 30)
    what are the products of responsive inquiry? — some look normative but many don’t… this is a challenge for teachers.

(2) EPPPTE book (due Sept. 1)
    Physics class as supporting students in generating their own ideas about science (kind of a responsiveness theme here) — why this matters and what it looks like in practice.

(3) Inhaling Calories (want done this school year…)
    physics and biology both employ a ‘substance’ metaphor for energy, but vary in what kinds of objects function as ‘containers’ of that energy. This variation - which is often read as an inconsistency to be resolved or a sign of being sloppy with language - is actually linked tightly to the questions and problems that the fields solve and the models they use for solving those problems.  Implications for ‘cross-cutting concepts’ and teaching energy as a coherent single scientific idea.

(4) The Five Laws (want to do over the summer)
    adopting a modeling approach to instruction about energy leads to a set of laws about the relationships between forces and energy transfers and transformations. these laws bear the thumbprint of their developmental trajectory — they sound mechanistic and causal… relate this to Sherin’s work on programming and physics.

(5) Representing Energy for a Physics of Processes & Causation
    This is a PERC reject (grr! it's brilliant!) that is similar to what I’d like to do in the 5 Laws paper. Could turn into one paper (merge with the Five Laws) and get it out the door more quickly.

(6) Student Ideas about Light & the Eye (summer)
    This is a TPT or similar article outlining the kinds of really fascinating ideas that are generated in the Inquiry class. Would be co-authored with students. Or it could be folded into the Effective Practices book?

PERC

(7) Comparing low and high TE instruction (Atkins, Frank)
(8) TE Survey Data overview (Frank, Atkins)
(9) Students’ Rights to Their Own Texts (Jaxon, Atkins)

CCCC

(10) Multimodal composition in science (Jaxon, Atkins)


Paper ideas, but not much progress:
(11) Teaching for Transformative Experiences (long term outcome of the TE grant)
    Model this on Engle, et al.s, paper on transfer - a range of possible mechanisms. Co-write with Brian. Have some drafty ideas, but need more data and thinking.

(12) Zero Speed as Two Frames Long
    TPT paper - could be quick and easy to write. Using stop-motion to think about motion and what it means to be "still" v. "zero speed"

(13) Modeling Energy
    write with students a TPT paper using their stop-motion Energy Theaters

(14) Responsive Inquiry
    with Sam. maybe even Emily van Zee?

(15) Lambertian Surfaces
    what does it mean for a surface to be perfectly rough? - write with Richard and former-student


Papers in R&R/Rejected?

(16) Analogies in discourse (this is a revise and resubmit from my dissertation back when I didn't know what revise-and-resubmit meant)

(17) Lava David (was rejected from JLS after a few rounds of revise and resubmit... send to PRST PER?)

Don't go to grad school?

Over the past 25 years at UW students went from paying (in current dollars) ~$3k of a $17k education to ~$12k of a $16.8k education. (This is true across the country; UW is of interest to me because I started grad school there 15 years ago and now a former student of mine has been accepted.) This means that students today are paying 4x the price for the same value of education. This is already unconscionable - adults who themselves benefited greatly from state support - who used their lack of debt to start businesses, buy homes, have families, and build careers - are not willing to pay that back to the generation after them.

For graduate students, some of the expense has been offset by grant funding. This was true for me - I was given tuition and salary for all 6 years of grad school, thanks to our country's willingness to support pure research and the training of researchers.  -- But this, too, is drying up. Some of that "drying up" is because of the increased pressure for academics to bring in federal funding (because, as noted above, states no longer support higher ed) - and so there is more competition for the same dollars.  But with sequestration, there's more competition for fewer dollars: the funding stream that I rely on (NSF TUES I) is not awarding grants at all this year. This cripples careers, research programs, graduate students, and our undergraduates.

I'm particularly worried about the cohort of potential graduate students who are deciding right now about their future.  Without state or federal support for our students, they have to take out loans to the tune of $25k (at least) per year to go to a "public" university. For those who want to pursue careers in pure research, it's pretty simple math to realize this is a losing proposition - faculty salaries and positions are as impacted as student tuition. While M.D. students face high student loan debt, they can walk into a career with exceedingly low unemployment rates and high salaries. Ph.D.'s interested in research face an incredibly tight job market for relatively low salaries. (I'm a tenured physics professor earning $60k a year; my husband, who also has a ph.d. in physics, cannot find academic work. Had we gone into debt for our degrees, we would be beyond broke. I really cannot advise someone to go into debt for a ph.d. if they want to be an academic.)

So I'm advising a potential grad student - someone who would be a phenomenal student and researcher and colleague - the kind of person who would offer more than a reasonable return on our national investment - not to go to grad school. She worked in the lab with me at Dartmouth, taught with me at Governor's School, worked at the South Pole station for two polar summers, taught at a charter school in Boston, and is now a NOLS instructor in Alaska. She's fascinated by what teaching and learning looks like in these really different places. She's the kind of awesome that our field needs.

For an American couple in their 50's and beyond - the folks who graduated from college when it was truly publicly funded, on average they're sitting on $1M of net worth. So it's not that America can't afford this. And it's not like those who can afford this don't owe it back. This has been making me really bummed out lately. And feeling so powerless.

Responsive classrooms

Something to think through -- we're doing a lot of work on peer feedback and related things in my class. It came up today that what I'm interested in is not just that *I* respond to the scientific substance of students' ideas, but that other students can hear and respond to their classmates' ideas. Was thinking about a responsive classroom as being far more than just about the role of the instructor.

Plus-- today the questions about what the parts of the eye do was fascinating. Might be worth transcribing and looking at how the questions and idea bounced around the room - how they asked far better questions that I would have asked of them, and how they respond to one another's ideas was cool. (does our cornea have an 'anti glare' coating? and someone reported that she's worn goggles full of water in the air -weird! - and things *weren't* blurry then) And how playful it felt, while still feeling really rigorous. With two groups really latching onto their own questions -- (1) the retina on the back of the eye should distort things like a fun-house-mirror - so maybe the role of the lens is to un-funhouse-mirror it?  and (2) Amber (with very light eyes) has some ideas about why she's more sensitive to light -- the way she phrased it when her group presented questions was very much like "I really want to know this..."

(And as far as affect goes and the class feeling playful, I'm worried about two students. DOesn't seem like play for them.)

Amin

Reading Amin's 2009 Conceptual Development Meets Conceptual Change. Supergreat.

Some thoughts to think through ... will update more later.

1. I wonder if the citation on p. 170 (Carey 2004) about the development of number also helps think through fungibility.

2. "many concepts might not be understood literally..." makes me wonder what it would mean to understand, say, E-fields "literally." It's unpossible, as Richard would say. There is no "literally." Right?

3. Amin points out that Lakoff and Turner find that in poetic metaphors, "causes map onto causes, purposes onto purpose, changes onto changes, and so on" - I've always thought of energy as an accounting and a somewhat acausal account of a phenomenon - purely descriptive. So then we should expect that there are not 'causes' present in energy theater. And I think that's true. Once we add forces we get some causes.

4. Throughout the reading I kept thinking of my activity on "give" (give a kiss, give money, give a headache) and being more precise about 'give' (interact, transfer, cause to have) and then thinking about that with force, energy, and motion respectively. We treat force as a 'thing' but a very different kind of 'thing' than energy. Might be nice to re-do that lesson and tape it. I have the pre/post paragraphs but not the conversation that got us to the post.

5. I'm confused by the term "image schema" and wonder what the "image" part of it means. Amin writes "image schemas: mappings between propositional knowledge structures where event structure is preserved." - but what's the image in that? the mapping as draw-able?

6. Nelson (1986) & Tomasello (1999) must be nice. - cited on p. 173. "A variety of elements in the context of discursive activity form the basis for appropriating conventional construals. These include; (a) the joint attentional scene itself... (b) the fact that different linguistic symbols are often used in the same situation pointing to the need to identify contrasting perspectives on the scene; and (c) the use of the linguistic context itself to provide clues to the intended meaning of a linguistic symbol."

7. Really easy to read Amin as a critique of the NGSS on energy.

8. P 182 discusses that "once energy is understood as a possession, this construal can be further elaborated in various ways. It can be conceptualized as contained in the person... as a resource.. and displaying force dynamic properties..."

9. I wonder -- I think I disagree with -- the claim that "abstract knowledge gestalts preserve only the topologial relational structure of the experiences from which they are derived." (p. 186)  he goes on to elaborate "The object contained could be in one of many locations in the container, including, for example, near its opining if it had one, making it difficult to judge whether it is in or out of the container. No ambiguity of this kind arises with an image schema." -- I feel like we do sometimes make this kind of a mis-step with container metaphors - maybe?

10. Continuing with that thread, "Such a gestalt does not sanction the questions: Where was the energy on the way from A to B? What was the path taken by the transferred energy? How quickly did the transfer happen?" -- Depends on the gestalt, right? "I gave her a headache" has a kind of container/causal story that doesn't allow you to ask "what was the path taken by the headache?" While "I lost 10 pounds" you *can* ask "what path did they take"? -- I think energy theater demands you ask those questions and decide if they're meaningful -- and I think these questions are allowed by the gestalt. Or rather, how is the headache gestalt and the weight gestalt different such that we aren't allowed to ask that about a headache but we can ask that about weight?

11. He builds to this argument, which I *do* (mostly) buy:
"the problems with the material-substance analogy noted by Warren and Duit derive from expectations that understanding is based on invoking an internally consistent rich image. These problems dissolve when we recognize that metaphorical understanding and reasoning need to be characterized in terms of the topological features of image schemas and the inferences they entail."
 -  but I prefer the later language that says "many abstract concepts are structured by multiple groudned metaphors" -- I'm not convinced about the topological features of the image schema. Yet.

energy theater

Another surprisingly difficult energy-theater: the hot air balloon.
The first impulse was to treat it like a rocket - the heated air just pushes it up.

Also, a similar problem, the lava lamp.

And finally the question keeps coming up : is pressure a form of energy?

More thoughts about teaching writing v. science

There's this seeming consensus (I'll have to ask Kim if there's debate about this) that, in a freshman comp/writing class, the goal is for students to develop and communicate their own ideas -- often in "academic" ways, though that part is certainly very much debated. I'm reading a paper now on how instructor feedback can strip away much of that agency: "correcting ... tends to show students that the teacher's agenda is more important than their own, that what they wanted to say is less relevant than the teacher's impression of what they should have said." (from "on students' rights to their own texts" by brannon and knoblauch)

I'm trying to imagine a similar comment about a problem set - or a similar analysis on the kinds of corrections and suggestions made on student writing applied to the corrections and suggestions on a problem sets. There's really no implicit/explicit agenda on developing students' ideas about physics via the problem set. I can't imagine many physics profs bothered by an assertion like: "The problem set solution showing them what they should have done has an 'agenda' that somehow supercedes students' own ways of using math to chase implications and communicate ideas." There's also - so far as I've experienced - no "rough draft" of a problem set where an instructor's comments are seen as helping shape a more final iteration.

This discrepancy is, perhaps, mostly related to the fact that - as Kim notes - the whole idea of a 'writing' class is wacky. You write about something and that something (physics, current events, etc.) is some kind of discipline or vocation - and that's where writing should live.

Nonetheless, I'm intrigued by the idea of looking for parallels between writing pedagogy and science pedagogy - with assignments designed to help shape students' ideas and not just to have them revoice the instructor's ideas. I actually think this is what I do in my Inquiry classes -- that this is what responsive teaching is all about.

Refrigerators

A student and I have been tackling energy theater for a refrigerator - and I've been in touch with Rachel, Benedikt, and others about it, too. The student is an engineering major and today brought his thermo book with him. He said "it's the first time I've actually read the book. When I took the class I would just skim the chapter and use the equations." That's exactly how I feel. For the first time, I'm actually able to see why you would need these equations and what they might mean!

HDB (Half-Disco Ball) Theory

In describing why we see what we see in a pinhole theater, one group came up with what they call the "half-disco ball" theory. That is, every object is just a collection of millions and millions of Seurat Spots (pointillism) - and each Seurat spot is itself a half-disco-ball, so that it can reflect light off in all directions. And one of those rays will make it through the pinhole, drawing, essentially, another pointillism drawing in the box.

Today, the author of the HDB theory brought in a homemade model whereby you can see what happens with the pinhole theater, including a model of the HDB reflection.

Borrowing language from ... ? ... (someone Brian mentioned), an "A" means "I will brag about you." -- I tell students this and I tell them that I mean it quite literally - I actually email colleagues their work and brag about them.  So this is an A.

Gears and chains

One of my students is working on the energy theater for a bike. I feel certain that this has been energy-theatered during an Energy Project class, but I haven't participated, so I was surprised to see how really interesting it is, and how it reminds me so much of electric circuits.

You (I!) would think that the links that leave the pedaling gear and head to the tire's gear are carrying energy with them that they "drop off" in the tire's gear. But no -- it's the top side of the chain that transmits energy to the back, even though it is actually moving forward.

At the top, the chain is under tension (we actually grabbed a student's bike and brought it in to look at the chain more closely) - the bottom is slack (unless the derailleur is really tight ... but even so, the bottom chain cannot be as taut as the top? right?). The top essentially is traveling faster than the bottom. So --- JUST LIKE IN THE ELECTRIC CIRCUIT! -- the chain speeds up as it passes by the rear wheel.

It makes me rethink some things in the circuit and the flow of refrigerant through a compressor -- but more on that later. after I've thought some more.

Again reminded of how tracking energy really carefully gets us to some pretty incredible questions.

Boring physics labs

I have a paper in mind before I've even gathered the data -- this  is not good methodology! -- but I started some ideas here: http://leslieresearches.blogspot.com/2012/11/imagining-te-paper.html

Yesterday I videotaped the Snell's Law lab (where students measure n for water and "confirm" that Snell's Law is accurate), looking for some things that Brian and I think are important, and focusing on just two tables (4 students per table, 3 hours per lab - ran short)--

• do they talk about anything from outside of the classroom related to the physics ideas? (like, in this lab, they might mention their contact lenses or viewing things underwater, or prisms… )  (none noticed)
• do they talk about anything from outside of the classroom, period? (is there any connection to their outside lives? – surprisingly none in this class - at the start and end, but during the activity they aren't chatty about other things.)
• do they use the materials provided in a way that isn’t anticipated?- like, are these materials things they can “play” with? is that purposeful play on their part or an “error” ?   (I’m imagining holding a laser and a prism and dying to do something other than the lab. But no one does. Not once.)
• do they notice/discuss things about the materials/lab that are outside the scope of prescribed noticings (like the way light lenses, the way laser light bounces, changes, looks grainy)? (there were two 'noticings'  – once a guy at my table mentioned that the laser light spread as it traveled, and then they saw the reflections in addition to the refraction)
• is there any authorship – “i think it’s doing this…” ? (only one noted – the reflected rays as an explanation for seeing more dots of laser light)

Most interesting of the lab was when I described the study -- I start by describing what we’re interested in and offer an example– and before even offering an example there are laughs. Brian has mentioned this to me before -- that even suggesting that students would see this class in their daily lives is a joke.  And when I offer an example – “so when you leave class do you drive around looking for examples of Newton’s Laws? Or if someone asks about school you tell them all about physics” – a student at his table started joking about how one might see physics in their daily life.  “Wind in my beard is a drag force…”  I love this joke. I should have it on tape.

I now want to interview students from class who say they don't think of physics outside of class and ask them to imagine someone who does -- what kind of thing would they think about? I can see how, after doing this lab, someone who 'thinks about physics' is going to be someone who is trying to calculate a force, find a coefficient, or some other banal activity that no one in physics does either.

Turning on an electromagnet

We've been playing with gaussian guns --- magnets + ball bearings --- in Adv. Inquiry.

We talked - as is anticipated - about the ball that starts off really far away from the magnet. Does it have a lot of energy or not?  And we were kind of joking about a magnet store next to a ball-bearings store, and then a mile away is another ball-bearings store. (And someone talked about how by me purchasing the balls and magnets and bringing them together, I've lowered the MPE.)

Anyway, this is all kind of okay - some of it counterintuitive at first and lots of discussion and movements towards precision around what potential energy is, and the difference between the ability of a ball to become magnetic (ferromagnets) v. the ability of a ball to speed up because it has energy. Kait again reiterated how it doesnt seem reasonable to say that this ball bearing itself has a lot of energy; it (again) has distance-from-magnet; not energy.  I said how I really liked this argument, how it is what she was saying earlier about a bowling ball, and that last year's group had another way of thinking about PE. I shared the pac man pooping pellets of potential energy.

But then what came up was the question about turning ON an electromagnet in the magnet store. Does turning on an electromagnet suddenly imbue the ball bearings many miles away with energy?  Does it suddenly deposit pacman pellets across the universe? Is it reasonable to think that the CPE in one little battery (that was used in turning on the electromagnet) then fills all of space with pacman pellets of potential energy?

I must say that if physics hadn't constructed the idea of PE already I would think "this is enough to convince me that this idea cannot hold up under scrutiny and we should drop the construct altogether." I'm also not 100% sure I'm aware of how to resolve this idea. Am I back to the question of static v. radiating fields?

Jacob said that we don't create mass -- so that, if we were thinking about GPE and suddenly creating a mass that then imbues all matter in the universe with a few more calories of energy -- this isn't possible b/c mass can't be created (and maybe this is why). The question was then do we really *create* magnets or just rearrange things so that their magnetty nature becomes evident.  

(Do I believe in energy?)

Similarly: Yesterday after class Kim (co-instructor/English prof) asked me about "does light do this?" (and sketched a light ray ping ponging around the world - eventually reaching your eye - thinking about how it is that the sun makes everything - even things in the shade - visible). I said "I think the only way to answer that is to rephrase the question as: 'is this  a reasonable model to address the question of how it is that the sun makes things in the shade visible?'"  And there the answer is yes. I think that's all we can ever say.  The model is reasonable.  I know this - this isn't new - but it seems like a new idea all over again to me yesterday.

And the model of potential energy - pac man pellets or whatever - is often pretty unreasonable.