What I observed yesterday morning, while playing silent participant in the energy theater

I was in a group with Valentina, Matt, Lisa, Angie, Camille, Adam, Hunter. Matt immediately took on a very strong, leading role, trying to get people thinking about the physics in the scenario. Most of the teachers took part in the conversation, but Matt was a strong moderator. Hunter, Adam and I held back. On very few occasions, Hunter raised his hand to play "Instructor" and give a little cue. At all of those times, he picked up on something that was just said, asked for clarification or gave a more methodological hint how to proceed. He always emphasized that he does not want to tell the group what to do, he was merely pointing out potential ways of proceeding (Matt for example brought up the issue of simplification the physics in our group, and Hunter stepped back to be the instructor and told us that we could either try to think about everything at once, or do some simplifications, to later add on further details). In general, I was under the impression that Hunter was actively holding himself in the background, that he wanted to support whatever was going on in the group without taking too strong a lead. I remember some funky physics going on (for example, we had a lot of thermal energy going from the spring over to the environment; I think it was as much as was going from the cart to the environment/floor). We also did not talk about other details like, where is the kinetic energy, where does it come from, what does it cause, what causes thermal energy going into the floor? On several occasions, I was tempted to prompt a discussion about some physical details, but I could refrain from doing so because I just wanted to see, in what direction everything would go. At some point, Hunter started to say something, at the same time, Karen started talking, Hunter immediately stopped, and Karen asked if all of us were convinced that our enactment made sense. Hunter silently applauded and told the entire group that he was about to say the same thing (in general, he not only said that he wanted to be open and transparent about everything, he actually was). He also told us that he was very pleased that one of the participants had come up with this prompt for a consistency check. And then, we actually had a defined end of the activity, everyone was pleased, there was agreement in the room that we had accomplished the task, without Hunter having to interrupt anything.

I was only in the room with Lane's group for a small amount of time, I only saw the last couple minutes of discussion and the final practice rounds of the theater, so maybe Rachel can talk more about her impressions in this group, so that we can better compare the two approaches.