During the first morning of Understanding Energy 2, Hunter shared some of the slides from his FFPER talk on Energy Theater with the returning participants. My sense is that he was aiming to be transparent about the broader Energy Project effort and also intending to remind the participants of the power of ET. He included the refrigerator analysis in his presentation, discussing the creation of the concept of "phase energy." This sets the stage for the clip that I am discussing, which is really very interesting on many levels. (Note that the video is of a different table, so you should mostly just focus on the audio.)
In the clip, it's clear that Margaret is concerned about the notion that the participants featured in Hunter's slides were just making stuff up. As she says early in the clip, "I know, we don't have any, we don't have understanding, we'll make something up. We'll call it phase energy." She goes on to raise the issue of whether or not it is real. The language she uses suggests that she perceives this whole construction as fake and perhaps nothing more than play. Without getting into too much detail, there is a sense throughout the clip that some of the teachers feel that there is a huge difference between their behavior in this professional development experience and the behavior of "experts" who have the authority to develop concepts and name things. Indeed, these teachers seem to feel that they are acting and making stuff up and that this is not the real world. The questions at the end of some of the teachers' statements may even suggest a lack of confidence and a deference to authority (Hunter). These attitudes and feelings are seemingly at odds with the Energy Project's efforts to foster teacher/learner empowerment.
I find it particularly interesting that the teachers can productively engage in such activities, articulate very clearly what they (and the so-called "experts") are doing, but still somehow separate what they are doing from what "experts" do. It will be interesting to see if such attitudes shift over the course of the week. Also, are there other interactions/discussions in which these same ideas become apparent?
I was reading last night Karen Gallas' "Talking their Way Into Science" and I found these excerpts I thought I'd share with you:
ReplyDelete(Ch 9, p. 95)
"(...) I saw that those children who have had more exposure to the technical language of science and often can speak with authority because they use those terms, rarely understood the meaning of the terms even though they often applied it in the correct contexts. (...) While some children did, indeed, use those words to build organizing concepts, (...), others used the words to provide quick answers without any substance behind them. As all of he children in the class realized that this was true, they no longer blindly accepted the use of terminology."
As I read this section of the chapter, I was immediately reminded of the above post. I thought it was curious that some of the things Gallas observed in her elementary classroom, we are seeing this week with the teachers. I'm not trying to say that every teacher that uses technical terms doesn't really understand what they mean, or that Margaret would rather have her students use the 'expert' term instead of the 'invented' one. But there have been several instances in which teachers slip into this 'talking like a scientist' mode, and sort of don't judge what a term they're using exactly means. For example, even though she keeps coming back to SCREAM (and it seems like she uses often when teaching), Meg mentioned "I still don't understand what radiant energy is." I wonder if part of this is the anxiety of conforming to state standards, in which students *need* to know the 7 types of energy, or whatever other technical terminology when referring to something.
(Ch 10, p. 99)
"I care that all the children feel included in the discussion and that all children feel the power of collaborative theory building and in fact understand the excitement of the building a theory, *even if it is an incorrect theory.* Incorrect theories are better than no theories at all! Incorrect theories are, in fact, often the basis of correct and revolutionary theories in the field of science."
(Ch 10, p. 100)
"(Mis-conceptions) are the result of careful, though informal, scientific inquiry and is yet another example of children's natural predisposition for scientific thinking.
Rather than viewing (mis)conceptions as a cause of distress and immediate intervention, we should carefully elicit them and work with the children to uncover the kinds of data upon which they have based their theories"
This excerpt reminded me of the conversation we were having about (mis)conceptions being treated as 'viral'.
I wonder if it would be worth making copies of these chapters/pages, and passing them around for teachers to read.
We'll likely post the clip when we've gotten access to the editable versions of the videos, and we'll probably give it its own blog post, but I wanted to follow up with something that happened this Wednesday June 29 afternoon. One of the groups (Lisa & Margaret) who are working on their elevator exploration, found that they needed a new form of energy, which they called rotational potential energy (which I'll call RPE). Hopefully we'll be able to figure out from closer analysis of the clip what problem this RPE helps to solve or how it aids in making sense of the energy picture. But this is the same Margaret who expresses such concern about the invention of phase energy by the other teachers. So that strikes me as a pretty big shift in two days.
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