One thing that came up in the instructors' meeting this afternoon is that, based on feedback cards passed out last week and conversations with participants, many of the participants are getting sick of Energy Theater. They think they've already learned all there is to learn from it, and that they can figure out what's going on with new scenarios just through thinking about it, and don't need to act it out. The instructors don't think this perception is necessarily accurate, but this is what the participants think. We had a discussion about how to address this issue, and nobody really knew.
I suggested that maybe we need to give them harder or more complex scenarios, so that they can see where they are still struggling. This suggestion was based on Hunter's discussion of his Yakima workshop: he let the participants pick their own scenarios, and they picked really hard ones, but still got a lot out of it. I have no idea if this would actually help, just a thought.
Lane suggested that maybe the instructors need to act out all the scenarios before class, so that they can get more familiar with all the subtle issues that tend to come up and be more able to discuss them with the participants. After all, if we think it's so critical to act it out, why don't we do it ourselves?
Other ideas?
Disclaimer: I don't really know the details of the workshops in Seattle (yet). And it might be that you already do what I am about to suggest. If so, just disregard this comment.
ReplyDeleteA way to re-involve teachers to do energy theater might be to give them the chance to come up with concrete implementations of the energy theater for their classrooms. Let them pick a topic (alone or in pairs, small groups, etc.) and develop a detailed instructional unit that involves doing energy theater. Then let them engage in a role play. One of them plays the teacher, the rest plays "school class." That way, they can test their scenarios and maybe talk about issues that might come up, while getting some input from PER people. Maybe they'll pick up on that, and if it's just the switch of roles, they can be instructors, again. If just for a couple of minutes...
I was part of the discussion about this, and I do not recall that anyone said the participants were sick of energy theater so much as they did not feel that they needed to actually DO energy theater for every scenario. An important point that was made over a few days of instructor debriefs is that even when the students were not actually doing energy theater, they were using the language of energy theater and discussing how the scenario would look in an energy theater context. Many of us felt that this process can be as valuable to an energy understanding as doing energy theater itself, even if it is not as interesting from the videographers' perspective.
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