Differences between this year and last year

I was completely blown away by what I saw in the Energy Project workshops last summer. They were truly revolutionary and ground-breaking, engaging the teachers in real inquiry and discovery, not just about scientific content, but about the scientific process and the learning process. These workshops were like nothing I had ever seen, and changed my whole perspective about what education is all about. Hunter and Eleanor were truly masterful in facilitating an open-ended inquiry process to help teachers build up their own ideas about not just content, but the processes of science, teaching, and learning. This process was incredibly empowering for the teachers. Rachel and I observed many instances of them thinking about science in rich and sophisticated ways, and reflecting on their own thinking and learning process as well as their empowerment.

Many of the people involved in this project, including me, have participated in the Summer Institute at the University of Washington, a PD program for teachers that uses a curriculum called Physics by Inquiry (PBI). PBI uses an inquiry-based process to help teachers develop their own understanding of physics content ideas. But it is not at all inquiry-based about process. There is a method, there are rules, and you must follow the rules. For example, you must build up everything from scratch, so you are not allowed to bring in prior knowledge, and it is explicitly forbidden to talk about things like electrons that you can’t directly observe, or to go look up things from external sources of authority. There are good reasons for these rules, and they really do help teachers develop a deeper understanding of both content and process. But it’s a little ironic that these rules are given by Direct Instruction.

Before last summer, I saw PBI as a model for inquiry-based instruction, and while I had nagging doubts about many aspects of it, I couldn’t really articulate what I thought would be better. Seeing the Energy Project in action completely changed all that. At the beginning, teachers drew on all sorts of prior knowledge, sources of authority, and methods of knowing. The instructors didn’t correct them, but carefully guided them through a process of building up their own knowledge of energy. And by the end, with nobody explicitly telling them to do so, these elementary teachers, with no background in science, were making sophisticated arguments about why we needed to use evidence in our explanations rather than taking things from authority. They were developing all the rules of PBI on their own, not as dogma, but as practical guidelines for deep learning.

This summer, I saw some of this, but I saw a lot more telling the teachers the answers to content questions, whether they had asked or not, and a lot less letting them grapple with things on their own. They did still grapple, and they certainly still had a perception that they had figured out a lot on their own, but from my perspective, in which I was comparing it to last year, it didn’t seem like enough. On the last day of this summer’s workshop, particularly in the poster session, I did see them questioning authority quite a bit, but I also saw them deferring to authority and expecting the instructors to give them the answers rather than trying to figure them out on their own. Overall, this summer seemed much more structured and top-down than last year.

On the other hand, the Energy Theater was way better this year. Last year, particularly in the elementary teachers’ course, the instructors were still figuring out the details of Energy Theater (back then it was called Energy Dance), and it never really moved past being a fun kinesthetic activity into what it is now: a disciplined workspace for solving physics problems. Last year teachers had fun with Energy Theater, but it wasn’t clear that they learned much from it. This year, thanks to a refinement of the rules and Hunter’s “Action to Writing” worksheet that forces them to come up with a written representation of what they just did, Energy Theater was a much more disciplined activity for the teachers.

But it still needs to go further. I think the teachers learned a lot from Energy Theater this week, but I don’t think their students will. They learned content, but they didn’t learn enough about the process of what makes Energy Theater work and why. When they talked about doing it with their students, they turned it back into a fun kinesthetic activity, taking out many parts that are critical for learning and adding many confusing elements. I think there are two main reasons for this: 1. They don’t know what the critical aspects of ET are that make it work. 2. They don’t have enough confidence in their students’ ability to engage in a sophisticated scientific learning process. The next step in the development of Energy Theater as a pedagogical model will be to address these two issues.