We decided we should write summaries of each day for the blog so that people who are showing up to tape in the middle of a course aren't so lost.
Energy 2 is a professional development program for middle and high school science teachers, all of whom took the Energy 1 course last summer, and many of whom participated in a monthly professional development program over the course of the last academic year. There are 11 participants in the course.
After a brief introduction to the videographers and research team (Hunter mentioned an Onion article called "Ska band outnumbers audience"), they jumped right into Energy Theater. These guys have done Energy Theater a bunch, and many of them have used it with their students, so this is nothing new for them. Hunter gave them a scenario of a cart on a spring that is pulled back, oscillates a bit, and then stops. The class split in two and they went out and figured out how to do the Energy Theater separately, and then came back and did the "Action to Writing" worksheet in which they worked individually to come up with diagrams to represent what they just did. While Energy Theater is not new to these participants, I think the worksheets are. The two groups came up with very different assumptions and therefore very different Energy Theater actions. Within each group, they came up with a huge variety of written representations, but all the representations for the same group showed the same information, even though they presented it differently. They spent most of the morning discussing these different representations, and a little bit of time reviewing what they learned last summer.
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