AYPD general plan, 2010-11

I had been thinking of this blog as mainly for thinking about the summer, but of course it ought to be about all of our work with the teachers -- all the more so since many of the researcher-videographers who are part of the project aren't here during the academic year.  And maybe you all out there could help!  So I am going to try to document and summarize what's been going on with the teachers in the evening academic-year professional development (AYPD) sessions.

The Energy Project team decided that as the summer focused on learning about energy, the AYPD should focus on learning to attend to student ideas.  Not too surprisingly, we decided that the most effective way to do this would be for the teachers to spend a good fraction of the AYPD sessions watching video of students discussing their ideas, especially ideas about energy, and ideally the participating teachers' own students - a video club.  Then, while I was out of the room, everyone else decided that I should be one of the primary instructors for the evening sessions, especially for the video club part.  (Stamatis is the other instructor.  Eleanor attends when she can.)  This is a big challenge for me, because while I'm pretty comfortable leading sessions in which other people (including teachers) discuss a video episode in detail, I've never led sessions in which teachers were looking at video of themselves.  That seems importantly different for at least three reasons that I can think of:

1. Putting your own classroom in front of colleagues for discussion is a big risk.  I don't feel like I have much experience in doing what it takes to insure a safe environment for everyone, so that we can do worthwhile work and not hurt anyone or just be unproductive.
2. This is work that engages the teachers as teachers, rather than as physics learners.  It's a little embarrassing for me to admit this, but I have almost no experience with that. 
3. The last time I did field work, the classroom video that I collected did not include much that would support attention to student ideas.  Student ideas weren't being made visible.  I'm worried I won't be able to find episodes worth discussing.

There are also some logistical difficulties that I think are going to make life harder:  Video clubs that I know of have been fairly intimate little learning teams, maybe 4-10 teachers, and we have 15-25 teachers at each session.  Worse, it's not the same people at every session, because the teachers don't have to attend all of them to earn credit.  It seems like it might be really hard to have an atmosphere of trust under these conditions.

That said, I can't think of anything that I think would be better to do with these sessions, and I can't think of anyone else who I think would be better at running them.  (Actually I very much can, but those people aren't here.)  So we're going for it.  Through Rosemary Russ I know that Miriam Sherin's group has a major focus on teacher learning with video:  I am learning as much as I can from what they do, and we are adopting their theoretical framework.  I also had a reassuring conversation with Emily van Zee when I was in Oregon over the weekend.  

Do you all know of more published work, or other people, that might help us in our planning?