Hot to cold or cold to hot?

Hunter and I watched video of three secondary teachers from this summer beginning to figure out how refrigerators work.  Lisa and Matt (with their backs to the camera) are thinking in terms of the local energy transfers from the food to the refrigerant and from the refrigerant to the room; they are puzzling over the temperature problem, which is that in order for energy to flow, they need the refrigerant to be colder than the food, but then hotter than the room.  (They aren't thinking about a compressor or an expansion valve yet.)  Valentina, facing the camera, has been quiet so far.  In the clip below, Lisa invites Valentina's thoughts.  

Lisa: Does that - Valentina what are you thinking?

Valentina: I am thinking that I don't have a meaningful answer.  So I know the energy flows from the cold to the hot.  And this happened just because

Matt:  Wait. [looks at Valentina.]

Valentina:  Yep!

Matt.  No, energy always goes from hot to cold.

Valentina:  [frown]

Matt:  [giggle]

Valentina:  There is - inside of the refrigerator, it's colder than outside.

Matt:  Yes.

Valentina:  So somehow you spend energy, right, the electrical energy, to make thermal energy to go from the cold to the hot.

Lisa and Matt:  [shake heads no in unison]

Valentina:  Which apparently doesn't make any sense, but in this, if I will ask my students, this is what they are going to know.

Matt:  Yes, I mean I think 

Valentina:  If it's a really warm outside, then you will hear the refrigerator [fanning herself] just working hard to make the inside much colder than the outside.

Matt:  Right.

Lisa:  Yeah.  But it's not because energy flows from cold to hot.  It's because it's hot to cold.

Valentina:  Right. [flaps hand downwards]  Right.  But.  [covers mouth]

Look at how they receive each other's statements - or don't receive them, really, because what I see is practically everybody merely reiterating their own position, not recognizing that the other person is right too.  Lisa and Matt are right that locally, energy that flows from one object to another by thermal contact always flows from hot to cold.  (Which law is that - the zeroth?  or is that a definition of thermal energy? or thermal contact?  eep.)  And Valentina is right that overall, a refrigerator is a device that moves thermal energy from its cold interior to its hot exterior.  But what they give each other is negation.  Valentina frowns at Matt and Lisa, and Matt and Lisa shake their heads in unison at her.  For whatever reason, Matt and Lisa "win" this one:  Valentina stops speaking (for about 20 minutes, actually), and Matt and Lisa proceed with their analysis.  But I think everyone is missing out.

Part of what bothers me is that everyone seems to be acting as if they understood the other point of view (with "right, right" and "yeah"), while also sending signals that the other point of view is repellent (no's, frowning).  I think this shows a lack of congruence.  

Matt Jones and Chris Blea observations

We videotaped Matt Jones's class this morning.  It took a lot of doing to get out to Bellevue in time for his 9:30 class, and I screwed up with one of the cameras, but the other one seemed like it got good data.  It was the first day of the energy unit.  We weren't in the class, but Matt said there were some good discussions and that the students were very focused on associating energy with fuel.  I'll be interested to watch the video.

Then this afternoon we videotaped Chris Blea's class again, because she was having them discuss the question, "What is energy?"  I was fascinated that she would ask that, because she herself seemed very dissatisfied with the what-is-energy question over the summer (see "Energy is woo-woo").  She had the kids whiteboard their answers to questions like, "What is energy?  What does it look-sound-feel like?  What kinds of energy are there?"  She asked them to use mostly pictures, with as few words as possible.  This all seemed really terrific.  She had me stay for their whiteboard presentations (in two classes!) and let me photograph them.  Here they are (all of them... why not):

After the classes, Chris was chatty, and wanted to talk very pointedly with me about teaching energy.  I hope some of it is on tape, because it was really quite a conversation.  She said, "I was hoping to get more specific teaching ideas out of the class this summer, but I really didn't, and I really do not know what to do."  She had a lesson plan but it felt like a sort of a placeholder, something to get through rather than something she felt ownership of.  She was clear on wanting to do transfers and transformations, and when I said, "If you do that and conservation it'll really be a pretty complete package," she said yes, sure, that too.  She wanted me to look over her list of forms of energy and help her with whether it was complete or redundant.  She also wanted to know, from me personally, what energy is.  I felt that it was a conversation in which I was at risk of appearing evasive, in a counterproductive way, so I just answered her straight out that I think energy is stuff that makes things happen.  Invisible, massless stuff that can permeate objects and change them or move them or light them up or whatever.  There was no risk of her thoughtlessly adopting my idea just because I said it; she said, "Really?  Are you serious?  No, not me.  I can't say it's stuff.  That sounds like it has mass, and it doesn't."  She showed me her slide with the textbook definition of energy on it ("The ability to do work and cause changes," or something).  I told her honestly that I felt that two really key things about energy are that (1) it moves from one place to the other (2) without any of it going away or appearing out of nowhere, and that the textbook definition was seriously unhelpful on both of those points.  After all, this morning I had a lot of "ability to do work" and this afternoon not so much because I'm tired; it went away, right?  No one else's "ability" increased to compensate.  And "ability" doesn't go from place to place, either.  She was interested in that and asked for my definition again, but she still could not live with "stuff."  She wrote, in her notebook, "Energy is what makes things happen."

While we were discussing the students' whiteboards, she seemed really charmed by their expressiveness but admitted she hardly had time to take them in, they went by so fast, and said:  "I have no idea what to do with these things they have said.  What do I do?  I'm really serious here.  I do not know what to do.  What should I do?"  (Beep!  Beep!  Formative assessment alert!  Teacher has elicited student ideas and is unable to use them to inform instruction!  Beep!  Beep!)  So... I said that I saw the students' whiteboards as being replete with the "makes things happen" part of energy, that they were really in great shape with that, plenty to reinforce there.  I said I also saw a medium amount of energy moving (sun -> solar panel, that kind of thing) and maybe also energy transforming, so those were things to point out and build on.  I didn't see any evidence that the students were thinking about conservation at all, so that was something that Chris could contribute to their thinking about energy.  And also the students seemed to think about energy significantly in terms of how it is "generated," as in wind energy, solar energy, etc., so there was room for expanding their sense of where energy can "come from" and maybe checking in about whether they are thinking of energy being made, versus made more usable. 

It felt odd to just ... come out with all that.  My history has me holding back a lot more, supposedly in order to bring out her ideas and not impose mine.  Today something happened early on, which is that when I tried to encourage her to take the lead more, she asked whether the camera was on.  I felt like that meant she was experiencing my questioning as putting her on display, exposing her, and that I should stop doing that.  So I just told her what I thought.  And as I said, she didn't seem to be terribly impressionable about it; she had plenty of her own opinion.  I hope I am getting more nuanced about all this, and not just slacking off of my former inquiry purity (such as it may have been).

NY Times article about metaphor

Here's an interesting article on metaphor from the NY Times:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/this-is-your-brain-on-metaphors/?src=me&ref=general

It's mostly stuff I've heard from Hunter before, but the article itself uses metaphor and visceral imagery in a way that helps it sink into my brain a lot more easily than other places I've read the same things.

Teaching Seminar, Fifth Session

Since Rachel is in Colorado and couldn't be here for last night's teaching seminar, I will blog about it, today. And I'm just re-blogging the post from my own blog to keep things simple ;-)

Last night was my second (and last, for now) teaching seminar at SPU. Stamatis and Rachel were gone, so Lane took over for the night. His plan for the evening was to have the teachers do energy theater for a "new" scenario, videotape this energy theater, and then watch the video together in class.

While I don't remember the exact number of people, it seemed like there were less participants than in the last session. At the beginning, it was very quite. Lane had posted some "warm-up" questions:

Thought for Food- Consider a wind powered car that can travel downwind faster than the speed of the wind on a level surface.
- Would such a car violate the principle of energy conservation?
- Would such a car violate some other scientific principle?
- Does such a car seem intuitively possible to you? Why or why not?

After he had the teachers think a little bit about them, he showed them a video of a group of engineers/physicists who actually did this experiment and claimed that they had built a wind powered car that actually can travel downwind faster than the speed of the wind (twice as fast, if I remember correctly). Unfortunately, there was not a lot of discussion among the participants.

Next up, Lane said that he wanted to do something for the night that he thought was fun. He told them that they would do energy theater about a little experiment that he was about to show them, and that we would take a video of that and watch it together. The scenario this time was an experiment involving a ruler (meter stick) that was fixed to the leg of a table with a clamp. A metal ring was put on the floor at the loose end of the ruler. Lane pulled back the ruler (together with the ring) and let go, so that the ring was launched across the room, sliding on the floor while giving off a ringing sound.

Before they started with the activity, Lane asked the participants to ignore the camera, and try to talk a lot while they were trying to figure everything out so that they would have something to talk about when they were watching the video later. Then they started thinking about the scenario, individually at first. After some time, some teachers got up, and eventually, the energy theater started.

I took the video, standing on the counter in order to provide a good angle from slightly above. One of the other cameras should have recorded a different angle which might be interesting for future analysis of the episode. The energy theater was great, participants were actively engaged, and after some initial cues, Lane could step back and let the participants do "their thing." The entire episode took about 20 minutes, participants were concerned about the different types of energy involved ("stored elastic," "kinetic," "thermal," "sound"), the different objects (the ruler, the ring, and the environment), there was some string-re-arranging going on, they did the experiment a couple more times, were thinking about energy losses due to friction, and eventually did a first run of the energy theater. And I mean "run" literally. They actually decided that they would have to do it more slowly, in order to be able to observe what was happening, in the video. The second "performance" was more thoughtful, less hectic, and more comprehensible. And that's not a scientific view, just a gut feeling that I had while watching the happening on my tiny little camera screen...

After the energy theater, we took a couple minutes break, and then watched the video. The entire 20 minutes. Lane had written two cues on the white board:

- Ideas about the energy transfer/transformations
- Questions about the energy transfers/transformations

He asked the participants to write down what came to their minds in regard to those cues while they were watching the video. We did that without any interruption, and afterward, Lane asked them to write down which ideas they felt most comfortable with, and which questions they still had about the scenario, on their white boards.

After they had done that, they started the last activity for the day, which was to go around the room and talk to each other which kinds of experiments they could design and do in order to find answers for the questions they still had. They had rulers, clamps and rings to do the actual experiments, and all of them engaged in this task. After some small-group-work, they eventually gathered around one table to do some experiments together, which concluded the evening.

Teaching Seminar, fourth session

Note the new name for the academic-year evening professional development sessions.  We decided AYPD was cryptic and offered no sense of purpose.  We like the image of a “seminar” as an intense, in-depth, small-group discussion of a topic of interest.

For this session, we wanted to watch what I call the “Beer” episode, which is below.

Sam has presented this episode to other research groups as an example of unsuccessful Energy Theater.  She has had that characterization challenged rather strongly, so maybe it’s not that bad, but I was still nervous about showing an episode in which I pretty much dislike what happens.  The first hundred times I saw this episode, what I saw was “Blaine” (with the cup) rudely and repeatedly mowing down “Laura’s” efforts to actually engage in the assigned activity.  However, our group has done some work to see things more from Blaine’s perspective, and my interpretation  now is that Blaine is just trying to have a little fun with it.  This is not so bad; shouldn’t there be room for some playfulness, even some theatricality, in an activity called Energy Theater?  This episode was very early on in the 2009 course, so we were all really just working out what Energy Theater even is.

For the Teaching Seminar, Stamatis and I decided to frame the episode with the premise that science learning should be fun, and ask the teachers what one ought to do to make it more fun.  I enjoyed thinking about what people might say and what underlying beliefs about science the answers would reveal:  for example:

• “Lighten up!” - This is what I see Blaine trying to do.  I think it suggests an underlying belief that scientists have sticks up their butts. (What I wrote on the white board in my office was “excess rectitude,” which I am still giggling at.)
• “Get your hands dirty!” - This is how I characterized people’s feeling that what makes science fun is more “hands-on” activities.  I think it suggests an underlying belief that science tends to be too sterile and remote.
• “Be nice!” - This is mine.  I think that a major reason that science is not fun for many people is that we (unwittingly) make people miserable: we discourage them, we hurt their feelings, we make them anxious, and that is no fun.  I think the underlying belief suggested here is that science itself is fun, but the fun is blocked by our lousy interpersonal interactions.

In class, things didn’t really go in a direction that led to my sharing those ideas with the teachers.  Asked to white-board about what would make science learning more fun, they wrote things that sounded to me like they came from their professional training:  “hands-on,” “interactive,” “relevant,” “exciting.”  Stamatis (in what I thought was a terrific move) asked them to close their eyes and imagine a personal experience in which they had experienced deep learning and it had been fun.  This changed the tenor of their conversation totally; I heard more than one table talk about having a trusted colleague to work out ideas with, which seemed to me to go in the direction of my “be nice” in the sense that it was about the value of safe interpersonal interactions.

In watching the Beer episode, the teachers were (to me) remarkably positive about the whole thing.  Not only did they see Blaine having fun, they saw Laura having fun, which to me was almost unbelievable (I had thought Laura was clearly frustrated).  Laura wasn’t there, but I shared the episode with her remotely and asked her whether she was having fun during it.  She said (in an email), “It seemed like we were having more fun than I remembered.”  So she remembers it as not having been fun, but thinks she looks like she was having fun in the video?  Odd.

The teachers’ observations of the video were ... observations!  They noticed interesting things that happened.  They pointed out the timing of events, the wording, the body language.  They made reasonable evidence-based interpretations of the things they heard people saying and saw them doing.  I wish I remembered more of the substance of what they said - it’s been too long since the class, I should have written sooner.  I remember that they saw Blaine and Laura as changing their language as to what represented the energy: was it the people, or the beer that the people were drinking, or the flow, or ...?  And I remember that they wanted to talk a lot about “Cara’s” nonparticipation.  I was heartened that we had a discussion that was free of insults.  The flags have been taken up as a symbol; if people didn’t have a flag at hand they would wave a pretend flag at each other, especially in small groups, when they heard someone saying something judgmental.  Maybe that’s easier to do in a face-to-face interaction than in the “ref” position.

Carl Rogers on education, part III

This is the third post on Carl Rogers' statement of the conditions for "significant learning."  Part I is here.  Part II is here.

Rogers has a lot to say about the role of evaluation in schooling.

In therapy, the examinations are set by life.  The client meets them, sometimes passing, sometimes failing.  He finds that he can use the resources of the therapeutic relationship and his experience in it to organize himself so that he can meet life’s tests more satisfyingly next time.

In [an education modeled on the therapeutic paradigm], the requirements for many life situations would be part of the resources the teacher provides.  The student would have available the knowledge that he cannot enter engineering school without so much math; that he cannot get a job in X corporation without a college diploma; that he cannot become a psychologist without doing independent doctoral research; that he cannot be a doctor without knowledge of chemistry; that he cannot even drive a car without passing an examination on rules of the road.  These are requirements set, not by the teacher, but by life.  The teacher is there to provide the resources which the student can use to learn so as to be able to meet these tests.

There would be other in-school evaluations of a similar sort.  The student might well be faced with the fact that he cannot join the Math Club until he makes a certain score on a standardized mathematics test; that he cannot develop his camera film until he has shown an adequate knowledge of chemistry and lab techniques; that he cannot join the special literature section until he has shown evidence of both wide reading and creative writing.  The natural place of evaluation in life is as a ticket of entrance, not a club over the recalcitrant.  Our experience in therapy would suggest that it should be the same way in school.  It would leave the student as a self-respecting, self-motivated person, free to choose whether he wished to put forth the effort to gain these tickets of entrance.

I think the Energy Project has an advantage shared by a lot of teacher professional development programs, which is that the teachers are mostly not recalcitrant (and do not need clubbing).  I think they mostly have the attitude that the measure of their success will be their improved performance as teachers.  So, while we do give them an exam at the end of the summer course, I think it is understood as informative for them and for us, rather than being for the purpose of judgment.

Carl Rogers on education, part II

This is the second post on Carl Rogers' statement of the conditions for "significant learning."  Part I is here.

3. Acceptance and understanding

Another implication for the teacher is that significant learning may take place if the teacher can accept the student as he is, and can understand the feelings he possesses.  ...The teacher who can warmly accept, who can provide an unconditional positive regard, and who can empathize with the feelings of fear, anticipation, and discouragement which are involved in meeting new material, will have done a great deal toward setting the conditions for learning.  ...It will perhaps disturb some that when the teacher holds such attitudes, when he is willing to be acceptant of feelings, it is not only attitudes towards school work which are expressed, but feelings about parents, feelings of hatred for brother or sister, feelings of concern about self - the whole gamut of attitudes.  Do such feelings have a right to exist openly in a school setting?  It is my thesis that they do.  They are related to the person's becoming, to his effective learning and effective functioning, and to deal understandingly and acceptantly with such feelings has a definite relationship to the learning of long division or the geography of Pakistan.

I feel like I have not gotten to actively thinking about this issue yet in my observations.

4. Provision of resources

In therapy the resources for learning one's self lie within.  There is very little data which the therapist can supply which will be of help since the data to be dealt with exist within the person.  In education this is not true.  There are many resources of knowledge, of techniques, of theory which constitute raw material for use.  It seems to me that what I have said about therapy suggests that these materials, these resources, be made available to the students, not forced upon them.  Here a wide range of ingenuity and sensitivity is an asset.

I do not need to list the usual resources which come to mind - books, maps, workbooks, materials, recordings, work-space, tools, and the like.  Let me focus for a moment on the way the teacher uses himself and his knowledge and experience as a resource.  If the teacher holds the point of view I have been expressing then he would probably want to make himself available to his class in at least the following ways:

He would want to let them know of special experience and knowledge he has in the field, and to let them know they could call on this knowledge.  Yet he would not want them to feel that they must use him in this way.

He would want them to know that his own way of thinking about the field, and of organizing it, was available to them, even in lecture form, if they wished.  Yet again he would want this to be perceived as an offer, which could as readily be refused as accepted.

He would want to make himself known as a resource-finder.  Whatever might be seriously wanted by an individual or by the whole group to promote their learning, he would be very willing to consider the possibilities of obtaining such a resource.

He would want the quality of his relationship to the group to be such that his feelings could be freely available to them, without being imposed on them or becoming a restrictive influence on them.  He thus could share the excitements and enthusiasms of his own learning, without insisting that the students follow in his footsteps; the feelings of disinterest, satisfaction, bafflement, or pleasure which he feels toward individual or group activities, without this becoming either a carrot or a stick for the student.  His hope would be that he could say, simply for himself, “I don’t like that,” and the student with equal freedom could say, “But I do.”

One of the suggestions that stands out to me is the idea that the instructor ought to make all his expertise and knowledge and views of the subject available to the students, without imposing it on them.  It seems to me that the focus of many reform efforts has been to stop the instructor from imposing his views on the students.  As for making our expertise available to the students, though, I think we (at least I) tend to be rather withholding.  I think at some level, I believe that an instructor’s ideas will always be a “restrictive influence” on the students.

I’m experimenting with being a little less rigid on this point.  There is a teacher in the Teaching Seminar who demands, pretty much every time, that I “tell her the right answer” (my words, not hers) before we try to understand student ideas about some topic.  In the moment, I am very resistant to her request.  I feel like she’s not supposed to need to know that, or I’m not supposed to tell it to her, or both.  But she really demands it... so, I have tried to understand why she wants to know.  And darned if she doesn’t have actually pretty understandable reasons.  I don’t remember how she put it (hopefully it’s on video somewhere), but I remember feeling like I could see where she was coming from when I recalled that I appreciated Rogers a lot more after I was informed that before Rogers, psychology was pretty much all Freud.  When someone gave me a big picture of American psychology, I could appreciate Rogers’ originality a lot more.

Speaking of Freud, my image of an aloof and neutral PER instructor who doesn’t divulge her own expertise (but who silently diagnoses and interprets the students’ misconceptions) reminds me of an aloof and neutral therapist who listens to clients free-associate and diagnoses their neuroses.

Carl Rogers on education, part I

To me, the great majority of what Carl Rogers has to say seems highly relevant to education.  He also has a chapter in On Becoming a Person titled "Significant Learning in Therapy and Education," in which he lays out what he feels are the criteria for "learnings which are functional, which make a difference, which pervade the person and his actions."  I'll be quoting extensively... and I think it's too much for a single post, so, this is part I.

1. Contact With Problems

Significant learning occurs more readily in relation to situations perceived as problems.  ...The student in the regular university course, and particularly in the required course, is apt to view the course as an experience in which he expects to remain passive or resentful or both, an experience which he certainly does not often see as relevant to his own problems.  Yet it has also been my experience that when a regular university class does perceive the course as an experience they can use to resolve problems which are of concern to them, the sense of release, and the thrust of forward movement is astonishing.

When a whole nation perceives itself as being faced with an urgent problem of being behind - in agriculture, in industrial production, in scientific development, in weapons development - then an astonishing amount of significant learning takes place.

So the first implication for education might well be that we permit the student, at any level, to be in real contact with the relevant problems of his existence, so that he perceives problems and issues which he wishes to resolve. 

The Energy Project is in a good position to put students in contact with problems they care about and/or that are of national concern (e.g., sustainability), and in fact this was one of the motivations for forming the Energy Project in the first place.

2.  The Teacher's Real-ness

Learning will be facilitated, it would seem, if the teacher is congruent.  This involves the teacher's being the person that he is, and being openly aware of the attitudes that he holds.  It means that he feels acceptant towards his own real feelings.  Thus he becomes a real person in the relationship with his students.  He can be enthusiastic about subjects he likes, and bored by topics he does not like.  He can be angry, but he can also be sensitive or sympathetic.  Because he accepts his feelings as his feelings, he has no need to impose them on his students, or insist that they feel the same way.  He is a person, not a faceless embodiment of a curricular requirement, or a sterile pipe through which knowledge is passed from one generation to the next.

The need for what Rogers calls "congruence" is based in his experience that human beings are keen perceivers of any kind of emotional falseness, remoteness, ambiguity, or mixed messages, and that when we perceive them, we tend to be confused and distrustful.  Then we don't show ourselves, and we avoid exploring risky territory because we don't feel safe, and "significant learning" is unlikely.  The effort toward "congruence" is most of what Rogers tries to do himself as a therapist:  If he can accept his own feelings and be completely transparent with his client, then he can be "almost sure the relationship will be a helpful one."

My experiences with the teachers in the Teaching Seminar (as we are now calling it) feel like an illustration of this to me.  Links to that sequence:  First session, second session, third session.

Continued in part II.

Energy in a Refrigerator, continued

We started a few days ago.  Here is our current analysis.

T is Thermal energy, P is Phase energy (which we made up; it's the kind of energy that is greater for a gas than for a liquid), E is Electrical energy, and M is Motion or Mechanical or Motor, as the mood strikes us.  I made two colors of arrows because I thought it made the diagram easier to parse, but then when I looked at it, I realized that the green arrows are when the energy is being carried by the material fluid, and the black arrows are heat and work.  Mostly.  I was not consistent.

We'll start in the evaporator (top left).  There is cold cold fluid, some of which is liquid and some of which is gas.  (You can't see the fluid in the diagram, because this is an energy diagram; but anywhere there's a P, there's gas.  We could have had more Ps for gas than for liquid, but instead we chose to have liquid be the baseline = no Ps.)  The cold fluid in the evaporator takes in thermal energy from the food; that thermal energy transforms into phase energy, meaning that some liquid evaporates.  (Hence: evaporator.)  You could say this as, "The hot food helps evaporate the cold fluid," and that tells you something about refrigerant (the interior of a fridge is "hot" as far as it's concerned).  Some of the refrigerant was gas already.  We'll get to that.

The gas goes into the compressor chamber (bottom left, right half of box).  In the compressor device itself (left half of box), electrical energy is transformed into M energy, squeezing the gas in the chamber, doing work on it and thus transferring thermal energy to it (first law).  Thus is the gas made hot.

The hot gas flows to the condenser (bottom right), carrying its Ps and Ts with it.  In the condenser, Ps transform to Ts (hot gas turns to hot liquid), and the proper number of Ts are radiated (or convected or whatever) off into the room.  Now we have a merely warm liquid.

The warm liquid flows to the expansion valve (top right), where it is forced through a small opening ("throttled"), spraying out droplets and a bit of gas.  The production of droplets is no big deal energetically (mere van der Waals interactions) and we neglect it.  The dominant energy process is the partial evaporation: Ts turn to Ps.  The result is cold gas.  This cold gas goes to the evaporator.  Remember we said there was already gas in the evaporator, and that it was colder than the food?

It seems to me that we would only need seven actors (plus maybe a few extras) to do this as Energy Theater, and I would like to do that, to see if anything new comes up when we make it dynamic.

Some remaining questions:
1. What is special about refrigerant, or about various specific refrigerants?
2. What does enthalpy have to do with it?
3. What does entropy have to do with it?
4. How does this diagram compare to the heat flow diagram common in textbooks, or to other refrigerator diagrams?
5. What are the names and thermodynamic laws associated with all the processes represented?

6. Are we right about partial evaporation being the dominant process in the expansion valve?

Relational discourse

Benedikt watched the first fifteen minutes of video of one of Chris Blea's classes today, and saw.... everything and nothing, in a way I will try to articulate.  First of all, technically it was fine, which was good to know, and skimming through the video it very much appears to be a high-discourse classroom, so there is a good hope of actually getting to see students discussing their ideas together during this session.  If that is the case, it'll be a first for this project, and a big score.

In the fifteen minutes that we watched at normal speed (neither skimming nor analyzing), the students talk about the camera.  A lot.  "The camera!  The camera!  We're on TV!  Remember that permission slip we signed, that's for the class that she is taking!  I want to be on TV!"  They look up at the camera, they do little dance moves, etc.  Chris starts class by saying, "Today we are going to finish up this activity.  We are going to do part 2.  Homework is your conclusion paragraph.  Reread part 2 of the lab to begin."  It's all procedural; I don't remember her even saying anything about what topic it is.  They open their lab books, but the ones on camera don't really read.  More camera antics (but quieter ones).  Chris, for the next several minutes, keeps up a fairly continual patter of, "So guys, right now you are reading the lab.  You are rereading the lab.  You are trying to figure out what we're doing.  You are not talking."  Myself, I would find it hard to read with her talking, but I don't know what it takes to hold together a room of 6th graders so I am not one to judge.

The fact that they attend to the camera for so very long is a drag on the one hand, because I'm sorry to have disrupted Chris's class.  On the other hand, though, camera effects are something about which I have a theoretical perspective.  My perspective (and I think I have references for this? better check) is that people stop attending to the camera when they have something more interesting to do.  Conversely, if they keep attending to the camera, they don't have anything more interesting to do.  Thus, the activity Chris is trying to start is not interesting to them.  Chris's reiterating "You are reading the lab, you are not talking," seems to me to be additional evidence for this; they must be pretty easily diverted from the desired activity, or she wouldn't have to harp at them constantly to keep doing it.

Benedikt, Hunter, and I tried to put our finger on what the problem is with the activity that Chris is presenting, such that the students are almost aggressively not interested.  We thought of a lot of things that we're not sure answer the question, such as:  The instructions are all procedural, "read this page"; there is little sense of purpose.  The activity is presented as very literal, with no invitation to use your imagination.  The instructor is talking kind of like a robot rather than showing personal enthusiasm for the topic.

Trying to bring (my understanding of) a Rogerian perspective to the analysis, I remembered that one of the key relational issues is:  As human beings we seem to need to know where the other person is coming from.  We (clients, students) need people in helping relationships (therapists, teachers) to be genuine and transparent, or we get anxious.  If we don't know who we are talking to, we don't want to reveal ourselves.  We'd rather leave, actually, or if we can't leave, we opt out in some other way.  So is Chris not being "genuine"?  After some discussion we decided that Chris is not really being Chris, here, not being her unique Chris self; instead, she is being a local representative of some remote authoritarian voice.  "Now You Will Read."  It may as well be over the public address system.  The person in the room (Chris) is not the entity that is addressing us.  That entity is remote and invisible, and actually so is Chris.  So, in a Rogerian sense, no wonder the students are opting out.  The whole thing is very dislocated.

To regain the students' attention, in this perspective, one would need to be present in the room, as oneself.  And one would need to address the students out of that presence, and also be addressing the students as unique people who are in the room with you, rather than as representatives of Studenthood.  There would need to be what I'm going to call a relational discourse, where the relation is between the unique teacher-person and the unique student-person, in that present moment.  I realize I sound very new agey.  I think I am stuck with it.

The idea of "relational discourse" seems to me to be totally critical to formative assessment, especially the kind of moment-to-moment formative assessment that I'm looking for (but rarely finding) in short bursts of video.  The only way you're going to get information about the students you're interacting with is if they are willing to share themselves with you.  If we are with Rogers, then they are going to share with you best when you are at your most genuine and transparent, when you yourself are most immediately present with them.  Then on top of that you need to have the other things that Rogers cites as key to a helping relationship: warmth (unconditional positive regard) and empathy (seeing things through their eyes).  


The usual definition of FA is something like "using evidence about students' understanding to make informed decisions about the next step or steps in instruction."  Using that definition to spot FA, you have to do this multistep analysis:  Did the teacher elicit student ideas?  Was the teacher informed by hearing the student ideas?  Did the teacher put those student ideas to use in an instructional decision?  It feels very intellectualized.  Relational discourse, on the other hand, feels like the sort of thing that we as human beings are very attuned to, and that makes it potentially a very useful concept.  If I can hook my FA-episode-selection-process to something I'm humanly attuned to, I'm going to be better at spotting relevant episodes.  


(I think attunement in general is extremely important for qualitative analysis in general, because there is just so much data and it's so overwhelmingly rich, you need the help of your instincts to spot the good stuff.  We should take every opportunity to harness our selective attention to our holistic sense of what's what.)

E2 Refrigerator Energy Theater

Benedikt and Hunter and I spent some time with two minutes of Energy Theater video today, in which the E2 people did ET for a refrigerator.   This ET session came after about ten hours of discussion spread over three days, and was pretty much the conclusion of their study of refrigerators.  The video below is of their first walk-through.

Three objects in the scenario are denoted with string loops:  the food, the coolant, and the electrical outlet.  The surrounding environment (say, the kitchen) is understood to be outside the loops.  Thermal energy people fan themselves, people with their arms circled over their heads are "phase energy" (which is the kind of energy that gases have more of than liquids), and people with twinkle hands are electrical energy.  The coolant that is represented here is not all of the coolant at once; instead, it is a packet of coolant that moves around the coolant-circuit as the action proceeds.

We are still figuring out the significance of what all they do.  Why do some of the phase-energy people walk down the stairs when the electrical-energy people enter the coolant (i.e., when the coolant-packet is in the condenser)?  Is it significant that the thermal-energy people that go out into the room when the coolant is in the condenser are the same people that were originally in the food?  Did they skip the evaporator at the end?  Plus there is a lot of lovely interactional stuff we barely touched on, like:  When are people taking direction from Matt and when are they acting independently?  Which people know what's going on?  When do people drop their arms?  When does Matt consult the white board?  What is Lisa's contribution?  What is Hunter's role?

This is all about stuff that happens during this short episode, which is natural for me since that's all I've seen.  Hunter and Benedikt have more of a sense of the conceptual development that happened over days, and have posted thoughts about that on their own blogs.

Chris Blea observation

Benedikt and I went and videotaped Chris's class today.  We didn't observe the class while it was happening (too distracting), so I am just here to record the rest of what we observed.

Chris teaches at McClure Middle School, which is right up on Queen Anne (we walked from SPU).  Queen Anne is a nice urban neighborhood.  The building is not new, but is well-kept, and the classrooms seemed well-equipped (by public school standards... the computer lab had eMacs, if you remember those).  The students were an orderly and pleasant bunch, more ethnically diverse than I would have guessed (still majority white), and had that nutty range of heights that you only see in middle school.  I did not see a single cell phone.  Maybe they are not allowed.  

The classes we taped were 6th grade classes, and today they were doing electric circuits. Chris has three of these classes in a row, 49 minutes each with a three-minute passing period.  She did not allow us to tape the middle class, which apparently includes a bunch of very distractible students.  Indeed, those students discovered the microphones taped to the insides of the desks, and (as Chris told us later) they did nothing else for fifteen minutes but look for more things.  I feel bad that we caused a disruption.  The other two classes were relatively uneventful, fortunately, and when we peeked in, we saw groups of four students engaged in plenty of science discourse.  I am optimistic that we'll get some useful episodes.

Energy in a Refrigerator

Yesterday morning, Rachel and I tried to figure out what happens to the energy in a refrigerator. In order to do that, we sat down with a white board (actually, two) and started drawing energy-theater-style diagrams.

First of all, we tried to come up with the important parts of the “refrigerator scenario.” Our list (assembled employing the help of omniscient sister wikipedia) consisted of Food, Room, Outlet, Condenser, Expansion Valve, Evaporator, and Compressor. Then we decided that we would have to look at two different scenarios, the initial cooling down of the fridge contents, and then the continuing keeping-stuff-cool.

The next step in breaking down the scenario was to think about the fridge as kind of a black box instead of this complex assembly of machinery, and just have four objects: Food, Fridge, Room, and Outlet. This is a reconstruction of what we came up with:


We decided that the Food starts by giving some of its thermal energy to the Fridge, and the Outlet gives some amount of electrical energy to the Fridge. The Fridge in turn hands the thermal energy from the Food on to the Room, and converts the electrical energy from the Outlet into thermal energy that also goes into the Room. Some of the thermal energy in the room can get back into the Food (through improper insulation, open door, etc.). Since the Fridge is cooling down the Food, it’s transferring more thermal energy out of the Food than is coming in from the Room. Make sense so far?

When we had come up with this, we decided that a Fridge is some kind of an operator that can be fed with two kinds of energy, thermal and electric, then does something with it and outputs thermal energy only.



In other words: A refrigerator is a thing that 1. transforms electrical into thermal energy, and 2. transports thermal energy.

Now that we had established this, we could draw a diagram for a fridge maintaining a constant temperature in the food:



This is a lousy fridge, it “uses” a lot of electrical energy to do whatever it has to do in order to transport the incoming thermal energy out into the room again.

A better fridge would need less electrical energy:



Now, we felt like we could zoom in a little and look what actually happens inside the fridge. So, we drew a new picture:



The box represents the fridge, and we have the two inputs on the left and the one output on the right. Next up, we decided which elements of the fridge would be our objects. Since we’re always looking at the refrigerant, but there are different energetic states of the coolant, depending on where it actually is, we decided to name those objects “Fluid in the [...]” where the [...] stands for the part that we’re looking at. We had identified four parts earlier, the Evaporator, the Condenser, the Compressor and the Expansion Valve. The next picture shows what we thought should happen to the coolant in the Evaporator:



We had already drawn the four shapes representing the objects, but only labeled the two that we were sure we had to include. We didn’t really know yet about the other two.

So, we decided that the food gives thermal energy to the refrigerant in the evaporator. This energy is used to vaporize the fluid, which causes an increase in the “Phase Energy” of the refrigerant. We just created this thing to not have to think too deeply about the microscopic details of the fluid/gas. Phase Energy to us just meant that whenever a phase change occurs, there will be a change in Phase Energy. If the refrigerant is liquid, it will have less Phase Energy, if it is a gas, we will have put some amount of energy into it, so it will have more Phase Energy.

Next up, we said that the fluid with its Phase Energy will enter the compressor, where it will be compressed. Duh. This happens by putting electrical energy into the compressor, which is basically a motor or a pump, where the electrical energy gets converted into mechanical energy. Then, the pump transfers the mechanical energy into thermal energy, it heats up the gas by increasing the pressure and decreasing the volume. Really, we should probably say that the pump does work on the gas, and since we assume that there is no heat exchange with the environment, the internal (thermal) energy of the refrigerant increases, the temperature goes up.



At this point, we realized that the transformation from electrical into mechanical energy does not happen in the fluid, so we decided to include another object, the actual compressor:



Yes, it says “squeeze” and “1st law” in the diagram. That was just a reminder for us of what happens, and why.

After the compressor, we said the refrigerant would go into the condenser. And of course, it would take all its Thermal and Phase Energy with it.



In the condenser, the gas condenses. Duh. And while it does that, it gives off energy, which is being conducted, convected, radiated, whatever, into the room. First, we thought that that might only consist of the Phase Energy that gets transferred into Thermal Energy during the phase change. But then, we started thinking about the rest of the thermal energy, and we said that that’s probably also going into the surroundings.



So, here we go, all the energy of the refrigerant (well, the parts that got there from the food and from the compressor) is going out into the environment.

After the condenser, the fluid goes through the Expansion Valve. And here (at the latest) things get a little funky. According to wikipedia, the now again liquid and cooled down refrigerant “partly evaporates.” Wait, how does this happen? What happens to the energy during this process? Is there energy coming in? Is the energy increasing or decreasing? Does it stay the same? Huh, there is no energy coming in, so it should stay the same! HELP!

At this point, the hunger was stronger than the desire to actually think it through, so we decided to stop there and get lunch. I’m not really happy yet with the Evaporator step. And in general, I’m unsure whether our definition of Phase Energy is sufficient or not. Is it really enough to just say, “once the fluid changes its phase, the Phase Energy changes a certain amount, e.g. three P for gas, no P for liquid?” Do we have to account for different stages of the phase shift? Is our representation accurate enough for our purposes or do we need to include some details that we have totally neglected so far in order to “make it real?” Those are the things that we will have to be thinking about, I guess. Feel free to think with us and contribute to the thinking process on this blog!