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).