Teaching Seminar: Continuation of Leaves in the Street episode

I'm finally getting around to blogging about the Teaching Seminar from 2/7, where the teachers discussed another 12 minutes of Matt's class. I had some technical difficulties, so there was a good chunk of time I wasn't able to listen, and then then battery on the mic died at some point, so I don't know how much of the discussion we actually have audio for. Too bad, because it may have been an interesting discussion. Also, I was so excited about the video myself (I had not seen it before class) that I had a hard time going meta and analyzing their discussion of it.

What excited me about the video: Lots of language about energy that I didn't understand. Using strange grammar and making strange distinctions like "It has a source of energy" and "Does it have energy or does it just use energy?" I suspect that the students are implicitly using some other metaphor for energy, but I'm not sure what it is.

Also, one thing that came up the next week in our research group meeting when we discussed the video: There's a point when Matt says, "So it's not necessarily that an object that is moving has energy, it just takes energy to cause something to move?" He's listening to what the students are saying and he's noticing a distinction that most experts wouldn't even see, because to an expert, those things are the same. Someone argued that he's been primed to hear that distinction because he's been in our summer courses and teaching seminars for two years, where we've talked in great detail about these distinctions. But if that's true, is this a piece of evidence that our course is actually having an impact on a teacher's classroom practice? Or maybe Matt would have done this even if he'd never been part of this course.

What may be interesting about the teaching seminar: Lots of rich discussion about what students were thinking. I caught teachers saying a lot of things that seemed too simplistic to me, like they weren't really getting what students were thinking, but at the same time, they were really talking the whole time about what students might be thinking. If we want to write a paper about how teachers' attention to student thinking changes over the course of the teaching seminar, there's probably some good data here, but I'd have to watch it again to know what to pick out.