UE2 - Teachers' Energy Framework (06/27/11)

On Monday afternoon, Hunter asked the teachers to come up with what he called an 'Energy Framework' (EF), a collection of questions they would like answered when talking about energy in a certain scenario. As an example, Hunter brought up the 'Car Framework,' and teachers volunteered: mode, make, color, number of doors, etc. Going back to the EF, Hunter mentioned "What form of energy is there?", "Where is the energy located?", and "How does it transform", as useful questions to have in their EF.

Once the activity was over, we were able to take pictures of the whiteboards the teachers had

written on, and compiled their questions on the following table:

(You can download the full file from here: files.me.com/easo/dp44bk ; password: EnergyProject)

It is very interesting to see how Hunter's suggested questions were used either as questions in their own EFs, or as 'parent questions' that helped the teachers come up with more detailed questions about the situation ("if it transforms, where, how, and maybe why?"). Most of the groups felt satisfied with the the EF very quickly, and proceeded to talk about other school-related issues, like the presence of energy in the curriculum.

I was observing Table 3 (Meg, Charlene, Michelle), and this is the progression of how the EF was built:

1. They repeated Hunter's questions to each other, decided on whether they were valuable or not, and, if they were, proceeded to write them down on the board. Once they had covered all of his questions, they started asking more detailed questions, like "Where did the energy come from?", or "What evidence do we have of either of the above questions?"
2. The conversation about the EF was put on hold on hold for a while, and they started talking about how, and when, Energy was taught in their schools, and the amount of resources available for them to teach it (kits, lesson plans, activities).
3. After they all went around the table explaining how things were done in their schools, they came back to the energy question they had written down and revised them, adding some more questions.

I do wonder about how the teachers are using the EF, though, because when they were analyzing Hunter's "dropping the basketball" scenario, it seemed like they were just plowing through the questions, and didn't seem to be paying much attention the 'evidence' that pointed to their answers. For example, a very common form of energy that came up was 'chemical energy', which was present when Hunter was holding the ball before letting it go. But it seemed to me like they never took the time to explain why there was 'chemical energy', or if the 'chemical energy' that Hunter used to lift the ball had actually transformed into 'gravitational potential energy' (a term that didn't come up in tables 3 or 7), etc.