How To Interact with Others and Badgering

On the first day of Energy One, much time was spent describing the rights and responsibilities (r&r) of all people involved in the class. It was striking to see the interaction between Group 3 and then hear what they had to say about rights. I found a clip where Tomme states, "You're badgering to get information" to Bill in the second E1 video, at about minute 10:30. It was certainly a case where the teachers each had their specific way of learning and seemed unwilling to adjust or help each other understand the different way of processing. Tomme then states, "This is not an educational process that's happening here, and I certainly hope you don't do this in your classroom."



It seemed like there may have been a communication malfunction when the teachers were thinking about the differences in their learning styles. I wanted Kristi (the silent member of the group during this interaction) to speak up and play mediator. I expect teachers to be good at facilitating and providing positive feedback to each other and I found this situation to be very typical for situations I have seen from my students in high school. Ideally (at least to me) teachers should be allowing students to challenge what they say, and allowing push back within their classrooms because this is how students will be able to get over misconceptions. Without the ability to question and discuss their confusion regarding physics, the students will have a difficult time truly internalizing what is going on around them. If the teachers don't feel comfortable working through their understandings with their peers, it might be difficult to allow students to question within the classroom.

**Mary Bridget made the comment that Bill was not present for the "getting to know you" introduction. Had he been there, this may have helped to alleviate some of the pressure in the situation.

According to Dorothy, this group worked well together after lunch and after the discussion around r&r. I feel like perhaps this conflict could have been avoided had the r&r discussion come first. But perhaps the r&r was more productive because they had already experienced this issue. This leads me to wonder as an observer, what exactly was the purpose of engaging the students in this first video (Honda Cog from Youtube showing a Rube-Goldberg machine) and analysis? Was it to start a dialogue about energy and get the teachers interested? Was it for the instructors to understand better what prior knowledge existed? Was it just a mixer activity or a sort of pretest that will be brought back later? I might have missed this too (I was challenged today with observing and typing at the same time!).

A couple of notes for me:
All video stored for EPSRI is under \\physicsdata\classes for PCs.
It is better to download the videos onto the computer before using Quick Time and Inqscribe.