Teaching Seminar visit to zhomes

Last night for Teaching Seminar Lane arranged for us to have a tour of zhomes, a new zero-energy development of town homes in Issaquah. I videotaped, but I'm not sure if there's really anything worth seeing on the video.

We had a good crowd, about 15 teachers, some of whom I hadn't seen for a while, and everyone seemed very enthusiastic about the tour. The tour was led by a woman named Elly, who is the education and outreach coordinator, and a man named Brad who is the project manager. Both of them were extremely knowledgeable about the project and were able to answer every question we asked except for the question about whether any of them had sold yet. Our fears that the tour would just be a sales pitch by a real estate agent were totally unfounded.

Having recently been through a green house remodel (from hell) myself and learned all the ins and outs of what's really green and what's greenwashing, I can say that they pulled out all the stops on this one, and really made it green in every way: reducing energy (and water) consumption, producing renewable energy (and water), reducing waste, using sustainably produced materials, and using non-toxic materials. They have super-insulated walls and a geothermal heat pump, which keeps the energy needed for heating the house and water low. They produce all the energy they need with pv solar panels. They *don't* have two things people commonly think of as being "green" features, solar hot water panels and an on-demand hot water heater, because they don't really need them with the geo-thermal heat pump. Also, there's no gas in the house, and one thing I learned in my own house remodel is that an on-demand water heater uses so much energy at once (although not much averaged over time), that it puts a huge load on your electrical system, so it's usually not worth it if you have to power it with electricity. They also harvest rainwater for flushing toilets and washing clothes. And they do lots of other cool things that I won't go into.

A couple new things I learned last night:

1. The term "watergy" means the combined water and energy used, taking into account the energy that went into producing your water and the water that went into producing your energy. I'm not sure if this is a quantitative concept, as in there's a formula to actually calculate a number for your watergy, or a qualitative concept, as in, wow, a lot of energy is used to get water to your house and a lot of water is used to make energy.

2. The price of pv solar panels has recently dropped dramatically due to flooding of the market from China, and Washington state is offering so many incentives (we pay 6 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity, but Washington state will pay you up to 55 cents per kilowatt-hour to produce electricity), that the payback time for solar panels in Washington is now estimated to be only 7-9 years. Wow.

The two things I was not impressed with about zhomes were the design and liveability of the homes, and the price. The lighting was terrible, and that combined with super dark finishes made them really depressing to be inside. And the most of them, even a 1500-square-foot "two bedroom" had no private rooms at all, just giant rooms and lofts that are all interconnected. I like less privacy than most people I know, but even I couldn't live in a house like that. Even if I could afford it, which I definitely couldn't!

So what did this tour add up to for the Energy Project? What did we or the teachers learn that we could use in our teaching? I think using a zero energy house design could be a great starting point for a unit on energy. Students be given the task of designing a house, and then make arguments for the trade-offs of various choices. After grappling with the problem for themselves, they could be presented with the real choices made in various design projects, including zhomes (I have lots of contacts for people who could provide other case studies, and could even offer my own house to study), and asked to evaluate those choices. Bringing in things besides energy, like water, cost, and liveability, makes all those decisions even more complex. I think a project like this could really help students learn about energy conservation in both senses of the phrase (and compare the two senses) and learn some great critical thinking skills. But if neither we nor the teachers are going to take on this project, I'm not exactly sure how this tour fits into what we're doing.

It might be interesting to ask the teachers who went to reflect on how they could use what they learned in their teaching of energy.

Islands of identification

Abby and I are reading P. W. Bridgman's The Nature of Thermodynamics, with the goal of understanding entropy, degradation, usefulness, etc. in disciplinary terms.  We picked this book because it is a pleasant little paperback, with next to no equations, written in a chatty, accessible style, and because Stamatis said it was good.

Bridgman won the Nobel prize in physics in 1946 for investigations of the properties of matter under high pressure.  He also is credited with coining the term "operational definition"; so I feel in his debt.  This book, published in 1941, starts out with an extended explanation of why his book is not going to be a rigorously logical or mathematical treatise.  The explanation is in terms of personal taste:

[A precise logical] analysis serves certain definite purposes; in particular one may feel a security in the conclusions of such an analysis which is impossible in a less formal structure.  But this I suspect is not the whole reason why those whose analysis runs to this form actually do it; it must be that they enjoy such rigorously precise activities for their own sake.  Personally, my tastes place me in that other group which does not take an intrinsic pleasure in the elaboration of a logically flawless and complete structure.  I would undergo the labor of constructing such a structure only as it might be necessary for some more compelling purpose. (p. vii)

His experience is that what feels to him most like "understanding" is found when physics concepts are expressed verbally, as opposed to in the language of logic or mathematics.  He goes on to suggest that this is not merely his own preference, but is likely something significant about human cognition:  he suggests that if we were to study which concepts and operations have survived in physics, out of all the possible conceivable concepts,

...I am convinced that the verbal factor wold be found to be one of the most important factors determining selection and survival.  The concepts of physics which we inherited ready-made were such that they fit the same verbal pattern as the more familiar objects of daily life; we demand of any new concepts which we are forced to invent to meet new previously unknown situations that they permit the familiar verbal handling. ...For our verbal habits have evolved from millions of years of searching for adequate methods of dealing verbally with external situations, eliminating methods that were not a close enough fit. (p. x-xi)

I have the idea that Bridgman would be pleased by embodied cognition.  I also think he would be a fan of Ochs, based on something he said about the development of atomic theory (long before it had any justification in experiment):

It just seems to be a fact about our thinking machinery that we must have our atoms; we cannot think of the velocity of a uniform fluid without imaging the "particles" of which the fluid is composed... Perhaps the human necessity for its particles is connected with the necessity for "identification" in thinking; the very words we use are little islands of identification in the amorphous sea of our cerebration, and the particle of a fluid is a little materialized piece of identifiability.  (p. 9-10)

I am never going to get to the second law at this rate; but I'm really enjoying myself.

Motorcycle current

I'm going back and watching video we've collected from teachers' classrooms for evidence of PCK and attending to the disciplinary substance of student ideas. Thought this video was awfully cute:

This comes from a class that has been using an adapted version of the Physics by Inquiry electric circuits model. The groups are in the process of devising rules for what happens to the current through the battery when a bulb is added in series and (separately) when a bulb is added in parallel.

Not sure what all of the sound effects that Frank is using mean, but I think the circuit that he's 'tracing' with his 'motorcycle sounds' is a parallel one. I think the crash at the end might be when the 'current' returns to the battery.

Light bulb energetics according to Brian Frank

The thing that makes Brian's model greatly superior to mine is that his has a mechanism for current flowing.  

Teaching seminar: Goals for the year

The beginning of the academic year means the beginning of a new year of Teaching Seminars, which is a tough subject for me.  There have been good times and bad times, in my opinion, but overall I would not call our Teaching Seminar a big success.  Attendance is low, participation is ordinary, the video of the teachers' discussions is mostly not rich, and there's not a sense on our part (the leadership) that we have really helped people get anywhere.  I hope I'm not being too negative in my characterization of our group opinion.... this is how it feels to me.

We are trying something different this year.  The plan is to support teachers in creating more high-quality discourse in their classrooms using an established discourse tool.  We have chosen a family of tools used by a team in the School of Ed at UW, called Tools for Ambitious Science Teaching; the developers are local and will hopefully collaborate with us.  Our hope is that once teachers get invested in producing exciting discourse using this tool, they will be excited to see how it works in their own classroom, and will eagerly invite us to videotape.  (Or, at least, they will feel less vulnerable about our videotaping, because we will be videotaping their enactment of someone else's thing, rather than just them.)  And the resulting video will be better than what we've usually gotten in the past, which will both support the Teaching Seminar itself, and will serve as evidence that we're helping teachers improve their classroom practice.  This is our vision.  

For the first session, though, we wanted to make sure and hear from the teachers about their own goals for themselves, and how we might support them during the academic year.  About a dozen people showed up and there was a convivial feeling.  As teachers came in, we had these beautiful little books waiting for them (thank you, Julie!):

Abby explained that their task, with these little books, is to jot down interesting things that students say, or that they see happen in their classes.  If you can write one little thing a day, or even not every day but just some days, then by the time the next Teaching Seminar comes around, there will be quite a bit of material.  The books are wonderfully attractive; they have a soft vinyl cover, they come in these beautiful colors, and they fit in a shirt pocket or back pants pocket.  I took one and put it in the camera bag.  

After a pleasant dinner, the first task was to respond to the following prompt (I'm paraphrasing):

"It is the summer of 2012!  As you relax and hike through the Cascades, you reflect on one wonderful new thing that happened this year.  What is it?"

I sat with Jean, Laura, Linda, Jim, Lane, and Stamatis, with a visitor named Ragini sitting in with us for a bit.  We had a wonderful conversation in which I learned a lot about each person's particular circumstances, and their wishes for their classrooms, which in some cases were in rather heartbreaking contrast.  There was a lot of consensus on the kind of statements people imagined making on this envisioned future hike:  here is what we agreed on:

(Click to make it bigger if it's hard to read.)  The rest of our conversation was centered on two other prompts, and since we were invited to share individual answers to the questions, that's what wound up on the white boards:

"What content area would you like to focus on this fall?"

"What content area would you like to see growth in for your students this fall?
"What instructional practice would you like to focus on developing this fall?"

The handwriting is all mine.  I wrote what people were saying partly because we had been asked to (and no one else picked up the pen before I did), partly to keep our discussion focused, and partly to acknowledge the very cool things that people were saying.

Here is the white board from the other table, which has responses to all three of the above prompts.  I hear that their discussion included a lot about Socractic seminars (described here).

Clement on embodied examples that don't work

For my other project, I'm reading Clement's paper on "anchoring conceptions" and "bridging analogies":

J. Clement, D.E. Brown, and A. Zietsman, “Not all preconceptions are misconceptions: finding ‘anchoring conceptions’ for grounding instruction on students’ intuitions,” International Journal of Science Education 11, no. 5 (1989): 554–565.

In this paper, they look for "anchoring examples," which are physical scenarios for which at least 70% of students give a correct explanation with high confidence before instruction. The idea is that these scenarios have the potential to be used in instruction to help students transfer their correct intuition to more difficult examples.

I was particularly struck by his discussion of physical scenarios that he expected to be intuitive students because they can easily put themselves into the scenario, but that turned out not to be so intuitive:

There were also some cases for which we mistakenly expected certain anchors to be stronger than others. For example, given the situation of a hand pushing down on a spring in question 4, students were asked whether the spring exerts a force on the hand. This was considered to be a good candidate for an anchor, but we had some reservations about how strong an anchoring example it would be. We expected that the upward force would be recognized more intuitively in the case of holding up a 30 pound dictionary on an outstretched hand (question 2). In both cases the subject can imagine feeling the upward force, but the dictionary situation involves a person exerting the force and allows for direct use of kinesthetic intuition. However, the results indicated that the hand-on-spring situation was in fact an anchoring example for more students (belief score of 80%) than the dictionary-on-hand situation (belief score of 65%). One possible reason for the spring being a stronger anchor is that the spring moves up when the hand is removed, whereas this is not so obvious for the hand when the book is removed.

Perhaps the most surprising result from this study was the low belief score for the log exerting a force on Mr T’s chest in question 1. We predicted this situation would be a solid anchor for students because of the opportunity to identify with the person in the problem. However, this situation was an anchor for only 53% of the students. A full 30% answered, although some with low confidence, that the log would not exert a force. We are interested in using deeper probes and analysis techniques to determine the origins of these anomalous responses in the future.

His description of what he expected seems very much in line with the way we describe how embodied learning activities build on the theory of Ochs. He does not offer any speculation about why these anchors didn't work as well as he expected. Surely this has some kind of implications for our work...

Light bulb energetics

In watching those light bulb energy theater episodes, I realized I needed to do some thinking about energy transfers and transformations in a light bulb that is burning steadily.  Here's what I feel clear on:  Energy, which I will call electrical energy, enters the bulb.  Electrical energy is transformed into thermal and light energy in the filament.  Thermal and light energy leave the bulb.  Check.

How does the electrical energy enter the bulb?  By means of the current, right?  Energy is carried by objects, and electrons are the objects that are going into the bulb.  That's why I called it "electrical" energy in the first place.  But, here is the issue that Russell brings up in the first episode of my earlier post:  The electrons leave the bulb, too.  And the current is exactly the same when it goes out as when it came in.  How can a current lose energy (as it must, if thermal and light energy are going to be produced at the filament) and yet be the same afterwards?

Over lunch, Amy and I did our darndest to think of what could be different that we might not be thinking of.  Could the electrons have less kinetic energy after the filament, and perhaps be differently dispersed in the wire to make up for it?  We think the answer is no.  We think that anything we could measure about the charges in the wire would be the same before the filament as after it.

My physics brain, meanwhile, was reminding me that there is something different about the electrons before the filament than after it, which is that they are at a "higher voltage."  That's just dead knowledge when I say it that way, a vocabulary word rather than an explanation; but it got me thinking.  I thought about the electrons as blocks sliding downhill.  Or actually, sliding frictionlessly on a horizontal surface (the wire), then sliding down a carpeted hill (the filament) so that the speed on the hill is constant, then sliding horizontally again (the other wire), and then being lifted back to their starting point by an elevator (the battery).  The blocks are the same before and after the hill – anything I cared to measure about any one block is the same, and a movie of the set of blocks on the lower level looks the same as a movie of the set of blocks on the higher level.  Yet they "generated" thermal energy on the way, when they rubbed on the carpet.  So the upper blocks must have had some energy not associated with an observable property of each block itself.  The only thing that changed is the height.  On that basis, I hereby invent "height energy" in the context of electric circuits.  Except it's not height; it's position relative to the battery.  So let's call it "position energy," or "arrangement energy," or "configuration energy."

Position energy is tricky, because you can't see anything about the object itself, in isolation, that tells you that it has more energy.  You know that the object has more energy because it can make more of something happen - it can warm the carpet more, or light the filament more.  But you can't see that (ahem) potential directly.

I'm also ready to define a "field" now, and my definition is:  A set of different positions associated with different energies.

Light bulb energy theater

I needed more video of Energy Theater for the paper I'm writing, and also Michael Wittmann needed some for a class he's teaching that is discussing our work - his deadline helped me get on the stick.  Abby remembered what she thought would be a good one from E1 this summer, and she is so right!  It's full of great stuff.  Here are three episodes in which E1 teachers negotiate and then enact energy theater for an incandescent light bulb. The episodes take place back-to-back, so the below is in some sense a single 22-minute "episode," but the conversation naturally divided itself into three topics, so I broke it up.

In the first episode, they discuss whether the fact that the electrons go in a loop means that they, the energy, should also go in a loop.  Their discussion is initially about disambiguating matter and energy; eventually, the issue is refined to be about the fact that the electrons are carriers of electrical energy, some of which is transferred to the filament but some of which stays with the electrons.

In the second episode, they discuss whether the thermal energy and light energy are made simultaneously in the filament or whether light energy is made from thermal energy (or vice versa).  Lane makes what I think is a terrific move, which is that he tells them the answer straight out, but not in terms of the ET representation:  he says something like, "The filament glows because it is hot," leaving them to translate that into ET.  There is also a juicy bit in which Tomme states that it is "physically impossible" for thermal energy to transform into light energy, because "light is a higher energy state than heat."

In the third episode they act out the energy theater.  Something to note is that all their planning is represented in the above episodes -- they don't really "rehearse" their energy theater, or learn from the model that they enact, because they don't have time.  Christine takes the lead and they all follow her directing.

I look forward to discussing these in a future group meeting.

Classroom Observation of ET

My observation of Mrs. B's 7th/8th Gr. ET - 10/10/2011

So much to talk about!  I had such a blast going observing with Rachel.  I felt like the response we got from Mrs. B was super positive and I hope that I get to do more of these observations.

We observed two classes and the differences between the two classes were absolutely striking!  Each class that she has was a small number of students compared to her regular class because 1/2 the students were out for a field trip.  The first class - Period 4 - was 16 students 10 boys, 6 girls and the second class - 5th period - was only 9 students 4 boys, 5 girls.  These students were asked to do ET for a bouncing tennis ball, from the point it just starts touching the ground, to the point it just leaves the ground.  I thought this was uber hard for the students to start with, but maybe it was just me!

The main difference between the classrooms was the students willingness to participate.  I feel like the group I watched in 4th period was paranoid about saying anything.  They were simply listening to the one student Jacob make his statement, and then followed along without considering it to be correct.  The "discussion" only lasted a little while and then they all stood around awkwardly for some time.  Finally, because I am not a good observer yet, I asked them to do it again so that I could see what was going on....then Mrs. B came over and asked them some questions that got them started again.  They couldn't move on without her really.
The 5th period class however, because it was smaller, had the full attention of Mrs. B because there was only one ET group.  I thought this class did an amazing job of working together at the time - but now I realize that although there were only 9 students, three of them were really the ones that were doing most of the talking.  Three others were called out to talk by Mrs. B, and four of them basically didn't say anything.  Were the numbers so skewed for the teachers?  It might be interesting to compare the participation of the members of the groups of adults to students.

When I came out of this class, I was so pumped up about trying to figure out ways to help out our teachers who were in the EP Workshop and wanted to use ET in the classroom.  I felt like the bridge between what happens during the summer and the classroom during the year was really not there.  Although Mrs. B did a great job on the first go-around, I felt like even between the 4th and 5th classes, things improved that could have been scaffolded a bit better for her coming out of the workshop.  A few changes/additions that I thought were really valuable that could happen were:
   1. Parent volunteers - In this case, Mrs. B was brilliant to introduce ET with the prior knowledge that her classes were going to be smaller.  However, in most classes, this opportunity is NOT possible, so how do you deal with 30ish students all learning ET at once and in different groups?   Perhaps you ask parent volunteers or other teachers to help out for this one day/training period.  That kind of support would have helped tremendously and could be something that we helped support by allowing teachers in the Seattle area a chance to help each other and providing money for a sub.  But I don't know if this is possible! :)
   2. Emphasis on conversation - I feel that although the teachers had great models for the style of open-ended classrooms during the summer, perhaps this could have been pointed out more explicitly for the teachers so that they could apply it.  I felt like Mrs. B was trying to let the students do their own thinking but that she didn't know how to "train" them to steer the conversation themselves.  I know it was only middle school, but I still feel like listening and critically thinking about what others are saying could be something that students do!  For the second class, Mrs. B emphasized that she wanted to hear everyone's conversation and ideas and that the important piece was the talking and discussing that the did.   This helped I think for 5th period.
   3. Suggestions for ET newbies in their classrooms - Now that we have some teachers who have tried ET in their classrooms, I think it would be awesome to have some of those veteran teachers of ET coming in to talk to the E1 teachers during the summer workshop, or at least if we asked them what they would say to teachers (as kind of a list of advice for them when they try it).
   4.  Allow total screw ups and start with an easy example - I think that the whole point of ET that is so awesome is that the finished product doesn't have to be wonderful (the first time) and that is is okay if they are not absolutely accurate.  I feel like the teachers in the EP workshop did excellent ET and I hope that they don't expect that of their kids the first time.  That said, Mrs. B said that just dropping a ball was too easy an example for her students to start with and I wonder if that is really true.  She started with an example that I thought was really hard.  It was tough to bring in Elastic energy, kinetic, and heat (as she called it) from friction.  Her introduction example the second class was much better. (4th period she talked about a roller coaster, and 5th period she referred to the first part of the ball's journey as it fell the second time.)
I am sure I will add more ....there is so much more!

Cosmopolitan and Embodied Cognition

I forgot to post these pictures! So, very fittingly (because it was on the way home from EPSRI), at 4 am in a midwestern airport I decided to buy a glossy magazine to pass the time. There was no way I was going to be productive and actually read something useful, like the stack of papers I decided to lug with me. And what did I find inside? Embodied cognition!

Here's the infamous clipboard study (reinterpreted a bit):

And this one I'd never heard of. Interesting. Wonder how they measure creative thoughts.

And my mom always told me not to read trash!