Energy Theatre as Routine Exercise?

Quick Post:

Yesterday, a group of 8 teachers were preparing their energy theatre in the auditorium. They were supposed to be doing energy theatre for a mousetrap car. While watching them, I had the feeling that they were doing something that was fairly routine (to them) at least in some respects They knew the rules for energy theatre. They knew what kinds of energy might be involved. They knew what sorts of things needed to be figure out and argued about. Of course, the exercise took a while, because they had to examine the phenomena, ask questions about it, seek out evidence, draw distinctions, and work out revisions. But there were no "big" things to figure out and resolve, so none of it seemed to feel surprising to them. It felt to me like they working out a difficult, but well-defined problem. Part of this reminds me of how Kuhn describes periods of "Normal Science". Part of this makes me think about how I would be able to tell the difference between the teachers working out something routine versus encountering something novel, ill-defined.

I guess I'm trying to articulate my sense that the activity wasn't taking them any place beyond doing the energy the mousetrap car, because the process and substance of them modeling that phenomena didn't seem to significantly stretch them or put them in contact with new, significant, surprising, perplexing questions, ideas, issues. I feel like it had no greater disciplinary significance beyond that phenomena, and that perhaps it wasn't going to propel them forward.

That said, the teachers were engaged, building community, re-establishing norms, thinking about disciplinary issues. In that sense, they were practicing.