Group A Reflection: Davenport

I am lucky enough to have participated in Energy Theater myself, and reading the careful analysis of group's discussion in the third paper ("Negotiating Energy Dynamics...") was especially interesting for me as I remembered my own experience with my group, trying to represent our ideas about the energy in a light bulb. In particular, I remember encountering the problem of whether we were representing electrons or electrical energy. At the time I felt that my confusion represented a specific knowledge gap on my part, so it is comforting to see that some other teachers had the same issue.

I think this confusion is the result of an interesting aspect of Energy Theater: Energy is hard to understand primarily because it is nonmaterial. By representing energy as a material substance (specifically by having people "embody" certain amounts of energy), things that actually are material substances (in this case, electrons) are not represented physically! Since we were walking around the circuit, gesturing with our hands to signify "electrical energy", it was easier for us to begin to think that we were electrons that possessed electrical energy, rather than that we were energy in a particular form.

I really liked the idea of the student called "Leah" (do you all typically use their real first names?) who suggests that the group stand within a loop of string that would represent the electron; when people/energy packets left the loop, that would represent that electron losing energy. To me that does (as the student says) solve the matter/energy problem--it becomes easier to see that the electron has its own existence outside of the electrical energy associated with it, and that the electrons don't disappear when the energy is transferred to the filament. I think if my group had thought of that, it would have made a lot more sense to me.

The authors of the article remind us that in Energy Theater, "Motion of objects is supposed to be indicated by including kinetic energy in the area designated for that object, not by displacing the rope that bounds the object-area within the representation space." I am having a hard time picturing what this would look like though. This instruction asks us to make the invisible visible (people represent energy) and the visible invisible (objects are shown to be moving only indirectly, by the expression of kinetic energy.) I am curious about how different learners represent and understand kinetic energy associated with moving objects, and how well different solutions in Energy Theater allow learners to understand their models. 

The authors say that "Energy Theater – a material representation  that uses the metaphor of energy as a substance – contributed to the disambiguation of matter and  energy for these participants...The activity of developing an Energy Theater enactment for this scenario caused the group to grapple with the distinctions between matter and energy, and to invent enactments  that illustrated these distinction". In my own experience, it was reflecting on the "rules" of the theater, particularly that each person represents energy, that reminded us to make a distinction between electrons and electrical energy. 

Still, I admit that I'm not sure I understand Toni's comment at the end of the exchange: "And because you still have energy maintained in the matter, we’re getting hung  up on the matter representation, and what we did was pure energy. Not all the potential is realized." Is Toni saying, Don't worry about the matter, we're supposed to be doing energy? But they are representing some pieces of matter--the bulb, the filament, the socket. Is there a good reason why these parts are represented, while others are not? I suppose that if you are representing electrons along with electrical energy, why not represent air molecules along with thermal energy? Since we don't know energy is there aside from its effects on matter, it does seem natural that we want to include, indeed focus, on matter rather than energy in our representations.

I was discussing my upcoming trip to Seattle with a friend, and she said, you know, energy can be a hard concept to grasp. Aha! Even our metaphors for UNDERSTANDING have to do with interacting with a material substance! The matter/energy problem is one I struggle with in my own biology classroom, and I am looking forward to learning more about how learners may come to understand and resolve it!

Group B readings: Responsiveness

During the last couple months I have been reading and learning about responsiveness. Even though I was not familiarized with this literature, the content of it really aligns with my research perspective.

Ball (1993) talks about the meaning of being a responsive teacher and the impact it can have in the students' learning. She presents a reflection on her own practice while trying to create an intellectually honest learning environment. I think it is important to understand the implications being responsive implies. In order to listen to the student thinking the teacher need to be sensitive to the students ideas. 

I consider the promotion of responsiveness in the classroom responds to a constructivist learning model. By identifying the conceptual models the students articulates during the instruction can allow the teacher to promote further exploration in these to develop a better understanding. While writing this I can not relate this with the extensive studies developed on misconceptions, not referring at them as an obstacle but as an starting point (Smith, DiSessa & Roschelle, 1993). I think responsive teaching is a good reflect on how the identification of the students' cognitive models on the scientific phenomena can be addressed in real time to improve their learning process. For example, Ball while working with elementary students in a responsive learning environment got to understand how their students understand negative numbers operations. The students felt free to give further information on their reasoning and question each other. The identification of the students' thinking allow the teacher to modify the activity to address emerging concerns. 

This in-the-moment response takes me to the concern: How can a teacher become a responsive teacher? How can you develop that sensibility that can help you notice the students' ideas? Reading vanEs (2011) helped me to address some of those concerns. I consider learning how to be a responsive teacher can be more difficult than implement a structured activity. VanEs shows that teachers can develop the sensibility to identify or listen carefully to students' ideas. The study shows elementary teachers having regular meetings to examine students' mathematical thinking. All of the teachers involved bring video clips from their own classroom and were asked to find remarkable issues to discuss in the group and to analyze students' thinking. At the beginning the teachers' analysis was more centered in their own practices, focusing their reflection in a general behavior of the class. While they move from a general observation to focus on particular discussions they started to notice more the students' thinking and also relating it to the teacher behavior. This research shows teachers can develop the skills to identify students' thinking, even when it does not address how to react to it in the moment-to-moment interaction. It also reveals the relevance of having a group support during the teachers development in responsiveness. The collaborative discussions allow teachers to learn from each other perspectives.

I would like to finish this blog entry with some reflections on what means to create an responsive classroom. According to Maskiewicz and Winters (2011) a responsive environment requires every participant to be responsive to others' ideas and contribution, it needs to engage the entire classroom community in considering the value in the ideas presented. I had the opportunity to read in a responsiveness conference the following phrase "It is not a diet, it is a lifestyle". I consider being responsive shouldn't be consider the goal for the teacher, but a way to better understand the students' current cognitive state to react to their necessities in real time interventions.

 

• A.C. Maskiewicz and V. a. Winters, Journal of Research in Science Teaching 49, 429 (2012).
• E. van Es, "A framework for learning to notice student thinking," in Mathematics teacher noticing: Seeing through teachers' eyes, edited by M. G. Sherin, V. R. Jacobs, and R. A. Philipp (Routledge, New York, 2011), pp. 134-151. 

• D. L. Ball, "With an eye on the mathematical horizon: Dilemmas of teaching elementary school mathematics," The Elementary School Journal 93 (4), 373-397 (1993). 
• J.P. Smith, A.A. DiSessa, and J. Roschelle, The Journal of the Learning Sciences 3, 115 (1993).

Reflection on Reading for Group B

E. van Es, "A framework for learning to notice student thinking," in Mathematics teacher noticing: Seeing through teachers' eyes, edited by M. G. Sherin, V. R. Jacobs, and R. A. Philipp (Routledge, New York, 2011), pp. 134-151. 

What first struck me in this paper was vanEs’s idea that in order to learn how to attend to students’ ideas, teachers needed to first “know what counts for evidence for effective practice” (p 134). Van Es points out that decisions about evidence are closely tied to a person’s theory of learning. This struck me as a different way to think about the process of teaching teachers to notice. It isn’t about teaching teachers to notice, but about teaching teachers what to notice. Therefore, if a teacher’s theory of learning is that students will learn whatever information they hear and take in, then it makes sense to focus on whether the information was presented in a coherent way and if the students were facing the teacher and listening quietly. If a teacher’s theory of learning states that students will learn if they are enjoying the activity and engaged in it, then it makes sense to pay attention to whether the students appear to like the activity and be having fun. Yet, if a teacher has a constructivist theory of learning then they will need to notice the ideas a student is expressing and whether the instructional response aligned with the student’s ideas and moved the student toward the scientific idea.

Given this perspective, the purpose of the video club isn’t to teach teachers to argue their ideas with evidence. The point is to teach teachers what evidence to use to argue their point. For instance, during the first video club meeting, the teachers were using evidence to argue their point, but it wasn’t the kind of evidence that the facilitators felt demonstrated learning as they understood it. I’m not sure that this means the teachers thought engagement was sufficient for learning, though. I do think these teachers’ valued using students’ ideas to help them learn; otherwise I don’t think they would have been so willing to be directed toward that focus by the facilitators. Instead I think these teachers had a disconnect between how they thought students’ learned and to what they had trained themselves to pay attention when teaching.

A second thing I really appreciated about this article was the result shown in Table 9.2 and the accompanying analysis. As researchers I think we expect learning to be linear, especially given the large grain-size of this study.  And while this data definitely shows an upward trajectory (as represented by a downward slope, but that’s another issue entirely), the middle of the data is nothing short of a mess. To me, this “mess” is a great example of Vygotsky’s theory of learning. Vygotsky thought that learners would try on and try out new ideas before they fully caught on or committed to an idea. I think this is what is happening here. This brings up the question, though, of what would have happened if the video club had ended on week 8? And when we’re teaching how often are our students tested during their “week 8” instead of on their “week 10”?

Reflections on Group A Readings

What struck me when reading these papers was the amount of work that is done by a single classroom activity. This activity/representation manages to (1) necessitate the conservation of energy, (2) necessitate a substance analogy for energy, (3) provide a way for students to communicate with each other when they don’t have the technical language to communicate solely through words, (4) store information about the group’s decisions (thereby scaffolding the learning through a decrease in the working memory required for remembering), (5) encourage group participation (even if you don’t talk you still have to walk), (6) make student thinking visible to the teacher, and (7) provide a presentation space for groups to report out and share with other groups. I’m struck by how Vygotskian the whole activity is (with a little bit of Montessori thrown in). I think in many ways this is a great example of the zone of proximal development. In the sense that an activity provides a scaffolding that extends a learner’s (or group of learners’) ability to solve problems they would not be able to solve on their own. I also think it demonstrates how learning takes place externally and is then internalized by a student. First the student continues to rely on the scaffolding to structure the internal process rather than the external process, but then eventually doesn’t need the scaffolding at all. The Montessori aspect comes from the implicit scaffolding that the environment provides. While the students tend to remain unaware of the restrictions placed on them by the scaffold, they are “forced” by it to do many things correctly (e.g. conserve energy). (Side note: Was Vygotsky influenced by Montessori’s work?) 

Despite the fact that I’ve seen for myself how effective Energy Theater can be for students, I still sometimes worry about the large groups that are often required. This relates directly to the fifth point listed above. The energy dynamics paper (Scherr et al., 2013) describes the interaction of a group of fourteen students. If fourteen students were to work through an activity worksheet (e.g. tutorial) together, maybe four students would speak. The vast majority of the students would sit passively waiting for someone to tell them the answer so they could write it down and claim that was the group consensus. Therefore it is rather impressive that of these fourteen students, nine of them make some statement during the episodes recorded. Now it is very possible that the other five students spoke up during the activity but in episodes that were not described in the paper. Yet I still worry about those other five students. As I mentioned above, in some ways it is impossible for a student to not engage in Energy Theater because even if they don’t help design the story, they have to act in the story. But I wonder if acting is enough. Is it enough for a student to act out an energy theater even if they were not actively involved in the process of scripting it? In some ways this is where the Energy Tracking Diagrams and Energy Cubes come into play. These activities can be done in small groups (or independently) so that more students are required to speak up. Yet both of these activities lose the embodied essence of Energy Theater. Is it just that these three activities/representations have trade-offs, or can we show that one activity is more effective for learning than the others? Can we show (or is it true) that Energy Theater is a powerful learning experience even for the students who do not speak or are not heard during the planning? Do these students gain something from doing Energy Theater that they do not get from doing Energy Tracking Diagrams? A second option is that all students need to engage in both activities to learn effectively? I guess what I’m saying is that I’m convinced Energy Theater is effective for the students who fully engage in the activity and that Energy Theater allows more students to engage than most learning activities. But now I want to know what is going on with the students who don’t speak up and why aren’t they speaking up.

Group A

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I read all three articles in Group A.  I work with multiple disciplines in science and find that context is key. Unfortunately, we often get hung up in terminology and lose conceptual understanding. I found the energy theater concept to be a unique way to learn about energy.  Energy is a thread that flows through all sciences and yet one of the most challenging to explain from an instructor standpoint and a student standpoint.

            Representing energy.II. Energy tracking representations (2002) by R. E. Scherr, H. G. Close, E. W. Close, and S. Vokos resonated with me. I particularly liked the Energy Tracking Diagrams and the use of the energy tracker as a developmental tool for teachers to gain understanding. Helping teachers and students feel comfortable with content and allowing them to have multiple frames of reference that they develop will provide for richer and more meaningful understanding of a topic that is difficult.

            Teachers can memorize or locate all kinds of information, but creation requires a higher level of thinking.  I also enjoyed the inclusion idea of including science teachers in the conversation with scientist. This type of peer interaction that minimizes jargon and addresses ambiguities in an authentic environment would be an informal and powerful way of mentoring teachers to be in the process and not rely on simplistic models that lack application. I am really excited about seeing so many things I have thought about physics education being incorporated and implemented with teachers who are pivotal at the early portion of the student pipeline.

            Are you measuring the impact on students from teachers in this training? Are teachers able to participate multiple summers? What is the range of teachers who attend? Do you track students’ future course taking?

            I appreciate the freedom to come and observe and take a natural path of interest. I am trying to read what has been done, but remain open-minded about where my interests will lead.