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.
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