Systems Centered Modeling Instruction

Welcome colleagues,

This curriculum project is not a finished product but a work in progress that is evolving, even as you examine this, through a dynamic process of dialogue with my modeling physics classes at Bergenfield High School and a few far-flung colleagues.

Because, it is hard to pursue new curricular ideas and get them up on line in a timely manner I invite you to look at my class web page to have a more up-to-date look into where I am going. This web page includes a classroom blog and galleries of student whiteboards.

In filling out this introduction, I was not even sure what to call this project since so many of the themes of our approach have actually evolved and clarified themselves of necessity since September as my classes and I have collectively stumbled over one big idea in physics after another.

If some of us think through writing, I think through teaching; and yet perhaps exactly because it has been such an uphill battle to maintain coherence in the middle of an extremely messy, creative process, I find that what is emerging is a novel approach to the standard physics curriculum with a very strong focus on the "big picture" and the deep underpinnings, which although as yet, half-formed is I think at least worth opening up to collegial input and comments who I also hope might be able to head me off before I take a really wrong turn or be able to coach me back to solid ground when I get way off track.

Here is a sketch of how things have evolved (or the story of how I got myself so far out on this limb):

I started the year with some well-formed goals (but ill-defined plans) to:

1) Integrate Eugenia Etkina's and the Rutgers (ISLE)s techniques for scaffolding the development of scientific abilities and also, especially, the qualitative and then quantitative two pass rhythm of their approach into the modeling instruction cycle.

2) Unpack the modeling instruction materials (i.e remove some of the scaffolding) so as to open the questions from the modeling instruction worksheets up for more student centered discourse and circle white boarding a la Dwain Desbien.

Background comment: I had had a chance to interview Dwain and Eugenia extensively at Syracuse and had even written a draft of a paper discussing the parallels in their methods to promote high levels of student engagement, responsibilty for learning, and intense participation and leadership in sense-making, which earn them both some of the hightest RTOP and FCI gains in the country. I very much wanted to try to implement some of these principles in my classroom and was game or fool-hardy enough just to set out to try it for myself.

Unresolved question: Although, I started the year with a some clear guiding principles for how to design individual whiteboarding activities in order to promote student sense-making and engagement, I also started the year knowingly without a coherent understanding of how this approach would shift the overall flow of conceptual development within and between the units.

I knew just enough to know that somehow things would shift and the shift might be dramatic. My one and only clue for this was that while I looked at Dwain's video in the RTOP collection (part of the unit on constant acceleration) I noticed that the student discussion for that lesson actually focuses on internal energy, which is a concept from way ahead in the curriculum. The questions in my head while watching this video were: "How and why did that (the internal energy concept) get in there? What are the consequences of messing around with the nice linear progression of concepts mapped out in the modeling unit sequence?" I knew these were important issues about which I had no perspective, but unable to get any clear answer from Dwain, I just decided to procede and find out for myself.

Then as I started the year, with the introductory white board circle questions "What is science? What is reality? Is science reality?" my classes unexpectedly got into a discussion of shape and number and a fascinating debate about what it is that we can be definite about and how we can agree on relationships in a different way than we can agree on specific attributes of a system like color or absolute size (as opposed to relative size). The interesting observation we came up with together was that while relationships themselves are abstractions that we can only communicate through symbolic representations, somehow these abstraction may form a better basis for consensus than the perceptions such as color and absolute size which form our direct experience but are not directly comparable from person to person. I.e. we could make more scientific progress by focusing on comparisons within our experience than comparison's between our experiences.

As a result this discussion my sense of direction for this curriculum got hijacked again by another influence, Rob MacDuff's ideas about our conceptual models of number and relationship, whose significance I was just starting to understand. This synergy gave a new focus to my curriculum objects which became centered around a big-picture exploration of the role of relationship, systems of relationship and the overall structure of the system of relationships that makes up physics.

Put all these half-formed ideas into a pot and stir in five classes of physics students and some rather extensive reflection and dialogue between some very smart people, then add in a side-interest in the whole question of how best to make curriculum visible and open to collaborative investigation and improvement, and the result is this project. I have no idea how this will all turn out, I have a lot of deep questions about the validity of my approach which are somewhat outlined in my pedagogical profile, I welcome any and all input and guidance as I try to work these ideas to fruition in collaboration with my students and interested colleagues.