Curriculum Overview- Essential Understandings, Skills, and Discipline-Specific Habits of Mind: How do you think knowledge is constructed in this discipline or subdiscipline? What skills and big picture ideas are requisite for expertise in this realm of knowledge? Less is more!
a system
model: a
structure of
concepts or
entities within a
domain, organized by
relationships; (Wikidictionary: ontology)Physics itself is a system of relationships with an overall structure which remains the same from physical system to physical system or phenomenon to phenomenon. A deep understanding of physics therefore requires a "Big Picture" understanding of this recurrent structure.The requisite expertise to develop a deep understanding of physics is a facility with thinking about and communicating about relationship and relationships between relationships, i.e. structure within a system. The challenge is that relationships and structures are themselves abstractions - one can not draw a picture of a relationship, one can only represent it through symbol or example. The meaning of symbols and examples must be negotiated. In any example there is always some ambiguity about that which we are paying attention. Therefore, developing an understanding of physics requires negotiation of a vocabulary of representational systems, relationships and structures and then using this vocabulary to organize and build an internal map of the interconnecting network of relationships and phenomena that we call physics.
- Pedagogical Stance: How will this curriulum promote the development of the above skills, understandings, or habits? What are the most common preconceptions specific to this subject matter that students bring into the learning process? How will this curriculum address these? What experiential resources might students possess that will aid the adoption of these new understandings? How will this curriculum utilize these?
High school students are generally quite inexperienced in thinking in terms of relationship. They have little experience interpreting graphs and for them equations are rarely descriptions of relationships but algorithms to calculate quantities. The distinction between number (a symbol for an abstraction, i.e a whole part relationship) and quantity (something that can held, pictured and added) has generally been completely confused, often with devastating consequences for students' ability to make sense of physics, mathematics, relationship and especially proportion.The pedagogical philosophy of this course is that through attention to these underpinnings and through careful development of "tools to think" along with the representational systems, vocabulary and principles of relational thinking the students can successfully piece together and understand the overall structure of physics as a system of relationships with broad implications.
- Supporting Research: What educational research supports the adoption of a curriculum that takes these pedagogical and/or epistemological approaches? Provide a brief synopsis of the existing corpus of evidence with links, if this exists. If limited research currently exists, describe an action research plan that will enable you and others to assess the value of this instructional methodology.
- Common Unit Structure: What patterns and rituals will punctuate and motivate the movement of learning in this curriculum? Is there a learning cycle? A project-driven structure? A skills/content-driven cycle?
- Action Research Tools (optional): What measurement tools can educators use to quantify the relative success of this curriculum in their classrooms?
