This post describes a project that follows the Energy… Part 2 unit. If you haven’t read about that (new!) unit yet, this post will probably be confusing. This project was created in collaboration with Allie Boyd at the Energy & Equity summer workshop (link takes you to the portal; find the current workshop info through links on that page). Project Description and Overview In this project, students create representations to tell an energy story that is personal to them. They can choose from two prompts: Tell the story of how you get to/from school. Tell the story of how you cook ..read more

It is impossible to separate science from the sociopolitical. As I think about updating my courses this summer, this idea is one that I keep coming back to and wanting to find additional ways to make explicit in my classes. Last summer, I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in the Energy & Equity summer workshop (link takes you to the portal; find the current workshop info through links on that page). A main part of the workshop is time provided to work on your own project. I was especially lucky to take the workshop at the same time as Allie Boyd, and together we created a mini u ..read more

In November, I tried this lesson (below) in my 10th grade physics classes. I’ve joined an “anti-bias task force” at my school made up of teachers from all divisions (lower, middle, and high school) who are looking at their curriculum and implementing lessons or other changes to work on removing bias and improving what and how we teach. I’ve decided to focus on the culture in my 10th grade physics classes. If we want students to learn to do the work of scientists, not just learn about science, how can that be done without recreating within our classrooms the same science culture that curren ..read more

One new change to my intro physics class this past school year was to replace the set of FBD practice problems with a card sort that would be done in groups. The card sort gives students a chance to practice FBDs with some scaffolding (especially choosing between options rather than creating everything from scratch), and it introduces a new representation that I hadn’t shown them ahead of time (force vector addition diagrams). The style of this activity is somewhere between my kinematics graphs card sort and my momentum representations card sort. It has right answers, but it also requires m ..read more