Author: Marianna Ruggerio

Marianna is the Physics teacher at Auburn High School in Rockford, IL. She currently teaches AP Physics 1 and AP Physics C. When she's not in disguise as Nerdy Physics Teacher she is busy at home as Nerdy Physics Mom with her husband Fr. Jonathan and sons Adrian and George.
The ABCs of How We Learn: L is for Listening and Sharing, Strategies to Enhance Group Work
Science of Learning · Teaching Methods

The ABCs of How We Learn: L is for Listening and Sharing, Strategies to Enhance Group Work

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

I have a saying for students, “The 100% is in the room”.

What I mean by that is that, collectively, the 100% exists. Not necessarily within one student, but when students engage in true collaboration, very often, the 100% exists.

L is for Listening and Sharing and is based on the idea that we learn more together than we do alone.

This would then suggest the power of working in small groups. However there are a few flaws that teachers fall into very often:

  1. Putting students in small groups alone is not going to lead to learning. Students need to know how to speak and listen to one another.
  2. Group selection can be powerful, but students will make assumptions about why they are in a certain group, which will influence their behavior in the group

Setting Norms for Group Behaviors/Interactions

We have all seen this in our classrooms and even in PD sessions or workshops. Some groups function together excellently, while others flounder fantastically. Setting the norms, expectations and even scaffholding the conversation is a critical component of our work.

Protocols

When we implement highly structured protocols we provide students with a predictable framework for engagement. The book Protocols for All is a great place to start and has some ideas that you’ve probably encountered. Many of these protocols are what you might classify under “ice breakers” or “team building activities.” Research has shown that taking the time to get students to work collaboratively outside of the specific content area supports their ability to work collaboratively when its time to get content-specific. What I like about a lot of these protocols is the emphasis on listening because often our best talkers are our worst listeners. In a profession that frequently values and rewards extraversion, it’s really important that we take the time to hone the seemingly less charismatic skills.

I just so happened to run across this graphic from Zaretta Hammond, author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain, that outlines a progression of protocols to support student discourse and equity.

She is leading an online summer PD on this topic that you can currently register for and has a previous article with additional ideas described here

Group-Worthy Tasks

Along the same lines, the kind of task we select is critical. This has been named “group-worthy tasks”. A group-worthy task has a few key features. First, it cannot be completed in the time allotted alone, the group members must depend on each other. This requires the task to have a certain level of complexity. Second, the task must have multiple entry points for success. This means that there is a way for the students who are at a lower performance level to positively contribute, but there are higher order thinking tasks available for the upper-performance level students to address.

Marta Stoeckel and Kelly O’Shea wrote a fantastic article about Group-Worthy Tasks for The Physics Teacher in 2024. A few additional features I’d like to bring your attention to is assigning group roles of Skeptic, Facilitator, Summarizer and Navigator and providing students with a role-card during the task. The second feature is discussions around what makes someone good in science (asking good questions, making astute observations etc).

Mitigating Student-Assigned Roles of “Smartness”

In addition to frequent discussions around competencies in science and shared norms, utilizing visibly random grouping can help alleviate any self-assigned roles students create. Regardless of whether or not the groupings were random, students will often assume they’ve been placed in a group by the teacher to either carry the team, or because they are the kid who needs help. When groups are chosen randomly, and visibly (drawing cards, using a random group generator online) students are unable to make these assumptions as a choice you the teacher made. Visibly random grouping is one of the tenets in Peter Liljidahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms. I’d like to address another key aspect of his work that is critical for the effectiveness of groups, listening and sharing. When work is complete on the boards, it is now time for the teacher to implement Just in Time Telling while continuing to engage student thinking. It looks like this:

  1. The teacher re-groups the students away from their boards, perhaps in the center of the room or on the side. The teacher may share some key noticings about the work at this point.
  2. The teacher informs students we are going to “Take a walk”. The teacher moves students to a particular board she has selected in order to discuss one step of the problem that has been completed correctly.
  3. The teacher directs students to this particular piece and poses the question “turn to someone next to you and discuss what this group was thinking when they wrote this part down”
  4. The teacher then asks “someone not in this group, share with us what this person was thinking”

What do to With That Really Smart Student Who Can’t Listen

A few years back I had a group of AP students where the dynamics couldn’t have been more disparate. I had a few hyper-competitive, confident, brilliant students who would do all of the talking and solving, and then I had a few students who were quiet and thoughtful but also lacked confidence. In more than one instance the confident students convinced the quiet ones that their incorrect answer was the answer. So I tried something new. As students worked in groups to solve a problem I assigned the following roles:

The quiet students were required to do all of the writing on the whiteboard. (By the way, having a shared visual also enhances the team-experience!) They were welcome to contribute in any way they desired, but the marker was in their hands so they were responsible for the documentation.

The average students were allowed to discuss the problem, but they were not allowed to write.

The confident students were only allowed to ask questions. The way I framed it was that they were in my role as the teacher. They needed to create and frame questions in such a way so as to get their peers to get on the same wavelength that they were on… without actually giving them the answer.

The result of this was pretty cool. At least one of the kids who normally ran the show was super frustrated at first, but its because I was pushing a different skill set. Rather than just solving the problem and talking it through out loud, he now was required to carefully listen to the conversation so that he could ask the right questions to move his classmates along. The quiet students were all required to be active participants, even if they weren’t doing the talking. Since they had to do the recording, however, this required them to be engaged and ask for clarification as needed.

ABCs of How We Learn: Knowledge … To Whom Does it Belong?
Science of Learning

ABCs of How We Learn: Knowledge … To Whom Does it Belong?

Marianna Ruggerio3 Comments

One of the most cringe comments I hear from students working in class is “she said that…” When I hear this instead of “what we need to do next is…” or “I know that the answer is … because… ” I personally feel that I have not yet done my job for students. Why? Because students are not yet taking ownership of their knowledge, the answer still rests in my hands, not theirs.

We could argue that the goal of education is to impart knowledge to students, but knowing that our students are not going to remember all things, what knowledge do we truly want them exiting our classrooms with, and to whom does that knowledge belong?

Knowledge is the bedrock for all learning. The more a student knows, they more connections they can make, the deeper they can go with that material. We’ve already discussed that when students can tie new knowledge to previous knowledge, whether its through analogy, elaboration, generation or a hands on experience, the pathway for memory becomes stronger. In the brain, the physical neural pathway is what has literally grown and strengthened.

If we are going to implement strategies in our classrooms to enhance learning, and we are going to do that from a lens of evidence-based practices, then we need to understand the foundational underpinnings of the brain and how knowledge, skills and creativity are built and work together.

Knowledge and the Science of Learning Conversation

The science of learning has its set of cognitive principals upon which learning instruction can be built. Deans for Impact has a nice document that outlines most of them. Below are a few of them:

  1. New ideas are connected to old ones, but students working memory is limited. Therefore so too must be our presentation so as not to overload them.
  2. There exists a core set of facts in any area of study. Once these are memorized, a person can tackle more challenging problems as their working memory is now freed up. (this is the foundation for phonics in Science of Reading and memorization of math facts for fluency)
  3. Learning transfer is difficult as it requires knowledge of deep structure, which is often not apparent to the novice. (This is argument for contrasting cases)

I want to say first, that all of these core ideas are valid and have the research to support them.

Next, I need to say that unfortunately, due to either a lack of nuance or the inevitable polarization of our current society’s expression of social media, there exist some pretty strong feelings that pit science of learning against constructivist teaching as entirely incomparable.

Through Hattie’s research constructivist teaching has an mean effect size of 0.92 which puts it on par with the jigsaw method and strategies to integrate prior learning. Constructivist teaching is designed with the learner at the center, involves active teaching methods and allows students to explore ideas, solutions and explanations and then take action. This is not to be confused with pure inquiry or discovery based learning. Another set of strategies which has come under great scrutiny are the methods developed in Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics. The hard-lined science of learning folks argue that having students engage in activities without prior instruction or knowledge is problematic due to the conflict with the previous statements above. Simply put, students are novices, therefore they lack the background knowledge and skill set to engage in a doing or creating activity, and as novices students will not be able to engage in truly meaningful ways that will impact learning. Instead, they will flounder around with great cognitive overload, little success and too much room for mistakes and misconceptions.

I’d like to take a moment to address this in the context of the kind of learning we see in curricula such as modeling and the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE). First, students are not blank slates. They come to us with a wealth of experiences which have shaped the background knowledge they bring to us. None of our students walk into our room with the same background, but there exists a background nonetheless. Both the experiences and the background knowledge need to be acknowledged in order for us to to our job properly, which is why constructivist teaching is student-centered. Second, I’d like to think that in an ideal educational setting our students are able to move from passive receivers of knowledge to active doers and producers of knowledge. In order for this to happen, we must create the environment where experience is central to developing knowledge.

I took on a collaborative project/conversation with another peer at the beginning of the year in which we took the principals from the Dean’s for Impact document and began aligning the principals with strategies and practices from a physics classroom that is centered on active-learning, constructivist pedagogies. If you’re interested you can take a look here.

Knowledge as a Cycle of Experience, Reflection and Testing

David Kolb, psychologist and educational theorist defined the learning process as the following cycle:

This cycle makes sense for any learning we encounter, not just school-learning. Consider perhaps the kid who “doesn’t like school” Very often that student’s dislike for school can be traced to a concrete experience, whether it was a teacher, and administrator or other students. That experience made them notice and feel things about themselves and/or their environment and made them determine that school was not the place for them. Perhaps this meant they withdrew socially or academically. Maybe it means they transfer schools all together. Either way, some action follows which creates a new concrete experience.

As humans we are learning all the time, and that learning is very often starting from an experience rather than a textbook. (Or perhaps the textbook motivates us to seek an experience!) Shouldn’t it only make sense then, that our students’ learning also begins in a place of experience?

In a previous post, Just in Time Telling, I discussed the fact that when a carefully selected and targeted experience is provided to students and then follow up with Just in Time Telling, the learning gains are strongest for the student than with lecture alone, or discovery-based learning alone. (Schwartz & Bransford, 1998) When we then follow up the Just in Time Telling with a testing experiment, we are providing students into the action, doing and ownership part of knowledge. During this phase of the learning cycle student can make a claim, “if ____ then ______ because______” This testing experiment then creates a new concrete experience from which the cycle can begin anew.

What is a testing experiment you ask? A testing experiment can be any of your traditional labs in which you’e asked students to calculate g, find the theoretical period for the flying pig, find the location where the two cars collide and so forth. Rather than making it a “challenge” task, we can reframe these activities as an opportunity to test our current understanding of forces, circular motion or kinematics.

A testing experiment might also look like one of your traditional labs. For example, we have a lab in which students determine if the friction of the wheels of their lab car are negligible. In this case the hypothesis might look like “if the friction is not negligible, then when we attach a mass to the car and allow it to drop, we expect the change in gravitational potential energy to be different from the change in kinetic energy of the car”.

A Paradigm of Ownership and Action is a Paradigm of Equity and Liberation

There is another critical component here regarding this particular concept of learning and discussing ownership. There is something that inherently sits very wrong with me around some of the language in the science of learning that sounds like language and expectations which are ultimately choosing compliance over creation and collaboration, and maintaining the power differential between teacher and student. When we can move students from passive receivers of knowledge to active producers of knowledge we are also transforming the seat of power. In a world in which we continue to have discussions around social justice, equity and power structures it is a natural conclusion that knowledge and the ability to act on that knowledge is also empowerment. Creating a learning environment where students become doers, producers and drivers of their own learning is creating a learning environment where students can become agents of equity and justice within their circles of influence and their communities.

Why is this conversation important?

When students are subject to strict direct instruction, in which students are assumed to be inadaquate at creative thinking until some benchmark base of knowledge has been established, what we are effectively doing is creating a bunch of minds with fantastic routine expertise (solve these exact problems this exact way). This kind of expertise might easily demonstrate strong effect with high grades and high standardized test scores, but what it doesn’t support is adaptive expertise where students can take a set of skills and move those skills to something novel. As is true in most of life, somewhere in the middle there exists the ideal balance. Routine expertise is important for some aspects, but so is adaptive expertise. We need both. I suppose another essay entirely could be written on why this is even more important in the age of AI.

Here are some questions for your consideration:

  • When you consider your classroom environment currently, does your teaching lean more towards the passive passing of knowledge, the active producing of knowledge, or have you struck the balance?
  • When you consider your students and their expectations for your classroom does they lean more towards the passive passing of knowledge, the active producing of knowledge, or have they struck the balance?
  • If there is discrepancy between your environment and your student expectations, how do you resolve this tension?

ABCs of How We Learn: J is for Just in Time Telling – Why Active Learning FIRST is BEST
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ABCs of How We Learn: J is for Just in Time Telling – Why Active Learning FIRST is BEST

Marianna Ruggerio1 Comment

Memories are stronger when we are able to connect a new experience to a prior one. The concept of “just in time telling” leverages this idea. Rather than dumping a bunch of new information on students, we recognize that students will be able to do more with the new information when we tell them the answer at just the right time.

Curricula in which students are engaged in activities to “discover for themselves” often gets a bad rap from the science of learning community. However, when experiences are paired with the just-in-time telling afterwards, the results are more robust than either method alone. In fact, if we are only lecturing our students are greatly limited by the amount of sense they can make due to their lack of background knowledge. This is often touted as the reason why constructivist learning is a problem, however when the activities are carefully selected and followed by just in time telling, we have provided students the background knowledge in an experience that permits us to then provide a lecture through which they can then make more meaning!

You’ve likely done this before in some context for students. Demos frequently take this experiential role. But what if we made experience before telling the cornerstone of our work? What if we viewed experiences not just as “fun demos” but as critical components to the learning cycle?

Here again is where I am going to sing the praises of the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) curriculum because it does exactly this! (In ISLE it’s called “Time for Telling”)

During the learning cycle for uniform circular motion students engage in a series of experiments. The first are observational experiments: get a bowling ball moving in a circle on the floor, swing a force sensor in a vertical circle and observe the force readings for the tension in the string, make a constant velocity buggy move in a circle. When I do this with students the next step is to ask them to represent and reason based on their observations. In this case, I ask them to sketch the force diagrams and look for patterns.

One of the key features in this sequence of activities is that the experiences chosen are very carefully constructed to be precise and matched to the intended learning outcomes. At the end of this series of experiments we do, indeed just tell students that in order to move in a circle we require an unbalanced force AND that force is directed towards the center of the circle. I provide my students with the following page for their notes (modeled after notes from Building Thinking Classrooms)

Students are indeed told the correct physics, but since it is after engaging in experiences, the memories should be more robust. This work is then also paired with the elaborative interrogation of the textbook that evening to prepare for the following day.

Today I challenge you to think of one topic where you have started the class by “just telling them”. What is an experiment that students could engage with prior to telling them?

A word of caution: As you take on this exercise I want to strongly discourage you from falling into the “trick your students” trap. A classic example of this is setting up the projectile demo where one ball drops straight to the floor while the other is launched horizontally. Many teachers set this demo up at the beginning of projectiles, ask students to make a prediction, they pretty much all guess wrong, we run the demo and say “aha!”. If we want to create a classroom of belonging, its important to take advantage of any opportunity to provide our students with recognition. In order to create an experience that will enrich our student minds, build their knowledge and support their self-perception, the experiences must be carefully chosen and scaffolded so that the answer we need is the answer we are going to obtain from our students. This typically requires students to engage in data collection in some way, even if that data collection is visual (such as dropping beanbags behind a rolling bowling ball, or observing the direction of an applied force).

ABCs of How We Learn: I is for Interleaving + An AP Practicum for Review
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ABCs of How We Learn: I is for Interleaving + An AP Practicum for Review

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

The skeleton for this blog series has been the book The ABCs of How We Learn by Daniel Schwartz, Jessica Tsang and Kristen Blair at Stanford. As I am doing my prep work for my blog series where I include and adapt the ideas within my physics classroom there are a few chapters that don’t quite have a 1:1 connection. In the original book, the authors write chapter I for Imaginative Play. The research is a bit on the weaker side (causation or correlation?) and is focused on the youngest students and their social dynamics. Although we could absoultely discuss the ideas of imagination and creativity in the physics classroom (consider the utilization of movies like Interstellar, or the discussions that launch units in OpenSci ed, for example) I’m going to make the decision to stick to the strategies that I feel most confident discussion. So here I diverge from the text and we will discuss Interleaving.

Interleaving simply means that students are engaging in activities that require them to problem-solve out of the order in which they were taught and/or by jumping around in terms of ideas/topics within a practice set. By requiring students to retrieve from a variety of topics/skills, students create even stronger neural networks in their brain which leads to stronger retention and comprehension.

For example, perhaps you have a homework set that looks like this: 4 balanced force questions, 4 unbalanced force questions where the object is speeding up and 4 unbalaned force questions where the object is slowing down. Interleaved practice would jumble these questions up.

Another example of interleaving is that perhaps students are currently learning about momentum but on a particular problem they are asked to calculate force from a force diagam, then determine the impulse and solve for the change in kinetic energy. In this case students are interleaving entire topics.

The value of interleaving is at its best when implementing similar problems (in terms of deep structure, which may look like different topics on the surface). This allows students to begin to focus on the problem solving structure, rather than the algorithm, and they can begin to notice subtle differences.

AP problems are often a great example of interleaving. Very often students need to pull from multiple units in order to complete the problem. Recently I provided students with this momentum practicum challenge as part of their AP review. The physical task was modeled after an old FRQ, but students were not initially aware of this fact. Students rolled a happy and sad ball down a hotwheel track where the ball collides with a block at the end of the track which falls to the floor.

Students are asked to do the following:

  1. Make a claim: Which ball will result in the wooden block traveling farthest (this should be physics-ly correct)
  2. Gather some evidence and quantify as much as possible. The more things you can quantify (momentum, energy, force, velocity etc) the more points you get! 
  3. Reasoning/Discussion: Does your evidence support your claim? Explain in detail why or why not. For every quantity you measured or calculated you should be able to explain how that piece of evidence supports or refutes your claim! It is possible that you evidence does not support your claim. If it doesn’t examine your videos carefully and look for anything that happened that we were not anticipating.

To “level up the spiciness” students are asked to find a different way to find the ratio of distances. I provide students a hint to drop the balls vertically. The goal here is to investigate with energy methods.

The last level includes the following prompt: The balls rolled down the track and you should have determined the velocity of the ball at the bottom. Assuming the balls are solid spheres (moment of inertia 2/5MR2) determine how much energy was lost on the track from the top of the track to the bottom. 

In this final challenge students are using energy and rotation.

For the “glass of milk” I have students work through the original FRQ and link it up with the practicum they just completed.

This example takes advantage of a number of previously mentioned strategies. In addition to the interleaving we have engaged students in a hands on exercise that ultimately leads to working through a problem with feedback.

ABCs of How We Learn: H is for Hands On – Activate Before Dictate
Activities · Science of Learning

ABCs of How We Learn: H is for Hands On – Activate Before Dictate

Marianna Ruggerio2 Comments

I don’t think I need to tell a bunch of science teachers the benefits of Hands on Learning, so let’s take this in a different direction: What makes for a hands-on experience that is positively impactful on student learning?

Not all hands on is equal! Hands on activities need to be carefully constructed in order to produce intended impacts. According to the authors Schawtz, Tsang and Blair, An exemplary hands-on procedure “allows students to find meaning and structure rather than copy a symbolic procedure” in other words, hands-on activities are sense-making activities.

In the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) framework every cycle begins with observational experiements and those observational experiments very often involve some sort of hands on experience.

Take the introduction to forces, for example. Students are asked to hold a light and a heavy object in each hand, palms up. Next, they are asked to sketch a diagram that shows the interactions on each object. Most students quickly indicate that both the hand and the earth are interacting with the objects and correctly reason that these forces must be equal due to the fact that the objects are not moving.

This seemingly simple activity is incredibly rich. Not only are students constructing the correct understanding of the fact that an object at rest experiences balanced forces, they are also beginning to understand the concept of a normal force (though we aren’t calling it that yet) and the begining of creating a force diagram. All by simply sketching what they feel through observation.

Another excellent example from the ISLE curriculum is the introduction to work and energy.

I provide students with an individually wrapped life-saver mint and ask them to think of ways in which we can crush the live-saver. The ideas of dropping it (or dropping something on it), throwing it (slingshotting it), and smashing something into it all come about and then I give students some materials to do it. However, I include one very critical instruction: there likely exists a way that you could drop it, throw it etc. in which the live saver doesn’t break. I want you to find the edge between breaking it and not breaking it.

Through executing these hands-on, very simple excercises, we are able to construct the idea that candy-crushing-ability (CCA…aka energy) can be increased as we increase the force and the displacement, but ONLY so long as those two attributes are parallel. In addition, in order to “save” the candy from say a falling brick, we need to exert a force in the OPPOSITE direction of the movement to reduce CCA.

In both cases we could have simply taught “here’s how you draw a force diagram” “this is the definition of normal force” “work is the dot product of force and displacement” but none of these definitions ground students in the physical real-world that we are describing in diagrams and mathematics. The hands on experience gives students additional neural pathways and memories to access as they learn new information and tie it to previous experiences.

There are a camp of explicit-instruction/science of learning enthusiasts who will enter into aguments against this kind of constructivist learning because students, as novices, lack the background knowledge to efficiently get to the learning/conclusions we want them to reach in the classroom. I’d argue that the examples provided here are exactly what is called for in direct-instruction. The examples are carefully crafted, the tasks for the students are simple, and after students have done the requested work we as the teachers will indeed tell students exactly what they need to know.

One of the biggest challenges/risks around hands on learning is that students may not notice what we need/intend them to notice. The most critical component here is that these tasks are carefully planned, and in many cases may even appear overly simplistic, like the examples above.

ABCs of How We Learn: G is for Generation
Science of Learning · Activities

ABCs of How We Learn: G is for Generation

Marianna Ruggerio2 Comments

Generation is all about working that brain muscle. The more often we need to remember something, the more likely we are to remember it!

In the information processing model of cognition, this is the retrieval portion

Retrieval has a great deal of benefits when used correctly and there are a lot of misconceptions about retrieval.

First of all: you cannot retrieve what has not been encoded into long term memory. Why is this important? Because asking students to write down what they remember from today’s lesson as an exit ticket is not retrieval. That information is still in the maintenance rehearsal stage. What is rehearsal is asking them to write down two things they remember from yesterday’s lesson.

Retrieval isn’t just good for memories, it also raises student confidence and lowers testing anxiety! In my own classrooms as well as in the classrooms of colleagues, we’ve seen that when students engage in retrieval exercises often, student confidence in the classroom increases significantly. This is particularly true when you ask students to regularly engage in “brain dumps” where they write everything down they remember about a particular unit. As the unit progresses they should be able to write down more and more. It creates a visible piece of evidence of their learning with zero stakes attached to it.

Retrieval is probably something you already do, but to use it effectively we have to use it intentionally. I have two older blog posts about retrieval as a class activity and a study tool in my classroom with a few strategies. Personally, I always prefer to link up retrieval with some sort of additional strategy, whether its engaging students in discourse, having them compare and contrast or concept map.

Retrieval Might be the MOST important activity to support student assessments. Why? Because when students take an assessment they are asked to retrieve. However, if we are only ever pushing information during class, students rarely get the chance to practice that retrieval. Students should use retrieval to study, but they do not know or understand it typically, so we need to teach them (and their parents!) the benefits. If you’re saying “oh but I don’t lecture all hour, I have an active learning environment!” then I’m going to challenge you with this question: but do your students retrieve? Or are they only ever working in maintenance rehearsal? Relying on peers and notes to get to the answer?

My Favorite Use of Retrieval – Retrieve and Engage

Retrieval can be done as an act and of itself. However, while retrieval alone will enhance the memory pathways, it will not necessarily lead to a stronger application of that knowledge. In a science classroom we are constantly aiming for that higher order thinking: explain, create, evaluate. So we need to ensure that students are engaging in that thinking as often as possible.

The first way in which I enjoy using retrieval is by having students engage in a “brain dump”. Students write as much as they can about a given topic. To engage, students share their lists with classmates in small groups. We mix up the groups until eventually all students have the same information written on their papers. The 100% is in the room after all!

Another way in which I use retrieval is to ask students to complete a task identical to the previous day’s work, but then they pull out that work from their notes and evaluate themselves. The goal in this task, however, is for students to identify gaps. This task remains ungraded.

As I mentioned in a previous post, another way I like to use retrieval is to have students retrieve the content from the previous day, but then ask them to consider a similar, but slightly different case. In this instance students are first retrieving the example, and then are immediately asked to compare, contrast and then apply that knowledge to a new context. Below is an example activity that I used with AP Physics C students when going through simple harmonic motion derivations. We had already derived the simple and mass-spring pendula, so I asked students to retrieve those, then take a crack at the torsional and physical pendula.

Retrieval is not Endgame

While retrieval is an incredibly powerful tool that is easy to implement and we often forget to access, it is not endgame. It is simply one strategy amongst what should be an entire playbook. I see retrieval as a strong tool to motivate growth mindset and also as a strong tool to support teaching students how to properly study for the course and better identify their own gaps. However, especially in our science classrooms, it must continue to be paired with active learning cycles and opportunties for students to apply, create, do and evaluate.

ABCs of How We Learn: F is for Feedback
Activities · Science of Learning

ABCs of How We Learn: F is for Feedback

Marianna Ruggerio1 Comment

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”

I’ve seen these words by Samuel Beckett on posters and in classrooms. The intention is to support the idea of the classroom as a safe space to try and fail. But failure without actional feedback is just failure. The classroom environment that has high expectations and high support is also an environment with ample opportunities for feedback.

Feedback can come in a lot of degrees, from a minimal “correct/incorrect” to highly detailed narrative regarding the student choices. For most of our students, the feedback they require should fall somewhere between specific discrepancy and elaborative.

Unfortunately many students are used to only getting feedback after a summative assessment, and without retakes any feedback is usually worthless. (Consider the student who crumples the test and throws it away immediately).

In order for feedback to be effective, it needs to be specific, timely, understandable, nonthreatening and revisable. (For the Hattie/Visible Learning enthusiasts, the weighted mean effect size is 0.92)

Teacher Led Peer Evaluations

A few years ago I started requiring homework submissions as scans to google classroom by the start of the school day. This allows me to do a quick skim through student work and make decisions for class prior to seeing students. Below is a sequence of student work I wanted to review and discuss with students.

Responses are left anonymous, but I use them as a way to provide feedback via whole group discussion. In this sequence you can see the work going from pretty disorganized to much more logical and detailed. I can lead this discussion, or I can ask for student observations about the work.

Student Self-Evaluations

I’ve written before about using self-evaluations for student problem solving process. I haven’t crafted these rubrics for every unit, but I’ve found that for some students this helps them focus on the problem solving routine, rather than just the answer.

Google Form Check Ups

The check up is a follow up I use when students are engaging in practice that is not scored, checked or graded by me the teacher. You can see the full blog post on this process here. During the last 10-15 minutes of class I have students engage in several activities in the google form. The first is a self-evaluation of the learning objectives. Sometimes I will ask them to rate their work from the problem set using a rubric I provide. Last, I will put 1-2 items from the day’s practice and ask students to explain the answer. An example from this past week is below:

After students submit their answer and click next, the following pops up. It provides them with the answer and an explanation behind it.

For what it’s worth, I was VERY impressed by the number of students who got a similar problem to this one correct on their exams this past week! Students are reporting that circuits has been the easiest unit yet, but the reality is that there is a great deal of conceptual heavy lifting!

One of the most important features of all of these feedback forms is that they are happening during the learning process. This means that students can very quickly adjust their course of action in order to move towards the desired results.

ABCs of How We Learn: E is for Elaboration
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ABCs of How We Learn: E is for Elaboration

Marianna Ruggerio2 Comments

The Information Processing Model for memory is an incredibly important foundation for establishing much of the what and how around teaching strategies.

We begin with the sensory input… the words on this page, the hum of my air conditioning, the sound of my typing, the sound of my husband reading to my son, the motorcycle that just passed by. The edge of my sleeve is a bit damp from washing my face a few minutes ago which feels a bit tight and needs moisturizer and my foot itches. All of these are inputs into my sensory memory, and my brain makes decisions about what I will attend to. I will typically ignore most of the sensations as I’m writing in order to focus on the task at hand. The words that I’m writing, and where I plan do go with this post are living in my short term memory. Meanwhile, I am simulaneously retrieving knowledge from my long term memory about this topic, while also reviewing certain details and aspects so I can correctly quote them here. Writing this post requires all parts of my memory: working, long term, retrieval and rehearsal.

The same is true when students are engaged in the learning process, and it is something we must be particularly attuned to.

When we learn something new and we have a way to connect it to prior knowledge, we are engaging in elaboration which provides us with some additional pathways to access when the time comes to retrieve the information.

I recall when I was taking AP psychology and the teacher warned us that the biopsych unit was often difficult for students due to the amount of vocabulary required. I can also still recall the various ways in which I attempted to elaborate in order to remember the terms we were given. For example, I can still retrieve that the cerebellum is responsible for fine motor movements and balance. My elaboration? It’s the cere-BELLE-um and Belle was a beautiful and graceful dancer.

Making connections like this is one way we can elaborate. For example, I will tell my students they can remember that a CONcave is also known as a CONverging mirror. Many of us are familiar with remembering that velocity is a vector while speed is a scalar. Velocity vs speed is often the first place we make the distinction between vector and scalar quantities and they convienently start with the same letters.

But elaboration does not need to be confined to definitions. We use elaboration in science classrooms quite often if we are asking our students how, why and making connections! This is referred to as elaborative interrogation. Elaborative interrogation is about asking questions to make those connections between ideas.

One of the features of the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) I found truly appealing is the use of the textbook. Unlike a traditional textbook, Etkina’s Exploring and Applying Physics engages readers with the experiments which were hopefully conducted in class and the text is meant to elaborate on those experiences. Additionally, students are expected to engage in an interrogation of the text, which then becomes elaborative interrogation. Rather than passively reading, students are taught to read the text by asking questions about the claims, “why is this true” seeing if the reasoning makes sense, and actively connecting the material to what was presented in class. It is also teaching students to behave like scientists because this is the way in which a scientist would read an article or paper while making a discerning judgement about the content they are reading.

I recently heard an eduinfluencer make the claim that teachers can only name and describe 3 evidence based strategies they use in their classroom. Challenge accepted. Each day I’m working through the book The ABCs of How We Learn and pairing a strategy with physics content/activities in my classroom.

Activities · Science of Learning

ABCs of How We Learn: D is for Deliberate Practice

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

Deliberate practice is what kicked off this whole series. I did a deliberate practice exercise last Friday as part of my AP Review in which we focused on graph linearization on the AP FRQs. I was so excited about it I decided to write about it.

This isn’t the first time I’ve intentionally paired an activity in my classroom with deliberate practice. I’ve also paired it with the Building Thinking Classrooms strategy using Mild, Medium and Spicy problems.

Deliberate practice is defined as applying focused and effortful practice to develop specific skills and concepts beyond one’s current ability.

The analogies to interests and hobbies abound. Running drills in sports to get body mechanics just right, Hanon finger exercises to help with piano dexterity, or point coordination exercises to improve hand-eye coordination and drawing with your shoulder.

These drills are rarely exciting, often frustrating but so necessary to move to the next level. In other words, they are focused and effortful!

The challenge with students (or anyone really) is that students tend to practice the things they are already good at. The challenge for teachers is that if we want students to engage in deliberate practice to improve their skills, we have to get them focused in on what they are really struggling with, and we know that’s not going to feel great.

AP classroom has recently made deliberate practice really east for educators. You can log into your AP classroom, go to Reports, then Content & Skills Performance. Then you can “generate practice quiz” in which you can make selections for content and/or skill based on the student level of performance. I’ve found this to be a really valuable tool this year to help my students focus in on that deliberate practice.

Another great example of a resource for deliberate practice are the Physics Classroom concept checkers. I’ve shared some of my written companions for these assignments which provide students some of the scaffolding they need to build that particular skill set.

I recently heard an eduinfluencer make the claim that teachers can only name and describe 3 evidence based strategies they use in their classroom. Challenge accepted. Each day I’m working through the book The ABCs of How We Learn and pairing a strategy with physics content/activities in my classroom.

ABCs of How We Learn: C is for Contrasting Cases
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ABCs of How We Learn: C is for Contrasting Cases

Marianna Ruggerio1 Comment

Contrasting cases is about noticing the difference between two or more examples that seem the same at a glance.

That core learning mechanic should absolutely scream physics problems to you!

Acceleration is a FANTASTIC example of the benefit of contrasting cases. Students frequently come to us believing the following to be true:

  • “Acceleration” describes speeding up only
  • “Positive acceleration” describes speeding up while “negative acceleration” describes slowing down
  • “If an object’s velocity is zero, its acceleration must be zero because it has stopped”

How do we help unlodge these incomplete conceptions in our physics students? If we could “just tell them” then it wouldn’t be a problem. However, these ideas are engrained deeply in students, and they need another way to approach the idea.

In the Investigative Science Learning Curriculum students conduct several observational experiments using a bowling ball. We drop a mark (bean bag for example) at equal time intervals as the ball rolls. Students copy the resulting pattern and then construct motion maps. This is how we begin to make sense of velocity change, acceleration and force.

The contrasting cases, in this instance, are the diagrams themselves.

Through a simple series of activities, we can build the ideas that constant velocity is not the absence of force, but the absence of an unbalanced force. Accelerations happen due to unbalanced forces and the direction of the acceleration is the direction of the unbalanced force.

We do a similar task shortly thereafter with an object that is accelerated vertically. When I review the material, I specifically grab the set of activities shown below. In the top two cases, the bob is experiencing upward motion. However, we see the change in velocity is different due to the difference in accelerations.

Next, I have students compare the top and bottom experiement (4 and 6). In both of these instances the delta v (acceleration) is directed upwards, however these both describe two very different motions, up and speeding up, and down while slowing down).

Again, while I could certainly just tell them, there is a lot more power to students constructing the diagrams based on their observations and then we can look for patterns and we can look at the fine details in contrasting cases. We can then use these details in the contrasting cases to more deeply understand the concept. We are also doing something incredibly critical for our students in the science classroom. We are teaching them to argue with evidence. That their answers and assumptions about how the world works need to be grounded in evidence over feeling and intuition. I would argue that fact is far more important than any piece of content they remember 10 years from now.

I recently heard an eduinfluencer make the claim that teachers can only name and describe 3 evidence based strategies they use in their classroom. Challenge accepted. Each day I’m working through the book The ABCs of How We Learn and pairing a strategy with physics content/activities in my classroom.