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.
ABCs of How We Learn: B is for Belonging
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ABCs of How We Learn: B is for Belonging

Marianna Ruggerio1 Comment
Alumni Speak with current junior students, Fall 2023

In the physics world there is a sizable body of research on belonging in physics, and another related body on how that belonging relates to success. Women continue to be underrepresented in physics and so this has been of particular interest to me. As my career progressed I began to understand more deeply the true weight of belonging in physics as it relates to so many different positionalities.

One of the most critical contributors to persistence in STEM is a STEM identity, and that identity is a collection of factors and includes belonging. Threats to belonging include stereotype threat and imposter syndrome, but recognition is one of the strongest mitigating factors. In short, when I think of belonging, I think of two complementary parts: creating a space where students can see themselves as scientists by seeing others like them as scientists, and secondly opportunities for recognition from both myself and peers.

I think most teachers might lump this into “building relationships” with students, but creating a classroom of belonging requires true effort and intentionality.

This is a difficult post to write succinctly, as it could easily be several books worth of content and materials, so I’ll share some of the activities that link directly to belonging.

Early on in the school year I implement STEPUPs Physics Careers Lesson in which students take a short survey and then are “matched” with people who have a degree in physics but do a whole variety of jobs. The critical component of this lesson is where students build their own bio imagining they completed a physics degree prior to their job of choice. I’ve also taught lessons from the Underrepresentation Curriculum Project so we can speak directly to the problems and stereotypes in physics.

During COVID I got the idea of “identity encounters” where students watched a video interview of a contemporary physicist from an underrepresented group talk about their work, success and challenges.

I really like Kelly OShea’s “Being Smart in a Physics Class“. This year, not only did I have students shout each other out, but I read these aloud for students in class.

Using plenty of activities with low floor, high ceiling and multiple entry points are also a way to ensure the content-specific activities are designed in such a way that anyone can belong. A good example of these activities include cart sorts, but along that note I also firmly believe that physics curriculum such as the Modeling curriculum and the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) are critical contributors to belonging as well. When students are simply asked to find patterns based on carefully crafted observational experiments, we provide students opportunities to see for themselves that they are capable as scientists.

While our content is important to us, we miss the opportunity for the deepest and longest lasting gains in our students if we neglect our students’ sense of belonging.

ABCs of How We Learn in Physics: Analogy
Activities · Science of Learning

ABCs of How We Learn in Physics: Analogy

Marianna Ruggerio1 Comment

Shortly after completing my MEd I was asked to teach the intro to educational psychology course at Rockford University. The course had recently been redesigned to focus on cognitive psychology and the science of learning. Eager, I looked around for other models at various institutions and reached out to a few collegues. One of whom referred me to the book “The ABCs of How We Learn.” It’s a wonderful and digestable text that goes into the research, provides some examples and good/bad uses of each strategy.

At a recent institute day the keynote speaker shared that in his personal research he found that, on average, teachers could only name and accurately describe three strategies they use in the classroom. So, here’s my challenge to myself: 26 strategies and 26 direct applications to the physics classroom.

A is for Analogy

What makes an analogy? Can you name one in physics? God please not the water pump as a circuit example. An analogy is where two examples have the same deep structure. Analogy then becomes a valuable tool for helping novices begin to pay attention to deep vs surface structures.

There are two ways in which we use analogies. The first is the one you are probably thinking of when you consider analogy… the water pump for a circuit, or lanes of traffic to explain what happens to current in series vs. parallel. As teachers I think we use these examples readily in the classroom as we make abstract ideas more concrete.

There is, however, an additional way to use analogy and that is by taking two or more examples and asking students to identify what about those examples is similar. I noticed that my students this year were having a more difficult time that my previous students making this leap. Have your students ever said to you “but you never taught us this problem!” or “you need to show us more problems!”. It’s not really the number of problems, it’s really a transferrence and deep structure problem. Students are not recognizing that the problem at hand is, indeed, the same problem.

To address this I decided to set up a two-for-one cognitive strategy task (document here). First, I asked students to retrieve the worked example from the previous day. In the first instance of this task I asked them to retrieve the derivation for the moment of inerta of a rod about its end. Next, I provided students with a similar, but different problem.

For this first task I felt the problem was almost too similar, but their hesitation proved otherwise. The task was to derive the moment of inertia for a triangular rod about its end where the linear mass density was provided as a function of position. (see below)

However, what I asked students to do first was to identify what about this problem was similar and different to the previous problem. After they took a stab at this we regrouped so we could discuss what I was looking for. It is similar in that it’s the rotational inertia of a rod-like object about its end. It’s different in that the linear mass density is non-uniform and is a function. Then students executed the task. As we moved through the rest of the rotation unit (where analogies abound!) this became my go-to phrase! “Before you begin, what is similar and different to what you’ve seen before?”

AP Review Activity: Skill Blitz (Linearization)
In My Class Today · Teaching Methods

AP Review Activity: Skill Blitz (Linearization)

Marianna Ruggerio3 Comments

One of the struggles this year with my students has been linearization. Maybe it’s because I ditched Unit 0: Linearization because I wanted them to enjoy physics instead of getting bogged down in the math. Maybe it’s because I was panicking that their skills, overall, weren’t where I wanted them to be. Maybe it’s because unlike in previous years, this group of students were unable to transfer the skills from the labs to FRQs. Either way, I had a clear problem on my hands and I needed to solve it. So I decided to do a skill blitz.

I went through old AP FRQs and settled on the lab FRQ from 2011, 2018, 2025, 2015 and 2005. I printed the page with the data table only on different colored paper for each year. Then I gave students a document with the following table (full doc here):

Students are asked to do the derivation, state the axis labels, the slope and then whatever algebra, if necessary, to obtain the necessary value.

When students believe they’ve completed the task, I come check their work. If it’s correct they go obtain the next problem. If it’s incorrect I provide some feedback/clues and they continue.

In hindsight, I should have provided the 2018 problem first, so what happened was this. I gave them 10-15 minutes to grapple with the 2011 problem. After a while and noticing students were spinning their wheels, I went ahead and walked them through the problem. Then I let them get started on the next one. Once they got started they were on a roll. I realized during class that I had actually managed to select 5 problems that also represented the entire scope of the course!

I wanted students focused on speed and accuracy. They were allowed to use notes, but obviously that could slow them down (and wasn’t overly helpful with this particular task). First group to complete all 5 tasks gets to pick treats for when we watch Interstellar next week!

I’m thinking about how I might do this blitz with the other styles of questions. Maybe for continued review next week. We shall see!

Paper Companion Activities for Pivot Interactives
Activities · Teaching Methods

Paper Companion Activities for Pivot Interactives

Marianna Ruggerio2 Comments

You know how I feel about online work! (Looking for Physics Classroom Companion Worksheets? Find them Here!)

When I took high school physics almost everything was online. From physics classroom assignments, to the dreaded WebAssign, it was online. And because it was online, I like others, gamed the system (pre chat GPT). You know a certain number is going to show up somewhere in the answers? Enter it in all the blanks for the first submission so you can focus on the actual calculations. On the flip side was the part where you tried the problem so many times by the time you got it right you had no idea what actually worked. For the better part of my career I’ve been vehemently against all forms of online homework. There’s something about that screen that just puts a stop to the idea of using scratch paper for novice learners and we can’t have that!

(For what it’s worth, when AP went all digital I did NOT feel the urge to go digital in my classroom. I continued to do everything on paper. When APs came around I found my goal was acheived: I proctored the macro exam and did a count. 80% of physics students were using their scratch paper during the exam, while only 30% of non-physics students used their paper.)

The first exception I made to online learning was Pivot Interactives. I was using Peter’s work back when they were “Direct Measurement Videos” which meant I had paper copies originally, anyway. As Pivot upped their game (including deep randomization and autograding) I started using some of these assignments since it sure made my life easier!

However, what I’m finding with my students this year is that like my Webassign days, students are doing the minimum to get all the green checks. This looks like not reading the prompts that explain what they’re about to do next and why, not actually collecting the data for the graph and totally missing the connections between the sample measurements and the data collection.

So, I’ve started to reimplement some paper versions.

The Activities: A Journey of Trial and Error

Earlier this year I assigned the helmet collisions activity. I added a prompt at the end that requested students to do the following:

  • What was the purpose of the activity?
  • Describe the procedure for conducting the investigation
  • Describe the calculations you made and why we made each calculation. You should include details regarding your values!
  • Describe what we learned from this activity about helmets as it relates to the impulse-change in momentum relationship.

This was ok, but I, arguably did this a bit hastily. I realized I wanted these documents handwritten and maybe a bit more depth/scaffholding.

A few weeks later I assigned the Explosions (Not Really) activity.

I knew that students would totally ditch all of the methods we had been using, so I decided to give them a paper to complete before the activity that related to the activity. This required them to complete the calculations with similar, but easy numbers and then have me check their work prior to the activity. This got a good chunk of kids on board, but some still struggled with the transference.

Still not completely satisfied, this past week I assigned the “Intro to Transverse Waves” activity. In this activity students are going to linearize a graph. This is a skill we don’t really cover in my regular level physics, but I like doing it at this point in the year because it’s such a powerful tool. As I anticipated, many students were ignoring the text about linearization completely. I chose a different approach to the paper copy.

I gave students this document which contains the following prompts:

First, I asked them to describe to me some of the new vocab as well as how we obtained our measurements

Next, I use a modified template from the Patterns Curriculum when students write conclusions in labs where we have graphs. It looks like this:

After investigating the behavior _______________, I conclude that there is a ______________________relationship between the [independent variable name]  and the [dependent variable name] As the [independent variable] kept increasing, the [dependent variable]_____________________________. This system of a ___________________ can be mathematically modeled as:

[write the final equation]

where the constant  [slope value]  is the [description of slope for this experiment] . 

I require students to write the ENTIRE paragraph from start to finish. This is not a fill in the blank activity.

This is currently my favorite interaction of the paper follow up and I’ll probably build more of these moving forward. I’m really in love with the patterns physics conclusions because it really requires students to put everything together.

Grading

I’ve noticed there’s a VERY strong correlation on these summaries between students who took the activity seriously and learned from it, vs students who did not. Because of this, the only thing I really need to grade with care is the conclusion paragraph itself. If students did the lab correctly, this paragraph looks great. If not, they usually don’t do well on this.

Do you do anything like this? What does it look like? How do you support genuine learning using online platforms?

Teaching Students How to Score Better
Activities · Classroom Issues · In My Class Today

Teaching Students How to Score Better

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

At the American Association of Physics Teachers Winter Meeting I had the privilege of presenting in literally the best session of the entire conference (no bias here at all). Magically, all four of our presentations beautifully complimented one another and related deeply to engaging students in metacognitive skills.

I transitioned districts this year. In my previous district I worked with a lot of students in the gifted program, a lot of students in the creative and performing arts program (who are basically also gifted) and within this culture and climate, all kids benefitted, even the ones who were not in a special program. For years I was able to get students on board with the Expert Game, and the Science of Learning Physics some trust in the process, and good relationships. This year, that hasn’t quite cut it. I’d been thinking about a way to somehow “teach” students in a way that feel like “teaching” to them about how to learn, study and grow so they might buy into the idea (which is really nothing new).

I had been digging back into Powerful Teaching and some kind of workshop was begining to materialize, albeit very, very fuzzy. And then, at Winter Meeting, Aaron Titus gets up and shares that he offers a “How to Do Better on the Test” workshop which turns out to be “How to Learn”

The workshop is grounded in the work of Dr. Saundra McGuire. There are a lot of resources of hers around the web, like this lecture here on metacognition, but primarily she has a sweet little book called Teach Yourself How to Learn. It’s short, sweet, to the point and a lot of fun to read. Dr. McGuire is a retired chemistry professor and Director Emerita of the Center for Academic Success. She is also an awardee of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Mentorship.

Immediately in chapter one she discusses one of the aspects about college that is hardest for students: getting As and Bs in high school often comes down to memorization and regurgitation. Now, before you come with fire I know that many of us (especially if we teach AP, and definitely if you enjoy my blog) are making students do incredible things. But I also know that you can probably name more than a handful of colleagues who don’t push their students beyond memorization. Teachers who produce study guides that are basically a carbon copy of the exam. Exams that are almost all multiple choice and the math is strictly plug and chug. The dreaded triangle to “support” students doing equations like F=ma. And if not the teachers themselves, some really great high school students simply don’t get pushed beyond needing to simply show up to class to learn the information. They can get away with minimal to no homework and no studying and still do okay in the class because we see them every single day and they work hard in our rooms.

So the workshop starts by introducing students to Bloom’s Taxonomy and we have a conversation about what level they are operating at most of the time, compared to what level they need to operate at for AP Physics. What level do they think they need to operate at in college?

And sure enough, if you pull up the science practices and skills for AP the word “create” is literally all over the place. The top of the pyramid.

From here we took a look at a recent exam question. First I asked them a simple question:

Which of the following is true about work?

  1. Work is effort
  2. Work is a change in energy
  3. Work is a force

They all know the answer. And this is a recall answer.

Then I showed them the exam question (they did really poorly on). While the question fundamentally was about the fact that work is a change in energy, what they were asked to do was apply the concept of taking an integral to calculate work and then create a graphical representation.

From here we discussed the differences between studying and learning and posed the question, “which would you work harder for? To study to get an A on a test, or prepare to teach the material to the class?”

The latter half of the workshop is about sharing strategies for doing homework, reading the text, and using practice exams. (You can find all of these in Dr. McGuire’s work and resources!)

I summarized some of these along with my personal favorites into the following list:

  • When you get home from school, write down everything you can remember from class that day, then compare with your class notes to identify/fill the gaps
  • Did you solve some problems? Grab a clean sheet of paper and solve the problem again. Compare to the example and make notes regarding your forgetting/gaps
  • Create a concept map to tie together big ideas and conceptual details
  • Make “teacher notes” as if you were preparing to teach the material
  • Aim for 100% mastery when you sit to study, not 85-90

As we wrapped up, the most important part of this workshop was asking students to make a commitment to do something different in the next 24 hours. I had students submit these along with some additional reflections. There were two that stood out to me today. One student reflected, “The reason this class is so challenging for me is because I haven’t had a class besides maybe Calc that required me to be at that creating level.”

A second student made an observation that knocked me over in joy:

“Physics is more than just who is smarter and has the ability to think at a higher level.”

And with that, I’m signing off. I’m going to attach my version of the slides, but everything is very much thanks to the work of Aaron Titus and Saundra McGuire.

Waves Intro Activity with Virtual Ripple Tank
Activities · In My Class Today

Waves Intro Activity with Virtual Ripple Tank

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

When I was in college my E&M professor introduced me to the falstad apps. It was literally this guy who created a bunch of different JAVA sims. E&M is notoriously challenging due to needing to think and reason in three-dimensional space, so we were encouraged to use the apps to help us visualize static fields.

When I started teaching I decided to poke around and see what else Falstad had created. One of his simulations I use year over year is his ripple tank. It’s incredibly powerful and way less cumbersome than setting up the actual water tables (which was just unfeasible being the only physics teacher with 3 preps)

I just finished my intro activity today so I figured I might as well share. You can find the simulations here.

When the app opens it’s pretty simple. A “faucet” wave like the one in the Phet sim is present. You can see the sliders to adjust for damping and frequency. You can move the source where ever you like and can even toggle into 3D view

What’s pretty awesome is the list of “examples” you can select from the drop down menu.

Single slit, double slit, two-sources, refraction, total internal reflection and a whole slew of topics. You also have complete freedom to add to the simulation using the “add” menu bar at the top.

For my students, we start our waves unit in the following way.

First, we watch the slo mo guys film this ginormous 90 foot wave... with ducks…. which is awesome.

There’s a lot of really great phenomena here. From constructive interference, to refraction and lenses (pay attention to the grid image in the column) to the idea that waves transport energy, not matter.

Next, students head to the sim. I provide them directions on this document and the record their observations on this one.

This activity typically takes a class period and a half. For my advanced students they can usually finish in a class period or I can assign the rest for homework.

When students return the following day, I put this graphic organizer up and prompt them to write their own definition of the behavior based on their observations and a diagram to go with it

During the unit I come back to this app quite often.

We discuss how the design of an auditorium is based on nodal lines

I can drag the single source around to demonstrate doppler effect and sonic booms

If there’s a phenomena I want students to be able to observe, pause and manipulate… there’s usually a way to do it.

Written Companions for Physics Classroom Practice
Activities

Written Companions for Physics Classroom Practice

Marianna Ruggerio3 Comments

The Physics Classroom holds a place near and dear to my heart.

For years I thought it was my special secret. Long, long ago the url was something like physicsclassroom.glenbrook225.k12.il.us because it was a site hosted on my High School’s sever. The main author was Tom Henderson, one of the best educators at GBS. Tom taught the most advanced freshman in chem-phys, as well as the conceptual physics course. He had a great handle on meeting kids where they were at and explaining physics in a way that made sense as a student.

It wasn’t until much later I realzied that physics classroom was a well known resource for physics teachers across the nation.

As a student, something I realized was that what I found fun, challenging and helpful to my learning in physics was often a barrier and frustration to my classmates. Getting an “O Drats” without a way or opportunity to reflect or see where an error was made became maddening and frustrating. At the same time the essence of drilling a tiny skill is so valuable for long term learning.

I steered clear of most online homeworks for a long, long time (webassign also traumatized me). I knew that too often the real work that needed to happen to actually learn was skipped by most students in search of elusive green checks. By the time you got the checks, you had no memory of what actually worked.

Over the last few years I’ve started developing handouts to go along with some of the physics classroom activity sets. I only have a few, but enough that I feel like they are worth sharing publicly at this point. The goal is to get students thinking, writing and documenting as they work through the physics classrom activities. It also provides me with documentation. I will admit, another motivation for this was the fact that I did not have a paid subscription to task tracker. Now that I do, I’m developing more of these and will continue to share and post them here as I develop them.

What I’ve found is that more students are able to move through more problems with more success and confidence. Definitely a win! They hate me for slowing them down with the paper documentation, but I see it as a win.

Without further ado, here is the list:

Kinematics

Match That Graph Interactive

In the paper document (preview below) I ask students to first describe the motion in words. This way, when they watch the little car drive across the screen and make the dot diagram, they know what they are looking for

Kinematics Calculator Pad Sets

In the paper document, students are prompted to make their picture, their chart of variables and solve the problem by selecting an equation then substituting values as needed. This is a second version (sample below) that is specific to set 12, and provides more room for student work.

Momentum

Concept Checker: Case Studies Impulse and Force

The first few pages of this document are notes in which we construct the momentum bar charts for different situations and identify what is the same and different. Then students go to the concept checker and I ask them to create the bar charts and document the similarities/differences prior to making their selections. A preview is below and here is the handout

Work and Energy

This document can be used for the calcpad sets. I ask students to draw a picture, construct a bar chart, and solve the problem starting with conservation of energy. Preview below

Waves

Open Tube Concept Builder (can be used for closed tubes as well)

Document here, preview below

AP Free-Response Practice, Skills and Metacognition
Activities · Teaching Methods

AP Free-Response Practice, Skills and Metacognition

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

It’s been two weeks since I got back from the AAPT Winter meeting inVegas and I’ve barely had time to sit and reflect. I’ve made some big changes this school year. Exactly one year ago I interviewed for the AP Physics position in a new district. It was one of the more challenging decisions I’ve needed to make in my career, and the first time I was walking into an interview fully confident of who I am as an educator, what I want in my future and in complete control. (When I took my position at Auburn I was confident, but hadn’t yet taught an AP course). With a new position comes new challenges and adjustments, but a new position paired with experience and confidence also brings the opporuntity to recognize challenge for what it is: an opportunity to search for innovative solutions. That’s one of the best parts of teaching; getting challenged in ways that require creativity.

With challenge comes a heavy mental load and so when the deadline came around for the AAPT abstracts I quickly threw together an abstract related to holding students accountable when we do work a la Building Thinking Classrooms (Accountability on Ungraded Homework) but had only shared here on the blog. A part of me felt pretty lame as this particular idea didn’t feel as exciting as I thought it should be for presentation, but I’ve learned that we are typically our own worst critics, and it’s always valuable to go ahead and present anyway. (Here are the presentation slides)

As it turned out, my session was loaded with three other awesome talks that all complemented one another really, really well. Aaron Titus talked about his “how to test better” workshop which is secretly a “How to Learn” workshop. Another faculty member talked about standards based grading at his college and Kathy Willard at Case Western talked about some metacognitive work she’s engaging students with. This session, tied with the AP sessions that took a deep dive into the science practices got me thinking about how to put all of this together to support my students.

The result? An FRQ reflection form.

Part of this spawned from the fact that we had -30 windchills last Friday and a remote learning day. With remote learning obtaining student feedback is more critical than ever for me, but I realized this would be a good strategy to maintain for all FRQ practice.

The Process

  1. Students complete an FRQ alone under timed conditions
  2. Students flip their work upside down and move to vertical whiteboards. They are permitted the next 15 minutes to discuss the problem and they can whiteboard their work/discussion as they go. This is a riff on friends-no-pens due to the complexity of the problem.
  3. As students wrap their discussion, I ask them to consider how the points are distributed.
  4. Students return to their original work and have 10 minutes to revise/add to their work. The way my room is set up students CANNOT see the work on the whiteboards
  5. Students self-score the FRQ. I ask them to give themselves a first pass and second pass score.
  6. Students complete the reflection

The reflection is a google form. The nice thing about this is that in addition to collecting this data easily, I can link multiple forms to the same spreadsheet to track changes over time.

The Google Form Reflection

This first part is asking students to think metacognitively in a few ways. First, I want them to see the gap between their individual and group-think. In a highly collaborative classroom, sometimes students think they have a better handle on the material than they actually do. The first pass at the FRQ gives them a chance to see what they are capable of alone. The second pass allows them to see that they can and do understand more physics than they might give themselves credit for, but it’s not currently encoded in their long term memory. This gives students a place to identify as a study need.

Next, I use the standards information available in AP classroom to provide students a check-list of the skills that were assessed. I ask them to identify both what they did well on and what they did not do well on.

To wrap it all up I ask a final question to get a guage on what my students believe they need more of.

Looking At Results

Below is a snapshot of some of my student results and reflections. I sorted the original scores from lowest to higest so you can see the improvements. This was a Translation Between Representations question which is worth a total of 8 points.

First, observe how much scores increased from original to group think! But what I think is particularly important is that this work happened without access to notes of any kind before and after conversation. When students return to their papers they no longer had access to the whiteboard work.

Next, I think some of the “aha” moments are particularly important and poingnent. I especially love the first one that is more about testing strategy. (This particular student is a rockstar, but the physics assessments have been rough for them).

I thought this data was particularly interesting:

I think anyone who teaches AP knows kids dread the word “derive” like we’re asking them to be Einstein Geniuses (more on that in another reflection another day). Interestingly, my students reported that they all need help on derive, but actually my data from AP classroom and testing informs me that functional dependence is actually one of their weak spots. And yet, students aren’t overwhelmingly identifying it as one. I’ve determined that this particular blind spot is going to be an area of focus these last few months as we enter the final lap.

Asking students where they struggle is always telling regarding their thought processes. Currently many of my students are still stuck in a very algorithmic way of thinking/approaching physics rather than working big picture down and it remains telling in their responses. This is still really valuable information because in order to get students where I need them to be I need to meet them were they are at first.

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Three Lesson Plans for Student Growth

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

I returned from doing work at the district office to a disaster.

My students were supposed to take their “check-in” (that’s what I call quizzes because their function is to literally check in on student learning) and at first glance I was walking into a mess.

Students should of had enough time to finish the two problems, however the vast majority of my class had half of the assessment blank.

I started looking at the students who finished.

Only three.

All three had done great!

But I have 30 students in this class. Not good.

At first, I will admit I was really upset for a number of reasons.

So I started planning what we were going to do. When I looked more closely at the assessment I noticed that about two thirds of the class was actually doing pretty ok, they just needed more time. Regardless of the fact that I felt strongly that they had enough time, I couldn’t argue the evidence that what was complete was good.

The students who had not done anything beyond opening the assessment were the same ones who have been disengaging with the material and straight up refusing to attempt. As much as I was frustrated that this was on the student (because, after all, my other class is flying and the students who are doing things every day are succeeding). I took a deep breath and regrouped.

What if I made it tactile?

We’ve been working on multiple representations for momentum. So I made up little squares to represent units of momentum. I made a set of red and blue (for each car) and added labels for 1 kg across the bottom and 1 m/s upward.

Sample of cards. This could represent a 2kg and a 1kg object stuck together post-collision moving at 2 m/s

Within table groups I assigned group roles that I borrowed from Marta Stoeckel (check out her article with Kelly OShea!) and then also added a task, one representation needed to be done by each student in the group on the large white board and then they were all responsible for doing it on their own paper.

Step by step we worked through the original problem in small groups. Since I had reduced my “class size” to eight, I was able to give the students with the most need all the attention they needed while the rest of my class completed their assigned tasks.

One of the cool features, aside from students commenting that they liked placing the blocks, was that it allowed us to discuss the limitations of using discrete blocks. In the assessment problem the final velocity was 3.6 m/s, so while I had some students show 22 blocks, demonstrating they understood that the total momentum was constant, they had uneven heights for an inelastic collision. It’s better, then, to just label height and width and go from there.

By the end of the hour everyone was happy.

My three students who did great were given this handout. They were asked to come to consensus and then reflect on their gaps/needs. I checked in with them at the end and they were able to communicate confidence and what they needed.

The large group felt satisfied that they had the chance to go back into their assessment. When I went back in to review the work I found that their performance matched my previous hour, even though they take more time.

The small groups were kind of amazing. Most of these students had been really checked out, but this small shift got pretty much everyone fully on board and verbalizing that they understood what was happening. In order to make up for the assessment, a second problem was on the backside of the worksheet for them to do independent of my help.

At the end of the day I reflected on how the only reason I was able to do this on the fly is due to the fact that I’ve been teaching for a long time. This was a new-to-me activity (although I’ve set up differentiated groups like this before) but at the same time this was effectly three different lesson plans in the same space. Elementary teachers might laugh at my overwhelm, but the reality is that teachers (all of us) are simply not given the kind of time required to plan high quality experiences for our students. This also shows how important data is in our work. Data can allow us to be a bit more objective in our judgements, moving from “they didn’t do anything” to “what else could I try to fill their needs?”

This job is challenging, but it wouldn’t be fun if it wasn’t!

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Legacy in Education

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment
“Legacy. What is a legacy?
It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.”
Hamilton the Musical

I continue to reflect a great deal after the AAPT winter meeting this year. This year we are celebrating 40 years of the Physics Teaching Resource Agents and Karen Jo Matsler gave one of the plenaries. During her talk I couldn’t help be realize the legacy that I’m connected to as a physics teacher.

Karen Jo Matsler Recognized with AAPT’s 2025 Melba Newell Phillips Medal

One of the most bittersweet encounters is that with a well-loved teacher who is retiring. Over the course of a 35 year career that teacher has potentially impacted as many as 5000 of their own students, and that excludes the many more they may have impacted through extra curriculars. The best teachers become legends in their communities, and as those students grow into adults they continue to share the stories about how their teacher made a difference. I know I continue to do the same to this day.

But when a teacher retires from a school, their legacy is rarely left in the building longer than a year. A new teacher fills their place and within a single year the program either shifts into a new entity, or, in some cases, is completely decimated.

The very real truth about teaching is that although teachers leave an impact that lasts forever on their students, there is no legacy left in the very place where they poured all of that work and love.

However, that does not mean that there is no place for teachers to leave a legacy.

It is in the professional societies that legacy lives on.

I saw this while listening to Karen Jo’s plenary. Slides filled with photos of activities, demos and labs that I grew up believing were specific to the teachers in my area. No, it wasn’t that. Many of those teachers were also involved with PTRA. They brought their learning back and forth from PTRA, AAPT and their local communities.

I saw this in an interactive session I attended. At the end of the presentation I was in the back with two college faculty and one shared that she loved seeing this presentation, shared as the teacher’s own, which originated from the work of Alan Van Heuvlan. We proceeded to talk about how Alan was her adviser.

I saw this when Duane Merrill offered a presentation about creating community around “Phood, Physics and Phun”, which is also the tagline for Chicago Physics Northwest meetings.

I encounter this with nearly every conversation at AAPT, especially those who are near retirement. Each of us was inspired by someone who came before us, someone who brought us in, pushed us forward, encouraged us to grow and learn and lead.

And the memory of these educators lives on. It lives through the stories that go along with the demonstrations and the activities. It lives through the work that continues to excite and engage others in teaching. Professional societies are not only the spaces that allow current educators to network, connect, receive support and grow. They are the spaces that house the professional legacies of educators, not just as inspirational teachers, but as exemplary professionals in their craft.