Category: Science of Learning

ABCs of How We Learn… X is for eXcitement
Activities · Science of Learning · Teaching Methods

ABCs of How We Learn… X is for eXcitement

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

Engagement is one of those trendy buzz-words in education. From the Danielson Framework (domain 3) to SilverStrong to Marzano, engagement is a major focus of all of these evaluation tools and typically a “sell point” for curriculum packages and methods.

When Building Thinking Classrooms was gaining popularity, one of the frequent complaints from folks deeply embedded in the science of learning/explicit teaching was that the program looked like “engagement” but engagement doesn’t necessarily equal learning. While this statement in and of itself is certainly true, there are quite a few points to Building Thinking Classrooms that are right on point when it comes to the science of arousal and learning.

When we are aroused, engaged, excited our brains are primed for more learning. Researchers describe the relation between arousal and performance as the Yerkes-Dodson law (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908). While this law applies to known skills, it is transferrable to learning new ones as well. In short, when aroused we release cortisol which activates the fight or flight response but also impacts the way in which we process and store information. This process is ultimately why we have stronger memories tied to stronger emotional events. The science around emotions and learning is a bit murky, but we do know that when the mind is aroused there is, indeed, a measurable impact on learning.

Arousal can take many forms in the classroom, which might be anything as extreme as the teacher coming into class with a ridiculous costume or schtick that day, to an impressive demo or video, but it can also be less intense such as interacting with engaging questions, or incorporating kinesthetic movement into the lesson.

My one and only schtick of the year… the flying pig hat. I can actually make the wings flap!

From the lens of physics teaching, this brings us back to why an active learning environment is beneficial for our students and has been proven over and over again to be more effective than lecture alone. An active classroom takes advantage of arousal to our learner’s benefit.

Coming back to Building Thinking Classrooms let’s take a look at some of the micro-moves and paradigm shifts that leverage arousal:

  • A lesson typically starts with an engaging story or interesting problem. In the ABCs of How We Learn, Schwartz, Tsang and Blair explain that arousal helps us consolidate focal information, and pushes out nonfocal information. The bits of the story which are applicable to the problem itself are most likely to be retained.
  • In a BTC lesson students never sit down. You’ve probably heard of “brain breaks”. Since whiteboards are vertically mounted, student bodies are now in an active, rather than passive position. This requires the biophysical response int he body for action, which requires a certain level of arousal.
  • A BTC lesson involves not only working in pairs or triads, but the cross-pollination of ideas from other groups. Research has shown that people perform better in social situations. The design of a BTC leverages the social aspect, while the carefully crafted consolidation phase reduces any negative anxiety that would be present in a “typical” classroom where students are called upon to give their answers for their own work.

When I started this project the initial motivator was our EduInfluencer keynote speaker. He made the claim that in his research the average teacher could only accurately name and explain three strategies. Today marks the 24th post in which I’ve explained the science of learning and then matched each topic with one or more classroom strategies.

Very, very often when teachers select an idea, tool or strategy for the classroom the reason they share they love it is because “it gets the kids engaged and they have so much fun”. We need to recognize that in the ongoing battle for the respectability of our profession, that line of reasoning is weak and harmful to us as professionals. Tools we choose that are “so much fun” are effective because tools which excite and engage our students activate the arousal systems in the brain, which change the way the brain receive, processes and encodes new information and subsequently increases the strength of the neurological pathways and the amount of knowledge retained. Let’s continue to have conversations about our work that can only be adequately criticized if done with additional evidence.

ABCs of How We Learn… V is for Visualization
Activities · Classroom Issues · Science of Learning · Teaching Methods

ABCs of How We Learn… V is for Visualization

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

If there’s one thing I find myself iterating repeatedly to my students its the importance of writing things down. Students who are used to doing well in school, and especially in math, often find they are able to solve most problems without showing a great deal of work. In physics, however, that becomes nearly impossible. Aside from showing work for the strict mathmatical portion of a problem, what is almost always more important is that initial diagram.

One of the critical and beneficial features of drawing a picture is that it allows for cognitive offloading. By sketching a graph or a force diagram or even just a physical diagram, now there are details about the problem that no longer need to be held in the working memory, which clears space for the problem solving.

When we use whiteboards in class this also creates the additional benefit of having a shared focal point for the group, which enhances attention and focus on problem solving when working as a team.

The other benefit is that once we begin to create visualizations, we may begin to notice structures and patterns that were not initially obvious or intuitive.

In a 2011 paper, Drawing to Learn in Science, Ainsworth, Prain, and Tytler advocate bringing drawing into the science curriculum because visualization enhances student engagement, helps students learn how to represent information, helps students learn to reason in science, is a major way to communicate scientific data and models, and is a learning strategy.

Drawings also provide us, as educators, quick and descriptive insights to student understanding and possible misconceptions. What students may not be able to adaquately articulate in words may be articulated through a picture.

The initial construction of motion maps with students and a bowling ball is a great example of this. First we run several experiments: letting the ball roll freely, constantly pushing the ball in the direction of motion, pushing the ball opposite motion. As this is happening we drop a mark behind the ball at equal time intervals. This creates a physical visual on the floor which students are then asked to translate to their white boards.

Once students have completed this pattern, they are instructed to craft the arrows to indicate the direction of travel of the ball.

After this we can discuss the meaning of and how to obtain the direction of the change in velocity.

These steps are generally well-received by most students. The misconception that most students initially bring to us is that “negative acceleration means slowing down”. In this case, as we continue to provide additional cases (such as an object moving to the left while speeding up) he visualizations serve as a tool to help students undo this particular misconception. They can see for themselves that when the direction of Δv and v match, the object is speeding up, when when Δv and v are opposite the object is slowing dow.

Force diagrams and energy bar charts are additional examples of visualizations that end up being imperative for problem solving.

What frequently seems to be the challenge is that students will generally not choose to complete these vizualizations. I cannot count the number of times I’ll have a very bright student come to me in frustration and the first comment I need to make is “where is your force diagram” “where is your bar chart”. It is for this reason I believe that its critical that the vizualizations become a no-excuses requirement in the work at all times.

For example, here is the hand-out I provide my students as part of their force notes. Their homework takes an identical three-column format

While the physicsclassroom.com interactives and conceptu builders are fantastic drill practice, the fact that they are on a screen reduces student uptake on physically creating the necessary representations. This is why I’ve created paper companions for most of the assignments I assign students. (Example below)

Like our students, we should actively shift our thoughts around diagrams from something we just happen to do in physics, to a critical learning tool that is backed by research and allows our students more engagement and depth thanks to cognitive offloading, emergent structure (finding patterns), and reorganization of material to get a new perspective.

ABCs of How We Learn… U is for Undoing
Activities · Science of Learning · Teaching Methods

ABCs of How We Learn… U is for Undoing

Marianna Ruggerio1 Comment

“A bullet is dropped at the exact same time that one is shot horizontally from a gun. The bullets start from the same height. Which lands first?”

We know how this question goes when posed to students. Aside from the fact that we’ve primed them to answer one of the bullets, knowing full well the answer is “neither” we are leaning into student misconceptions, or rather an incomplete conception.

Students know, and are correct, that the shot bullet is initially travelling faster than the dropped one. Students also know, and are correct, that the shot bullet is always moving with a faster speed than the dropped one. Students also know, and are correct, that faster objects will travel the same distance in a shorter time than a slower moving object. All of these notions are true, and because students know these to be true, they will typically answer that the shot one lands first.

Well… except for those students who think about it a little more. See, those students reason that because the shot bullet is travelling faster and because it was shot horizontally, it is going to travel more distance, so perhaps the dropped one lands first due to its shorter distance.

Then there’s the one kid who of course has to say “air resistance!” in some way because fast things experience air resistance. Also not wrong.

Every bit of this reasoning is true until you get to the conclusion.

The issue here has to do with the fact that the reasoning and concept are incomplete. Students are not taking into account that the vertical properties of the two bullets are all identical, and since gravity, a vertical force, is responsible for accelerating the bullets towards the ground with the same vertical acceleration, they will land at the same time.

In a course where students are already coming in with preconcieved notions about who can do physics, the last thing we should be doing is blatantly demonstrating everything wrong with their thinking. Instead, we should leverage and aknowledge the good, while also giving them the tools to make a complete judgement.

Physics students come to us with a lot of incomplete conceptions, they want the ball to roll out in a curved path…

They want the force on the bug to be more than the force on the bus

They want acceleration at the peak of a projectile’s flight to be equal to zero, an object that flies out the window is moving backwards, waves should push matter, and more resistors to always mean more resistance.

Physics misconceptions are frustration for student and teacher alike because they are very much grounded in elements of truth and lived experience, but they are always incomplete.

Making these notions complete and providing many opportunities to encounter the complete notion is imperative to unlearning the previous notion. In order to do this we must:

  1. Increase student precision of thought; so they can reconize the difference between arguing with evidence vs intuition.
  2. Provide students with an alternative conception. This is where our representations such as force diagrams, motion maps etc. come in.
  3. TIME – students need time and exposure for the new conceptions to take hold.

This is a critical component built into the Investigative Science Learning Environment framework, and it is immensely effective at completing these conceptions. What I particularly like about ISLE is that when we are providing the alternative conception, especially for the first time, we are not leaving it up to students to just make the representation. Instead, that representation is carefully drawn through observational evidence.

Coming back to the original question of the two bullets, let’s discuss how the ISLE cycle approaches this particular conception.

In my class, I use the “three views of a ball” in pivot interactives for their observational experiement.

First, I ask students to construct the motion map for each of the three views. Even here students will sometimes rely on their incomplete conceptions over their observations. I will gently remind students to construct the maps based on the evidence in the video. (This is why we use an experiment!) How is the distance changing (or not) as the ball travels accross the screen? Be sure to represent it appropriately!

After students have done this, we discuss how the side-view actually works (Just in Time Telling!). It’s a composite of the top and front views. That is, the top (horizontal motion) is totally constant. This makes sense because there are no horizontal forces (I do projectiles after forces). The front view looks like an object experiencing gravity.

When students get the question with the classic ball drop demo (now a testing experiment rather than a demonstration) instead of just asking the question about landing, I ask them to first carefully construct the motion map for each ball based on what we’ve just learned and discussed then make their prediction. They should then be able to explain the reasoning for their prediction based on their motion maps.

Students all come to the agreement they should land at the same time.

In this manner of approaching the misconception, we have equipped students with tools to support their thinking, and forced them to slow down that thinking so they can achieve success at reaching a final answer.

From here, students need additional opportunities to represent and reason, so I will use problems like the ones from TIPERS

Teachers that have learned about ISLE for the first time often feel overwhelmed by the idea of “changing everything” but in truth, it’s really more about shifting the overarching perspective and intention, and then you can continue to do a lot of the same activities you’ve done before! Consider any of the other misconceptions presented here, or that you can think of. What might be a way to develop an observational and testing experiement to support the undoing of their misconceptions?

Activities · Science of Learning · Teaching Methods

ABCs of How We Learn… T is for Teaching

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

In the previous post on self-explanation I mentioned how one of the strategies I provide to students is to create their version of “teacher notes” to reference and use.

When we engaged in our “How to Score Better on the Test” workshop (aka, how to learn) students were presented with the following question:

Which case would you work harder?

A) Study the material to get an A on the test
B) Learn the material so you can teach it to the class?

As you would expect, students overwhelmingly chose “B”

A 2013 study furthermore found that when students do, in fact, teach the information they learn more than if they only prepare to teach the content.

The idea of teaching content to another person to enhance one’s own learning is the reason why the jigsaw approach works so effectively in the classroom.

Students sharing problems in a jigsaw activity

In my physics courses this has looked like a number of activities, but most frequently looks like this:

  1. Students have a selection of homework problems they were required to solve in class or the previous night. All students were expected to complete all problems. This works best with 3 problems.
  2. Students are divided into visibly random groups of 2-3 students and are assigned one of the problems. The team discusses the problem, comes to consensus and provides their final solution on their board.
  3. Teams with the same problem come together to discuss their approaches to the problem. The team needs to come to a final consensus. Both teams must have the agreed upon solution on their respective boards.
  4. Teams then move into new groups where one team for each problem. Each team is presents the solution to the problem to the rest of the group.

Why this works:

  1. Students are individually responsible for making an attempt at the homework. I’m not a huge fan of doing this with problems they’ve never seen before unless I’m selecting a very, very specific skill.
  2. Students are able to discuss the problem in a non-threatening setting.
  3. Students get to confirm the answer, which increases confidence in the work BUT..
  4. Students are still accountable in small groups to do the teaching. That means that the group can’t rely one the one “really smart kid” out of the group of 6.

I think another great example of leveraging the idea of teaching as a non-threatening classroom activity is Kelly OShea’s Mistake Game.

Playing the “mistake game” at a Chicago Section AAPT meeting in 2017

The premise is simple: solve the problem, but leave one intentional mistake in the work…something a student would do. The group then presents the problem and its the class’s responsibility to help the presenters “find” their “mistake” by asking questions.

Why This Works

From the cognitive science lens, students are still required to solve a problem with the goal of presenting/teaching it to the class. Additionally, they have been specifically asked to build in a challenge (because often in teaching students will throw us for a loop!) and work that logic through to its completion. In order to do this, students need to be able to meaningfully connect ideas through elaboration, which, in turn, increases their retention and neural connections.

What’s great about this method is that the mistake is inevetable: it was part of the assignment! But this does something else so important for developing STEM identities: if the group made a valid mistake, no one needs to know which mistake was “intentional” and which was an unintentional mistake actually made by the team.

What this is NOT

I was talking about writing this post with my 10-year-old son and he groaned that he does this in math all the time and it’s not helpful. In order to use teaching and be effective it’s critical that students have time ti actually prepare what they are teaching. Too often teachers will group the “smart” and the “struggling” student together, expecting the smart student to “teach” the struggling one. And too often this leads to nothing but frustration. Both students know their respective “role” in the pairing, and the “smart” student is expected to effectively communicate without any prior preparation. Recognizing that students are not the teacher-expert in the room, it’s our responsibility to craft experiences where that preparation can happen and we can facilitate effective communication of the process while students are preparing their problems.

ABCs of How We Learn… R is for Reward
Activities · Science of Learning

ABCs of How We Learn… R is for Reward

Marianna RuggerioLeave a comment

A friend recently shared with me a strategy her son’s teacher implements in class. Each day the teacher secretly draws three names of students she is going to observe carefully for their behavior. If the students are well behaved, they are announced and they get a reward. If the students are not well behaved the teacher announces that, the students keep their anonymity and they get to start again tomorrow.

On the surface level this looks like the antithesis of behavior charts where the record of bad behavior is available for all to see. There also seems to be an extra layer of genius in that the teacher gets to reward 2-3 students pulled at random that day, but no one knows who those kids are until the end of the day. This motivates everyone to do well and eliminates and shaming for missing the mark.

On a cognitive science level, this is an excellent example of reward. A famous study in 1973 demonstrated that although rewards will increase desired behaviors, they also decrease people’s enjoyment in engaging with those same behaviors. There was, however, a caveat: if the reward was not guaranteed, the enjoyment did not decrease.

We reward students in many ways in the classroom:

  • Candy for right answers/participation
  • Points for homework
  • Extra credit for a particularly boring or challenging, but necessary task

My math teacher used to give out candy if she was corrected by a student. Even then I thought this was an amazing type of reward: she was rewarding speaking up and not assuming the teacher is always right. It wasn’t a class norm until the first time it happened, and it didn’t happen so often that students were looking to challenge her, but its something that stuck with me. She taught us that we all make mistakes, and that’s okay.

What’s made some more recent headway is the idea of gamification in the classroom. Whether its Kahoot, Blooket Quizziz or GimKit, all of these platforms take advantage of the motivation that comes with gamification to support student learning. An interesting metastudy from 2023 found that not only did gamification support student learning, but it was most effective in science classrooms compared to other content areas (although many of the studies examined were online courses).

What I personally struggle with (this is my opinion!) is that none of the typical methods of gamification are particularly well-suited for physics beyond super-surface level content. Physics problems, even some of the easier ones, or multiple choice, still require deep thinking. I personally take issue with the concept of introducing speed as a valued quality when students are learning physics. For this reason I tend to choose when I want to engage in these activities explicitly for review, rather than earlier learning. It is my belief that in order to get the kind of learning we need in a physics classroom, true gamification requires a great deal of thought, time and effort in not only crafting the content of the activity, but also all of the rules that go along with it.

A particularly excellent example of gamification that allows for deep thinking in the context of a group-worthy task which increases participation and engagement are Joe Cosette’s escape rooms and mystery tasks. Not only are these activities fun and engaging, but they work because of the different areas of cognitive theories that we’ve discussed over the last few weeks: self-determination, listening and sharing, participation and now reward with gamification.

ABCs of How We Learn… Q is for Question Driven
Activities · Science of Learning

ABCs of How We Learn… Q is for Question Driven

Marianna Ruggerio1 Comment

When I first started teaching I had students to objectively had already decided they were not science people. The school I was working at had a deeply flawed version of “conceptual physics”. The “true” iteration of the course was that conceptual physics would be for 9th graders who had poor reading scores because “there’s not as much reading in physics as biology” (don’t get me started on the importance of literacy). The 9th grade conceptual physics classes were then typically classes where 67% of students had some sort of IEP or 504 plan and 33% did not. (no, that’s not legal. The school got around it because on paper there was a self-contained class of 20 with a SPED teacher and a class of 11 with me, and both classes just happened to meet in the same room at the same time… talk about trial by fire my first year!). As horrendously flawed as that model was, it got worse. Junior students who were deemed unfit for the regular physics class after their chemistry experience got put in conceptual, and so a junior section of this class emerged. My first year teaching as a 22 year old woman I had 3 students aged 19, and one who was turning 21 soon and whose IEP involved violent angry outbursts. Can you imagine?

So my 22-year-old shiny-eyed self decided I would convince these students that they were, in fact, science people. My youngest brother was only 7 at the time, so his development was still fresh in my mind. I asked them what a baby does when you put a toy in their hand. They stick it in their mouth, they shake it, and then they chuck it to the ground. What are they doing? An experiement of course! And what are they learning? Gravity! Being a science person, I argued, was part of being human, because being human is being curious.

Question driven learning is as old as our humanity, whether you look at it from a lens of child-development, or from the socratic method.

Another personal example, the first piece of writing I produced in high school was a response to Sydney Harris’s 1994 essay, “What True Education Should Do” in which he argues that most people think of students as sausage casings in which to stuff information. “The job of teaching” he argues, “is not to stuff them and thenseal them up, but to help them open and reveal the riches within”

In the assignment, we were asked to answer the question of whether we agreed with the sausage or oyster perspective of a student and why. This past school year I have found myself reflecting on this assignment frequently. Not only the fact that I firmly stand by the “oyster” metaphor, but the fact that in having us read and write this essay as high school freshman, our teachers were setting the stage for what would be the next four years of our educational formation. That this was a school where we were expected to cultivate our talents, grow and go out into the world with something new.

Our natual curiosity will drive us to spend time and energy to get answers to questions we care about. It’s one of the reasons click-bait titles work “You’ll never believe what students said when their teacher made this one small shift!”

In NGSS we call this an “anchoring phenomena” in ISLE we call it the “need to know”. OpenSciEd and Patterns Physics both ground their curriculum under driving questions. There is a reason why this works, when done well. It taps into that curiosity. It moves students away from “why do I have to learn this” to “I want to know more about this”

Selecting an anchoring phenomina or need to know is really important in order for it to be useful. This is not pure discovery based or inquiry learning. There is a highly cited article by Kirschner, Sweller and Clarke and a rebuttal by Silver, Duncan and Chinn at Rutgers that are both worth reading around constructivist, active learning environments. As discussed in the Knowledge post, we are not leaving students to truly discover anything on their own. We have crafted very specific and scaffholded experiences for students to engage so when we arrive at the time for telling (aka lecture) students have an experience and a memory to connect the new knowledge to, which ultimately creates stronger neurological pathways.

Here are a few fun need to knows:

Can Damien Walters run a human vertical loop? How fast does he need to go?

If you are in free-fall, how high up do you need to be to break the sound barrier? Felix Baumgartner did this in 2023!

Why Do Tic-Tacs Sometimes Bounce Higher on the Second Bounce? (this is a great energy question)

This is another fun one where there’s basically a “duet” using a pipeline to create the echo (partner). How long is the pipe? What tempo works best for this to work?

Here’s the best part. You don’t have to have the need to know somehow anchored and tied to every moment of the entire unit. The need to know sparks the curiosity and the questions to motivate students to engage in the upcoming lessons. When the unit is complete, we can come back and answer the questions we had at the beginning which gives us an opportunity to see just how much we have learned as a result!

The researched summarized in the ABC book discusses how in a variety of studies students who learned under a problem-based learning or anchored phenomina were able to better transfer knowledge to new and complex situations, seeing the value of the content outside of the classroom, and having positive attitudes towards the material.

A strategy of teaching that increases value, transfer and identity? I’ll say yes to that all day!

ABCs of How We Learn… P is for Participation – You have to DO physics to get better at DOING physics!
Activities · Science of Learning

ABCs of How We Learn… P is for Participation – You have to DO physics to get better at DOING physics!

Marianna Ruggerio1 Comment

After the first exam, I have students participate in a lesson called “The Expert Game”. The activity begins by prompting students “what do you consider yourself an expert in?” Because I know how this will land with a lot of students, I actually ask this question in three ways: What is something you consider yourself pretty good at, what are some of your hobbies, and name one thing you really enjoy doing. Students submit via google form and I get a list like this:

Next, I group students based on similar interests. Then, students are asked to create a cycle of learning for how you go from a novice to an expert in that particular area

Interestingly, these cycles end up being remarkably similar! That’s because learning how to do anything inevitably includes a concrete experience, a chance to try, opportunities for feedback, and trying again. This is ultimately the learning cycle we discussed in the Knowledge Post

Because this activity comes fresh after an exam, one of the key aspects that I lean into at this moment in time is the part where you have to do physics in order to get better at doing physics. In other words, you need to be an active participant in your learning.

In The ABCs of How We Learn, Schwartz, Tsang and Blair define participation as “engaging in an existing cultural activity.” There are two really critical features of this. First, is that participation is going to require that active engagement, but second, that it is an engagement in existing culture. As teachers, we have a responsibility to define the culture in our classrooms. A great deal of this comes from the norms that we put in place, in addition to our own modeling. This is challenging when the culture we know we need in our rooms is very different from the one in our building or community. (Can you tell I’m itching to write a different post?).

Vygotsky’s theory of learning defines the zone of proximal development. The main idea is that when we provide carefully selected and scaffholded work for our students, work that is just out of reach alone, but attainable with help, this is the sweet spot of learning

Selecting group-worthy tasks is a great way to access the ZPD, as are carefully created activities with rich feedback loops. The other benefit of hitting the ZPD just right is that the small wins and gains in knowledge ultimately incite motivation to move to the next challenge. The feedback loop of learning becomes its own motivator! (There was an interesting op-ed on this idea published this week)

It’s also important to note that participation can, and should take many different forms. With up to half of the population identifying as introverts, its our responsibility to recognize that participation does not have to equal the loudest voices in the room that are offering all of the information. The goal is that, ultimately, our classroom is an active learning environment where students learn science by engaging with science in the way that scientists do science.

As I close out my own school year, I’m thinking a lot about my students’ experience in my classroom. I’m actually really pleased how many of them are commenting on the active learning environment and their collaboration as being something that they are proud of or were suprised by in the class. Moving into next school year I’m thinking a lot about the culture of my classroom vs the culture that students are familiar with in school. The big question I’m asking this summer is, “how can you scaffhold and support the reflective thinking capacity of your students?” I ask this because if I can get students reflecting critically and deeply, then we can make serious movement on the other aspects of the classroom! I’ve asked my students to reflect on their work for several years now, but I’ve not really considered how to support students in actually increasing that skill. Another post for another day, but if this is a conversation that interests you, by all means share your thoughts!

EQUITY Share air time equitably. Know yourself, balance your listening and talking. DIFFERENCES Value differences. Remember that your perspective is not the only one, and that we all face different challenges. EVIDENCE Argue using evidence. Back what you have to say with data. SAFETY Make sure everyone feels safe. Safe is not the same as comfortable. Ensure that there are ways to report problematic behavior. DISCOMFORT Discomfort is okay. Identify your learning edge and push it. OWNERSHIP Own your impact. Your intentions may not be the same as your impact. COMMUNITY Create a sense of community. Acknowledge others and do not isolate anyone. ABCs of How We Learn… N is for Norms
Science of Learning

ABCs of How We Learn… N is for Norms

Marianna Ruggerio2 Comments

Today was the last day of school for seniors. I have my students fill out an exit survey in which I ask them what they were most proud of, what surprised them and what was the most important thing they learned this year. I was really excited to read some of my student responses. More on that in a moment.

Norms are the rules of the game. They are what dictate conduct in social settings. In society they are often the unwritten rules, very often defined by cultural norms. I remember when I went to France for my honeymoon. A lot of Americans go to France assuming the French are rude. The reality, as my Aunt and Uncle explained to us, is that Americans go to France assuming they can act like Americans, rather than learning the cultural norms, and this becomes off-putting. In the US we expect our waiter to check in when we sit down and when we are done with our food. In France, the restaurant expects you to enjoy the experience for as long as you need or would like. You call the waiter over when you are ready to order and when you’re ready for the check. No one is going to rush you out of the restaurant with a check, you can sit and talk as long as you like!

I bring up this example for two reasons. One, it is an example where the norms dictate the expectations and behaviors, but secondly, the conflict in expectations due to cultural differences is what can lead to one or both parties either being upset or in active conflict.

Conflict very often arises when the unwritten norms of one person/group do not match the other. This is why it is especially important in the classroom setting to make these norms very much written and visible.

One set of particularly important norms are the ones we use regarding our content. The previous post mentioned the scientific practices from NGSS. These are excellent norms to have as part of learning, discovering and justifying. We must ask ourselves, what is the norm for engaging in learning activities? Is the norm that the teacher is the keeper of knowledge and the students are passive receptacles? Or are the students active participants? Are they expected to continue asking themselves “how do I know this”? Are they expected to give answers based on intuition or based on evidence? The norms we set for how we engage with science in our classroom are the norms we are teaching our students are part of the scientific community.

This is part of what I really enjoy about Building Thinking Classrooms. Many of the strategies turn what students know as the norms of school on its head. Specifically defronting the classroom, the consolidation process and note-making.

Since Listening and Sharing is also a critical feature of education, norms for discourse are particularly important in the classroom.

STEP UP has a great poster of norms for the classroom:

EQUITY Share air time equitably. Know yourself, balance your listening and talking. DIFFERENCES Value differences. Remember that your perspective is not the only one, and that we all face different challenges. EVIDENCE Argue using evidence. Back what you have to say with data. SAFETY Make sure everyone feels safe. Safe is not the same as comfortable. Ensure that there are ways to report problematic behavior. DISCOMFORT Discomfort is okay. Identify your learning edge and push it. OWNERSHIP Own your impact. Your intentions may not be the same as your impact. COMMUNITY Create a sense of community. Acknowledge others and do not isolate anyone.

This school year I found that students were very uncomfortable having conversations or working in groups with students who were not their besties coming in. Sometimes holding the norm looked like actively telling students we weren’t going to comment on “good” or “bad” groups. Other times this meant actively coaching students on engaging in discourse with one another. It felt like an uphill battle all year.

But then the end of year comments came in:

“I feel like I talked to more people in the class than I usually would, I actually met people and worked well with them”

“Proud of surviving this course. but more specifically, being able to step outside my comfort zone and discuss with peers. At the beginning, I was too timid.”

“I am proud of the improvements I was able to make throughout the year, especially when it came to checking my wrong answers. I also am happy with my collaboration skills.”

Particularly as an AP teacher, it can be easy to get caught up in the exam, the scores, the grades. After all, its one of our primary measures of success. But honestly, for myself, success also looks like these student reflections. It looks like students telling me that tests are feedback, and that they learned it’s ok to fail sometimes. Because those lessons? Those are the ones that last a lifetime.

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 Ruggerio4 Comments

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.

In November 2025, this article was published in The Physics Teacher. In the article the group lays out their summary of suggestions for effective group work based on the current litterature. Their findings are summarized in this guide:

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 Ruggerio5 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?