Category: Teaching Methods

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.

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:

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

AP Review Activity: Skill Blitz (Linearization)

Marianna Ruggerio4 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?

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.

Accountability on Ungraded Homework
In My Class Today · Science of Learning · Teaching Methods

Accountability on Ungraded Homework

Marianna Ruggerio4 Comments

In Building Thinking Classrooms the way that students approach homework is different. The idea is that we know that homework is intended for practice however students often end up doing homework either to satisfy their teacher or to satisfy their parents. The result is a lot of cheating. One of the small shifts around homework is to simply change the language to what we intend, “check your understanding” However, in following the tenets of insuring student autonomy Liljedahl sets forth 4 more rules:

  1. Don’t ask about it
  2. Don’t mark it
  3. Don’t check it
  4. DO use phrases like “this is your opportunity“

One of the neat tools for opportunity that I learned was offering “mild, medium and spicy” problems. The problems are a matter of “taste” rather than “level” and there is no expectation around how many are accomplished, just that you keep working. Students do a great job moving themselves up as they gain confidence. This year, to my glee, I actually had students ask to post the problems online so they could do more!

As fun and as engaging as this is, I still felt like there should be some way that students are accountable for their work, but in a meaningful way. So here’s what I’m doing this year:

We have work days where students might have Mild, Medium and Spicy problems, or maybe just a standard problem set. I post solutions around the room for students to check their own work as they go. This not only keeps them moving, but it also means that the questions I’m answering are a little more meaty than “is this right”. Much of the simpler questions can be answered within student groups, giving them some independence.

Following the guidelines around homework I do not have students submit the work. It’s not checked, counted or graded.

There IS, however, follow up. It lives in a google form and I ask students to evaluate themselves and then do a little more thinking so I can see where they are.

The first part of the form looks like this. I’m asking them to self-evaluate on each of the learning objectives. The four categories are akin to the way in which I will ultimately grade their assessment, but in very simple terms.

Next, students have 2-3 items that are reproduced from the solutions of the work they engaged with during class.

In this example students received a stack of position, velocity and acceleration graphs that all were associated with the same motion. I provided a photo of the key (above) followed by these prompts:

What’s great about this is that the part “A student asks this question…” are real questions I get from students! During the activity I often hear these exact questions during the work, which gives the student a second opportunity to reflect on this and address the misconception (these questions come from experience, I’m not making the form during class) Something I’m realizing I did not do consistently was first ask “why would your classmate think this” before asking how to correct the response. I’ll need to update that for next time!

Looking at the student data is really cool!

First, I get a sense of where my students believe they currently stand on the work.

I can see that we need to gain confidence on sketching a velocity graph from a verbal description (which surprised me, because in my expert blind spot that feels like the easiest one to graph!)

I can also disaggregate between how students think they are doing, and how they are actually doing.

The question referenced here was a standard free-fall parabola on the position graph(concave down) Yet 2/3 of students who attempted it did not answer some portion of it correctly!

There are some really great student responses to the question I asked about this item. Some better than others. This gives me a great launch-point when we get into free-fall specifically

I think the next step here is to overtly integrate the results from these feedback forms into class instruction. I want students to be able to make a strong connection between the practice we do in class and how it can impact their learning, even if they don’t get credit for the actual practice.

Note Making in an Active Classroom
In My Class Today · Science of Learning · Teaching Methods

Note Making in an Active Classroom

Marianna Ruggerio1 Comment

I like to be challenged. In the last year as the Science of Reading has surged in use/popularity so too have the direct instruction advocates. Specifically in my space I’ve seen a lot of attacks on student-centered instruction (the type of instruction that is promoted by the National Council of Teachers in Mathematics and the NSTA) which argue that an emphasis on student thinking and problem-solving is harmful to all but the top tier students.

None of us educators who truly care about the craft are blindly and deliberately acting every day in ways to exclude students. Most of us are intentionally considering what is presented to us and how it impacts our students in the classroom. I graduated college fresh on the latest expression of inquiry-based learning making its rounds as all the rage. At that time the idea was to let students explore and then let them go where they wished. This concept drove my first day activities where my students play with various demos and lab set-ups, but it was very clear that the kinds of questions and ideas students would come up with on that first day were predictable and lacked meat. True to the advocates of direct instruction (DI) and grounded in cognitive science, the more you know the better questions you can ask.

My first year teaching was also a shift from my previous experiences in affluent schools to one where the majority of my students were highly dependent learners, for various reasons. I quickly realized that I needed to scaffold most of the resources I had from student teaching in order to support students reaching the intended goal.

In the years that followed I had a wealth of opportunities with student groups. I ended up teaching everything from co-taught freshman physics to honor’s physics at that first school and then everything from kindergarten astronomy to middle school integrated math at Northwestern’s gifted enrichment programming. Then I was back at my old high school where I tutored over 2,000 different students in science and math. That experience was eye opening in terms of how instruction impacted students, and yes, some students need more direct support.

I attended my first Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) in the summer of 2018 and it was earth-shattering. Roughly a decade into teaching and the method from Rutgers University gave language and research to many of the things I had figured out along the way.

In 2022 I discovered Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics and in 2023 I attended a workshop with the author, Peter Liljidahl. At that workshop we focused on the later-half of the book which is arguably the most difficult to understand how to execute from the text alone. Peter explained to us that in their research what they noted was that consolidation and note-making were the critical components that made the different in lasting learning. Let me reiterate that: Peter himself shared with us that random groups, vertical whiteboarding, thinking tasks are easy to implement and certainly promote engagement but in order to get the learning to stick, the consolidation was key.

I started thinking about this in the context of any kind of active learning environment. In ISLE students go through the process of observational experiments and testing experiments and are also “representing and reasoning” along the way. After each round students are supposed to be “interrogating the text” and then practicing with problems. This works great for my gifted AP level students, but as many of us have found other student groups need more scaffolding and support. During the workshop Peter shared his latest idea for note-making.

Some context from the book. Everything is about considering the psychological messages we send to students about our expectations and their roles, and how we can make moves to flip that to re-center the student and their thinking. As renowned cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham points out, thinking is hard and our brains do everything possible to avoid it. At the same time we also enjoy puzzles and figuring things out (did you do wordle or connections today?). In the book the idea is that notes are something that happens after engaging with thinking and in a way that you continue to think while making (not taking) the notes.

Think about that for a second. When you take notes in lecture how does that go? Are you furiously copying everything and then find yourself not remembering the actual lecture? Are you trying to furiously copy and then falling behind, leaving you frustrated? Or do your prior experiences prohibit you from taking any notes at all so you give up. We know that the act of note taking is helpful for remembering, but there are also a lot of barriers and challenges when trying to get a group of 30+ individuals to all obtain the information pertinent to their learning.

The book discusses having students “go make notes” and to write things down for “their future forgetful selves” which is a good framing, but I noticed in class that many of my students were still unsure about what that would mean.

What it Looks Like

At the workshop Peter shared this really cool template (these are my notes from the workshop):

Check it out! It’s all the things the DI folks love to share are necessary and supposedly non-existent in a thinking classroom. The top is structured by the teacher. In fact, it’s two worked examples. The first is for students to fill in the blanks while the second is a similar, but different example. The bottom half is for student autonomy, though it should be noted that the “create your own example” can come from homework, the textbook etc.

The way this was presented was that students would create these notes on the whiteboards and then transfer them to their own notebooks. I cannot fathom running a lesson, and then doing the notes on boards and then having the transfer happen, so I needed something different.

Meaningful Notes in My Classroom

What I chose to do was to create the template and provide it to students with that teacher part already prepared. Here are a few samples:

This first set is what students completed after doing the observational experiements dropping bean bags behind a bowling ball and creating their first motion maps:

The following day I have students engage in a desmos sorting activity to continue working with motion maps as we continue the reasoning process. ISLE folks will recognize the content that is directly from the Active Learning Guides:

Next I borrow from the AMTA curriculum to start translating representations. The top half of this page was all work we do together on whiteboards.

Here’s what’s been really cool about using this style for notes:

  1. Students (and I!) are able to recognize what actually translated/processed during the class discussion. Since the first box is often work that was exactly from the discussion and whiteboarding we can hit those problem areas right away using the discussion we just had.
  2. The example is manageable. Instead of giving students 5-10 practice problems, they have just one they are required to complete. This example is either very similar to an example that was done in class or identical to the example done in class, but the example is no longer available to copy (yeah, I’m sneaking some retrieval practice in!)
  3. As students work on the top half and we have those conversations about what they are stuck on or missed I’m able to say “ok, that’s something you should probably put in the things I need to remember box!” This is also true any time I hear a student go “oooooooh!” when the lightbulb turns on.
  4. Create your own examples are actually pretty decent! Sometimes they are pretty similar to the first example, other times I see students stretching themselves.

The notes that get submitted also paint a great picture of where my students are at. Check this one out. This student is pretty quiet in a class of students who are generally super vocal and asking for my help frequently.

I’m able to make a few judgements here from the work. First, this student doesn’t yet understand how to represent stop on the velocity vs time graph. Second, even though that’s the case, she does have a pretty good handle on what they were supposed to learn in the lesson that day (see the “things I need to remember”)

I’m still experimenting with this and finding ways to adjust and ensure that students are ultimately getting what I want them to get from the notes. I do feel, however, that now the notes that are on the papers are resulting in more meaningful work than when I’m expecting them to copy as I work on the board. I can still craft these so students get what I want them to get on the paper, but also provide space for autonomy and small wins to build confidence.