At a parenting workshop the keynote speaker used the metaphor of renting an apartment vs owning a house as an analogy to a child’s developing identity. That in the high school years, our children go from being “renters” of our family morals/values/beliefs to “owners”. This was a really powerful metaphor for me. As children (novices) we accept certain things to be true and mimic our parents because we assume that’s what we’re supposed to do. As we enter adolescence we begin to question everything, “is this what I believe to be true? Why do I believe it?” For students in my classroom, I would like to see the same shifts in their attitudes towards science. That what we learn is true not because I told them so, but because they have enough understanding and evidence to know what is true.

In order for this to happen, students must move from passive receivers of knowledge to active aquirers of it. This is where self-explaination comes in. Self-explanation is about making meaning of content and trying to undersand the what is being presented by the text/author/video/diagram. In other words, self-explanation is about metagognition.

In the Elaboration post we discussed the strategy of elaborative interrogation of a text. Essentially, we ask students to read their textbook while having a conversation with themselves: does this make sense? Why is this true? How does this connect to the previous example or what we did in class? By actively asking and looking for the answers to these questions as we read, we are engaging with the text in a far more active manner than simply reading it.

The slide below summarizes the main points of interrogation

Another name for active reading is the SQ3R Reading method which reiterates most of the bullets in the slide above.

Regardless of what you call the method, the goal is active reading of the text.

At some point well before my own entrance into education, many high school educators decided to forego the traditional textbook. I imagine there are a great many reasons for this, however after a decade of teaching the same way I was taught, I now firmly believe that we are doing our students a disservice by not using and instructing them on how to actively engage with a textbook.

I believe this even more strongly for our content as science educators where the content in the book itself requires a different kind of interrogation than it might if it were a history text. In a history text we are seeking for connections between persons and events, but in a science text we are looking to make connections between ideas, concepts, representations and mathematics. I distinctively remember as a student skipping the example problems because I assumed “we covered this in class” or not knowing how to use the example problem to my advantage.

What makes for a good self-explainer? Clearly a good self-explainer is a really smart student, and that isn’t going to be effective for everyone.

This actually isn’t true. As it turns out, a good self-explainer will find their base comprehension being comparable to a peer with poor self-explaining skills however the good self-explainer is nine-times more effective at identifying their comprehension failures, which allows them to find a path to act on that failure. This is what we want from our students!

I’m thinking a lot this year about how to make these processes more explicit for students and how to get them to better engage in these processes. One piece to this puzzle, I believe, is the incorporation of the reflective component into each aspect of learning. After every lesson or activity students need to be able to answer the question “What did you learn today? How did you learn it?”

I’m working on a template for this, the rough draft for observational experiments is below:

When I’ve had students struggling to perform on exams, I would share with them that one of my personal strategies was to make “teacher notes”. Essentially I would create two-column notes where the left hand side had the steps to the problem and the right hand side was my verbal explanation of the steps. Students who have taken me up on this have found it to be immensely help. This idea is also the foundation of why I require detailed lab theories written prior to students engaging with a lab.

The most critical outcome of self-explaination is the construction of the mental models. These mental models allow people people can draw inferences about new, relevant problems and to learn subsequent, related information more effectively. If our goal as educators is move students from passive receivers of knowledge to active producers of knowledge, then supporting student ownership and independent mental-model building is critical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Students are asked to do the following:

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

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

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

In this final challenge students are using energy and rotation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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