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.
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?
At the American Association of Physics Teachers Winter Meeting I had the privilege of presenting in literally the best session of the entire conference (no bias here at all). Magically, all four of our presentations beautifully complimented one another and related deeply to engaging students in metacognitive skills.
I transitioned districts this year. In my previous district I worked with a lot of students in the gifted program, a lot of students in the creative and performing arts program (who are basically also gifted) and within this culture and climate, all kids benefitted, even the ones who were not in a special program. For years I was able to get students on board with the Expert Game, and the Science of Learning Physics some trust in the process, and good relationships. This year, that hasn’t quite cut it. I’d been thinking about a way to somehow “teach” students in a way that feel like “teaching” to them about how to learn, study and grow so they might buy into the idea (which is really nothing new).
I had been digging back into Powerful Teaching and some kind of workshop was begining to materialize, albeit very, very fuzzy. And then, at Winter Meeting, Aaron Titus gets up and shares that he offers a “How to Do Better on the Test” workshop which turns out to be “How to Learn”
The workshop is grounded in the work of Dr. Saundra McGuire. There are a lot of resources of hers around the web, like this lecture here on metacognition, but primarily she has a sweet little book called Teach Yourself How to Learn. It’s short, sweet, to the point and a lot of fun to read. Dr. McGuire is a retired chemistry professor and Director Emerita of the Center for Academic Success. She is also an awardee of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Mentorship.
Immediately in chapter one she discusses one of the aspects about college that is hardest for students: getting As and Bs in high school often comes down to memorization and regurgitation. Now, before you come with fire I know that many of us (especially if we teach AP, and definitely if you enjoy my blog) are making students do incredible things. But I also know that you can probably name more than a handful of colleagues who don’t push their students beyond memorization. Teachers who produce study guides that are basically a carbon copy of the exam. Exams that are almost all multiple choice and the math is strictly plug and chug. The dreaded triangle to “support” students doing equations like F=ma. And if not the teachers themselves, some really great high school students simply don’t get pushed beyond needing to simply show up to class to learn the information. They can get away with minimal to no homework and no studying and still do okay in the class because we see them every single day and they work hard in our rooms.
So the workshop starts by introducing students to Bloom’s Taxonomy and we have a conversation about what level they are operating at most of the time, compared to what level they need to operate at for AP Physics. What level do they think they need to operate at in college?
And sure enough, if you pull up the science practices and skills for AP the word “create” is literally all over the place. The top of the pyramid.
From here we took a look at a recent exam question. First I asked them a simple question:
Which of the following is true about work?
Work is effort
Work is a change in energy
Work is a force
They all know the answer. And this is a recall answer.
Then I showed them the exam question (they did really poorly on). While the question fundamentally was about the fact that work is a change in energy, what they were asked to do was apply the concept of taking an integral to calculate work and then create a graphical representation.
From here we discussed the differences between studying and learning and posed the question, “which would you work harder for? To study to get an A on a test, or prepare to teach the material to the class?”
The latter half of the workshop is about sharing strategies for doing homework, reading the text, and using practice exams. (You can find all of these in Dr. McGuire’s work and resources!)
I summarized some of these along with my personal favorites into the following list:
When you get home from school, write down everything you can remember from class that day, then compare with your class notes to identify/fill the gaps
Did you solve some problems? Grab a clean sheet of paper and solve the problem again. Compare to the example and make notes regarding your forgetting/gaps
Create a concept map to tie together big ideas and conceptual details
Make “teacher notes” as if you were preparing to teach the material
Aim for 100% mastery when you sit to study, not 85-90
As we wrapped up, the most important part of this workshop was asking students to make a commitment to do something different in the next 24 hours. I had students submit these along with some additional reflections. There were two that stood out to me today. One student reflected, “The reason this class is so challenging for me is because I haven’t had a class besides maybe Calc that required me to be at that creating level.”
A second student made an observation that knocked me over in joy:
“Physics is more than just who is smarter and has the ability to think at a higher level.”
The Physics Classroom holds a place near and dear to my heart.
For years I thought it was my special secret. Long, long ago the url was something like physicsclassroom.glenbrook225.k12.il.us because it was a site hosted on my High School’s sever. The main author was Tom Henderson, one of the best educators at GBS. Tom taught the most advanced freshman in chem-phys, as well as the conceptual physics course. He had a great handle on meeting kids where they were at and explaining physics in a way that made sense as a student.
It wasn’t until much later I realzied that physics classroom was a well known resource for physics teachers across the nation.
As a student, something I realized was that what I found fun, challenging and helpful to my learning in physics was often a barrier and frustration to my classmates. Getting an “O Drats” without a way or opportunity to reflect or see where an error was made became maddening and frustrating. At the same time the essence of drilling a tiny skill is so valuable for long term learning.
I steered clear of most online homeworks for a long, long time (webassign also traumatized me). I knew that too often the real work that needed to happen to actually learn was skipped by most students in search of elusive green checks. By the time you got the checks, you had no memory of what actually worked.
Over the last few years I’ve started developing handouts to go along with some of the physics classroom activity sets. I only have a few, but enough that I feel like they are worth sharing publicly at this point. The goal is to get students thinking, writing and documenting as they work through the physics classrom activities. It also provides me with documentation. I will admit, another motivation for this was the fact that I did not have a paid subscription to task tracker. Now that I do, I’m developing more of these and will continue to share and post them here as I develop them.
What I’ve found is that more students are able to move through more problems with more success and confidence. Definitely a win! They hate me for slowing them down with the paper documentation, but I see it as a win.
In the paper document (preview below) I ask students to first describe the motion in words. This way, when they watch the little car drive across the screen and make the dot diagram, they know what they are looking for
Kinematics Calculator Pad Sets
In the paper document, students are prompted to make their picture, their chart of variables and solve the problem by selecting an equation then substituting values as needed. This is a second version (sample below) that is specific to set 12, and provides more room for student work.
The first few pages of this document are notes in which we construct the momentum bar charts for different situations and identify what is the same and different. Then students go to the concept checker and I ask them to create the bar charts and document the similarities/differences prior to making their selections. A preview is below and here is the handout
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
Students complete an FRQ alone under timed conditions
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.
As students wrap their discussion, I ask them to consider how the points are distributed.
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
Students self-score the FRQ. I ask them to give themselves a first pass and second pass score.
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.
I returned from doing work at the district office to a disaster.
My students were supposed to take their “check-in” (that’s what I call quizzes because their function is to literally check in on student learning) and at first glance I was walking into a mess.
Students should of had enough time to finish the two problems, however the vast majority of my class had half of the assessment blank.
I started looking at the students who finished.
Only three.
All three had done great!
But I have 30 students in this class. Not good.
At first, I will admit I was really upset for a number of reasons.
So I started planning what we were going to do. When I looked more closely at the assessment I noticed that about two thirds of the class was actually doing pretty ok, they just needed more time. Regardless of the fact that I felt strongly that they had enough time, I couldn’t argue the evidence that what was complete was good.
The students who had not done anything beyond opening the assessment were the same ones who have been disengaging with the material and straight up refusing to attempt. As much as I was frustrated that this was on the student (because, after all, my other class is flying and the students who are doing things every day are succeeding). I took a deep breath and regrouped.
What if I made it tactile?
We’ve been working on multiple representations for momentum. So I made up little squares to represent units of momentum. I made a set of red and blue (for each car) and added labels for 1 kg across the bottom and 1 m/s upward.
Sample of cards. This could represent a 2kg and a 1kg object stuck together post-collision moving at 2 m/s
Within table groups I assigned group roles that I borrowed from Marta Stoeckel (check out her article with Kelly OShea!) and then also added a task, one representation needed to be done by each student in the group on the large white board and then they were all responsible for doing it on their own paper.
Step by step we worked through the original problem in small groups. Since I had reduced my “class size” to eight, I was able to give the students with the most need all the attention they needed while the rest of my class completed their assigned tasks.
One of the cool features, aside from students commenting that they liked placing the blocks, was that it allowed us to discuss the limitations of using discrete blocks. In the assessment problem the final velocity was 3.6 m/s, so while I had some students show 22 blocks, demonstrating they understood that the total momentum was constant, they had uneven heights for an inelastic collision. It’s better, then, to just label height and width and go from there.
By the end of the hour everyone was happy.
My three students who did great were given this handout. They were asked to come to consensus and then reflect on their gaps/needs. I checked in with them at the end and they were able to communicate confidence and what they needed.
The large group felt satisfied that they had the chance to go back into their assessment. When I went back in to review the work I found that their performance matched my previous hour, even though they take more time.
The small groups were kind of amazing. Most of these students had been really checked out, but this small shift got pretty much everyone fully on board and verbalizing that they understood what was happening. In order to make up for the assessment, a second problem was on the backside of the worksheet for them to do independent of my help.
At the end of the day I reflected on how the only reason I was able to do this on the fly is due to the fact that I’ve been teaching for a long time. This was a new-to-me activity (although I’ve set up differentiated groups like this before) but at the same time this was effectly three different lesson plans in the same space. Elementary teachers might laugh at my overwhelm, but the reality is that teachers (all of us) are simply not given the kind of time required to plan high quality experiences for our students. This also shows how important data is in our work. Data can allow us to be a bit more objective in our judgements, moving from “they didn’t do anything” to “what else could I try to fill their needs?”
This job is challenging, but it wouldn’t be fun if it wasn’t!
“Legacy. What is a legacy? It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.” Hamilton the Musical
I continue to reflect a great deal after the AAPT winter meeting this year. This year we are celebrating 40 years of the Physics Teaching Resource Agents and Karen Jo Matsler gave one of the plenaries. During her talk I couldn’t help be realize the legacy that I’m connected to as a physics teacher.
Karen Jo Matsler Recognized with AAPT’s 2025 Melba Newell Phillips Medal
One of the most bittersweet encounters is that with a well-loved teacher who is retiring. Over the course of a 35 year career that teacher has potentially impacted as many as 5000 of their own students, and that excludes the many more they may have impacted through extra curriculars. The best teachers become legends in their communities, and as those students grow into adults they continue to share the stories about how their teacher made a difference. I know I continue to do the same to this day.
But when a teacher retires from a school, their legacy is rarely left in the building longer than a year. A new teacher fills their place and within a single year the program either shifts into a new entity, or, in some cases, is completely decimated.
The very real truth about teaching is that although teachers leave an impact that lasts forever on their students, there is no legacy left in the very place where they poured all of that work and love.
However, that does not mean that there is no place for teachers to leave a legacy.
It is in the professional societies that legacy lives on.
I saw this while listening to Karen Jo’s plenary. Slides filled with photos of activities, demos and labs that I grew up believing were specific to the teachers in my area. No, it wasn’t that. Many of those teachers were also involved with PTRA. They brought their learning back and forth from PTRA, AAPT and their local communities.
I saw this in an interactive session I attended. At the end of the presentation I was in the back with two college faculty and one shared that she loved seeing this presentation, shared as the teacher’s own, which originated from the work of Alan Van Heuvlan. We proceeded to talk about how Alan was her adviser.
I saw this when Duane Merrill offered a presentation about creating community around “Phood, Physics and Phun”, which is also the tagline for Chicago Physics Northwest meetings.
I encounter this with nearly every conversation at AAPT, especially those who are near retirement. Each of us was inspired by someone who came before us, someone who brought us in, pushed us forward, encouraged us to grow and learn and lead.
And the memory of these educators lives on. It lives through the stories that go along with the demonstrations and the activities. It lives through the work that continues to excite and engage others in teaching. Professional societies are not only the spaces that allow current educators to network, connect, receive support and grow. They are the spaces that house the professional legacies of educators, not just as inspirational teachers, but as exemplary professionals in their craft.
Welcome, I’m so glad you’re here. Do you know so and so? Let me introduce you. You should give a presentation about that idea; I would love to hear more.
These three simple statements were something that I came to believe were a norm of the physics teacher community. Early in my career I took for granted just how transformative they are, and how special the community I had entered was. It’s because of this that I find myself frequently repeating these same words over and over at events like our national meetings. Unlike other aspect within our community, I’m not sure there’s a particular person these can be tied to, yet everyone has a story about an individual person who pushed them forward in the community. I’ve seen the great power of these simple three sentences
Welcome to the community, I’m so glad that you’re here
When it’s your first time at a large conference like AAPT, it can be so easy to feel isolated. A large conference is a large undertaking. You have to arrange a great deal of finances, rearrange your schedule, arrange for substitute teachers and lesson plans, and it can be defeating to do all of this work just to feel alone at the conference. What was the point? Hearing, “I’m so glad you’re here” makes it inevitable for a smile to spread infectiously from one person to the next.
“Have you met so and so? Let me introduce you”
This weekend I met one of my student’s professors!
So many of us are quick to say that the reason we come back meeting after meeting after meeting is because of the community. In order to form community, you naturally need to have more than one person as a familiar face.
Engaging in conversations with others with a true curiosity to learn about the other person does a few things. First, when we engage others with curiosity they immediately feel valued! It’s actually been researched, the more a person engages positively with others, the more positively viewed they are by others! It seems simple, but as in all relationships, creating a strong community is about building up others, not trying to make ourselves look impressive. The second piece is that if we lead with true curiosity, we may find ourselves easily connecting members of the community with one another, bringing them in. I’ve witnessed this and participated in this first hand on so many occasions, I find myself eager to engage in opportunities for helping others connect.
You should give a presentation about that idea; I would love to hear more.
Without a long CV to create for a tenure dossier, high school teachers don’t necessarily have a specific, extrinsic motivator to give a presentation at a conference. Add to that these national conferences can create huge waves of intimidation and imposter syndrome. “What do I possibly have to offer?” a teacher asks themselves. “Everyone knows so much more than me” or “I’m sure they’ve seen this before”. Of course, as I’ve learned and many others have learned, it’s simply not true. Telling someone that an idea that they have from a casual conversation should be presented at a conference is validating and empowering. And when that presentation happens? It creates one of the strongest positive feedback loops you can gain from community. Quickly, you find yourself presenting out of a desire to give back to the community that has given so much.
“Hi. Welcome to the community. I’m so glad you’re here.” Now there’s joy across my face.
“Have you met so and so? Let me introduce you” Now I have someone with whom I can relate and possibly co-create.
“That’s such a great idea. I’d love to hear more about it. You should present it.” I gain the confidence to get up in front of my peers share my ideas, and it results at a positive feedback loop where people ask questions and come up to me and tell me that they liked my idea.
After those three questions have been answered, and after you’ve been the one presenting, now it’s your turn. It’s your second, third, fourth time presenting at the conference. Are you asking those questions?
So glad to see you. Have you met so and so? I hope you present that I want to learn more.
This is how our community grows, and it’s how each of us is able to grow within our community.
I used to do lab notebooks. I used to give students grace and flexibility. Labs had due dates in the calendar, we had board meetings, time in class and I would collect the notebooks at the time of the unit exam.
The inevitable happened. Many students spent hours upon hours of time getting notebooks done the night before the test. It wasn’t that they weren’t given time in class or during the week, they just did the student thing and other classes became more important until physics was important.
That all changed a while ago.
One of the shifts I made a few years ago was adding vertical whiteboarding to the lab. Specifically, I set up the physics of the lab as a vertical white board task. I gather students together and demo the intention of the lab. Then I verbally tell students what I’d like them to go figure out.
In building thinking classrooms the key piece is the consolidation piece. I’ve done the consolidation for the lab, but what I’ve found is actually more effective is the following prompts:
You are not there until we are all there
If you’re done or stuck, go take a walk.
I first tried this the day of a formal observation(!) and I’m never going back. The energy in the room was unmatched, and the sense of accomplishment by the students was so much greater than if I had told them outright. In previous years I’d let them work the problem in their lab groups, but this meant some groups would get it right away and dive in, while others really struggled and then were behind in data collection. Doing the physics this way instead builds the community.
One year I had two challenges. The first was that my students simply were not putting in the same time, effort and care as students in previous years. I know I sound like a crabby veteran teacher, but it was truly different. I also had one student, in particular, who had extreme anxiety. My flexibility with them inevitable created more anxiety as they tackled the most pressing assignments in their heavy school load. The infrequent lab collection was a complete nightmare for them.
Meanwhile, I’ve been adamant that certain lab writeups will have theory sections. I ask that students explain using diagrams, words, and mathematical models the physics behind what we are doing. Getting students to craft an excellent theory and how it then connects to the procedure is something I’ve been trying to figure out how to best present for many years.
Although we obviously discuss these ideas before students head into the lab, students inevitably dive into the lab, record their data and would come back to writing the formal theory later.
And later is almost always an afterthought.
To support my student with anxiety and to get the rest of the class doing physics on a more regular basis, I started requiring the theory sections submitted to me the day we would begin the lab. I explained that the theory would be a draft (and in practice, I did not penalize students for not submitting it, the consequence was they had to do it all the night before the lab due date and didn’t get a chance for actionable feedback).
Student response was overwhelmingly positive. First, by putting the hard-ish deadlines in place, the quality of student work rose dramatically. Second, students had the time and space to prepare for their unit exams, rather than trying to write a bunch of physics for the lab. Third, and most persuasive, the students verbalized how much more they liked this. I had one student say “I actually feel like I know what I’m doing in the lab now!”
We can show and tell students all day long, but until they work with the content themselves and make it their own, they haven’t yet become owners of their learning.
Take a look at these two drafts submitted by the same student.
The first draft was for a lab where we found the acceleration due to gravity with a ramp. This draft is typical of what I used to see often the first time I asked for a theory section:
This is done fairly well, but the representations are after-thoughts and it’s not entirely cohesive yet. I left comments on this draft and the student responded positively.
Now take a look at this same student who wrote this draft. There is one physics misconception that needs to be addressed and I’d like the formatting cleaned up, but notice the quality of the content at this point:
I’ve taken this as a win-win-win
Win 1) Students are not scrambling to provide this level of detail the night before the test or the night before lab collection way after the lab is done
Win 2) Students feel confident going into the lab about what they are doing and why they are doing it, which lets us focus our conversation on the how, which includes the procedure, the equipment, uncertainties, assumptions and error sources
Win 3) I feel way more confident that students know what they’re doing. AND, I get to support and fill some of the incomplete thinking as soon as possible.
If you’ve followed me for a while you know that I’m a huge advocate for building capacity in communication skills. I firmly believe that communication is the single most important skill in which we can educate our students. Without it brilliance has no impact.
I already know what the comments are going to look like when I share this. I’m happy to engage in a dialogue, but I’m not here for ranting.
Around the pandemic many schools started having conversations around equitable grading. Joe Feldman’s book Grading For Equity became a hot topic (originally published in 2018) and conversations, initiatives, pilots and mandates started making their way down.
So too came the complaints, “you don’t get half a paycheck for doing nothing” “so you’re telling me. a student does nothing, passes one test and then passes the class?” “if we don’t give zeros they won’t do the work!”
If you get into a deep conversation with teachers around grading, its something that is deeply personal. This in and of itself is probably a part of the problem. A lot of teachers were good at playing the game of school, checking the boxes and earning the grades. It’s really hard for teachers who “won school” to view school as anything different. Some teachers are deeply concerend with equality, “it’s not fair to the kid who worked really hard all year if another kid can just pass a test and get a good grade”. I personally have a really tough time with this one, because why should it matter? In a world where society is hell-bent on individualized education why do we care how each student gets to the finish line?
For myself, I was never a fan of putting in zeros for missing work. Students who regularly didn’t do my work in class did poorly on the tests. Students who did all of the work and missed a test are typically pretty high-strung and anxiety ridden. The zero for the missed test causes a lot of undue stress. Sure the test gets done, but at what cost?
I mentioned grading is personal. When I was a freshman in high school I became violently ill during the last week of third quarter. As such, I missed an exam in every single one of my classes, and the end of the marking period. My report card was promptly sent home with a string of Ds and Fs on it. Feverish and delirious, all I could think about was making up the missed work. It took a phone call to my counselor to assure me that I could make up the tests for me to finally rest. It sounds ridiculous in retrospect, but if you’ve ever worked with teenagers, they tend to be a little dramatic. When I returned to school (and you know how you are after a week of illness) my teachers were constantly on my back about my missed tests. I had one in every class! The only way to make up exams was in the test center after school, and I could reasonably only get one test done a day. I got caught up, and my grades were adjusted and a new report card was sent home, but I still vividly remember that horrible week.
So I pretty much always held off on entering zeros in the gradebook until I got to a point where it had been more than enough time to make up the work.
Enter grading for equity. The original grading scheme came somewhere between Yale, Harvard and Mount Holyoke. There were 4 brackets of proficiency plus failure (F). We shoehorn a 0-100 scale onto the letters and somehow 0-59 are all failing while the rest of the brackets are a mere 10 points. The argument for the 50% cut-off is simple: If you have 4 grades, 100, 100, 0, 100 that averages to a 75%. Is that student really just “average” due to the one zero? Or are they exemplary but missed one key component? Wouldn’t a B make more sense for this student? This is the change that the 50% grading floor provides.
“it lowers expectations!”
I want you to really think about this. What is our goal for students? Our pinnacle of learning? Personally, the pinnacle of learning would be that every student is able to earn an A. Realistically, I would be happy if I could get everyone to an A or B level. My expectations are that students can meet me there at a really high level. You can see why I’m then baffled at the idea that limiting the numerical possibilities of an F from 59 points to 10 is lowering expectations. Every other grade block is defined by 10 points, and adjusting the F to match the other grade blocks has no impact on my expectations on what A, B or even C level work looks like. Failing work is failing work: a failure to demonstrate any level of competence. To be completely transparent, between the grade floor and an approach to grading where letter grades are matched with level of mastery, it’s really difficult to earn the A unless you are on your A-game every. single. day. An A is never totally out of reach if a student want to earn it, but if anything my expectations are way higher than when I used points and did common teacher things like “the highest grade in the class becomes 100%” or using some weird math to make the average a certain number. It also feels a lot more honest and transparent as a mode of communication between myself, the student and the parent.
“they can do nothing all year take one test and then pass the class!”
I’ve noticed that a lot of the conversation is around the students who scrape by with a D instead of failing with a 25%. I truly wonder why so much vitriol energy is spent here. The first question I ask to that is, “if your gradebook is set up that they can pass with one assessment, does that assessment cover all of the content? I’ve never seen a student do nothing then pass a single test and pass the class. At best, they might get a 60%, but with the rest of the 50’s it’s still coming out to a 50-something and they still fail. An F is an F on the report card. As for the students who do, in fact, barely eek by with a few passing assessments…. isn’t that what a D represents anyway? That you existed in class and you learned something, but not anything near proficiency.
“You don’t get 50% of your paycheck for doing nothing!”
That’s correct, but this isn’t about “earning” 50%. It’s about making the F bracket the same size as the rest of them! You know what else my job doesn’t do? It doesn’t have a pay scale like this:
Jobs also start paying you when you’re hired, how dare you get a full salary after two weeks when you haven’t done anything to contribute to the company yet!
“We aren’t preparing them for college!”
Unless you teach at a college, stop making claims about something you experienced literal decades ago in a single program. Colleges are also undergoing shifts, both pedagogically and in terms of grading. The shifts, standards and policies can vary school to school, college to college and professor to professor.
My District Mandate and What I’m Doing
We were told the day before school started that this year the 50% grading floor was mandatory, blanks and zeros were not acceptable and our classes would be calculated with 90-10. That is, 90% of the grade is based on summative scores and 10% is formative (homework, participation etc). Any summative that is given must have at lease one retake opportunity.
Like most district mandates I certainly have my qualms, but it is what it is right now so I need a solution. Here is what I’m doing:
First, I should preface all of this by saying that I’ve been working towards standards based grading for a long time now.
AP is the place I have the most qualms for a number of reasons, mostly because making retakes is super hard, especially with the recent rewrite of the exams. I also used to have a number of different approaches around showing proficiency based on where we were in the year and the specific content. Due to this I have made one very specific shift: Every unit test is two tests.
We cover most of the content prior to the first test (for example, everything for 1D Kinematics but not projectiles, or everything in forces except multi-bodied systems). The second test is then a “built-in retake”. The second test has the entire unit’s content. If a student’s score is a letter grade higher than the first score, I change the first score to match the second. If the second score is equal or lower, both grades stand. After the second test a student may request a retake.
Retakes require deliberate practice
I have the following process for a retake:
AP students have to have their progress checks done in AP classroom. Regular students receive a selection of problems to attempt.
Students are required to schedule an appointment with me to discuss their work. We also conference on their test to highlight the good, the struggle and some tips for test taking
After the conference students are eligible for a retake at any point 24 hours after the conference. (within a 1 week window). they can also come back in to discuss more work with me if they’d like.
Benefits of the two-test system is that a lot of students do, in fact, improve the second time which eliminates the need for me to give a retake outside of class time. It also gives students a “freebie” retake. I had about 10 students request a retake after the first test. I don’t anticipate this number increasing significantly, and I can manage it.
No Finals Allowed, so I do retakes!
We got rid of finals in 2020-21, first by making them “holds harmless”. I refuse to do more work than my students, so I told them how things were going to go: if you can earn a score that is a letter grade different from your current grade, I will adjust your grade to match the exam. I do this in AP with a practice AP exam. In regular physics its a “choose your own adventure” final where students select what they want to reassess on and I only score those parts. I find that students are eagerly studying for these opportunities to demonstrate proficiency. It also means that “it isn’t over until it’s over”.
What about the 10%
Everything I score for the 10% goes in the gradebook as 10 points, so the level of proficiency is obvious. Quizzes in AP and “check-ins” are weighted at 5x, so they are “counting” as 50 points each. Formative labs are weighted at 3x. All of the rest is 1x. This allows for that 10% to be as informative as possible.
Some labs are Summative
Especially in AP, I am putting certain important labs as summatives. Students simply aren’t allowed to give me garbage. If the lab is bad, I send it back requesting/expecting revisions. In the real world? revisions are a thing. In the academic world papers are rarely accepted for publication the first time. Revisions make our good work great.
How do my students do anyway?
Here’s the bottom line: Students who always did well, still do well. The students who refuse to do anything, still refuse and still fail.
BUT…. students who don’t do anything for a long time period cam sometimes come around because they aren’t so far gone that they “don’t see the point”. I have a handful of students each year who really put forth commendable effort after big things in their lives. These students may eek by with a D or are really proud of a C.
An A is truly an exemplary student. Since I use standards based grading, earning an A means doing that near-perfect work all of the time. This is the most frustrating part for students who were used to “playing school” by checking the boxes, and this is where a lot of work is needed on my end, because the difference between the A and B needs to be crystal clear.
I know I’ll continue to think about, re-evaluate and shift the way I score and assign grades. I also know that as soon as I post this I’m going to see/hear all kinds of things. That’s ok. We’re all learning and growing, and hopefully, the ones doing the most growing are your students.
Before the Science of Reading train took off en masse, I was already excited about applying ideas from cognitive psychology in physics. In 2020 I was in the midst of my graduate studies and noticed that strategies I had “discovered” as effective were grounded in research. Previously I had attended an ISLE workshop with Eugenia Etkina and had much of the same experience, during which I learned about The Expert Game.
I chose to implement The Expert Game immediately after the first exam. The idea was that students needed an opportunity to experience the full learning cycle, and in some instances “fail” (by their standards) so that the expert game held meaning.
A student generated cycle of learning a sport
As I dove into the science of learning, the book The Science of Learning Physicswas also published. One of the authors, Jennifer Docktor, gave a talk for Harvard’s PoLS-T series that summarized the chapters. I decided to add this video as a homework assignment for my students. They are given the following prompt,
Watch the talk and write a short reflection (minimum 300 words) Include the following. Please dig deep and synthesize rather than simply agreeing or disagreeing.
What ideas challenged your current thinking?
What resonated with you?
What ideas challenged your current thinking about how we learn and learn best?
What do you now wonder after listening to this talk?
What resulted in an “aha” moment for you.
Lastly, as a student, what can YOU take away that you’ve learned in order to improve your learning this semester?
The reflections are always really cool to read. Check out this one reflection:
I must say that one of the things that challenged me the most was the idea of a gap between what methods students think teaches them the most and what methods actually teach them the most. The human brain can be incredibly annoying, and this feels like a prime example of it. It follows to reason that when I feel like a method is working better, I should trust those thoughts and engage with that method. However, the human brain likes things to be easy, not necessarily successful, which is something I must remain aware of and try to put into practice, seeking out the difficulties that generate learning, even if they might not be the most pleasant at first.
In particular, some students verbalize that they finally understand why my class is structured the way that it is. This was particularly noticable from students when I first assigned the lecture during the pandemic. Unlike many of my collegues I avoided lecture like the plague and put students in breakout rooms constantly. At first students complained a lot that “I wasn’t teaching them” but as the semester progressed they realized they were learning more in physics than their other classes:
The biggest realization in the video was in the “Active Learning” section (Chapter 5), where Docktor says that sharing ideas is an excellent way to learn. It’s as if she’s saying that students should keep working together. While working in groups is fun, I wasn’t sure if I was learning as much as if we did it on our own. The evidence she cites implies that the jamboards and group labs are some of the best ways for us to spend our time.
This school year I’ve been a bit overwhelmed. For the first time since I’ve been at this school my classes are all at 30+ students. We have also been given a directive that every summative must have a retake opportunity. It’s been a lot. Thanks to that, I have not gotten to reading my student reflections from three weeks ago until today.
It turns out this is a gift!
One of the shifts I made to make the retake process easier is the following: For each unit, we take the summative when we are nearly done with the content. For kinematics we covered everything except projectiles. For forces we will do everything except pulley problems and other multi bodied systems. You get the idea. Then, after we cover the final topic we take a second summative. The second summative contains all of the content and is a “built-in retake”. If students score higher on the second summative, the score will replace the first score. If they score lower then both grades stand as is in the grade book. Students can then request an additional retake. This naturally reduces the volume of extra retakes I have to give, as I already had this multiple assessment per unit practice in place.
Since I’m behind on grading, I am reading the reflections after the first exam with student data about the second exam. It’s really cool! Students who took the message to heart: that practice and active strategies trump passive ones, generally performed better on the reassessment! Students who wrote a reflection that seems stuck in their ways performed the same or worse on the second assessment. As I am reading the reflections I can now point to their own words as we go into the retake process and continue through the year.
A student who saw an entire letter grade shift on the second assessment wrote, “When studying last year, I mainly reviewed my notes. Although this process was somewhat beneficial and better than not studying at all, Dr. Docktor argues that the act of practicing the material is much more effective for students attempting to retain the information. Now that I know this, I plan to incorporate active processes into my studying for physics and my other classes.”
Meanwhile, a second student wrote,“I find the most effective method for me is a mix of passive and active learning. Using passive methods to set a base level and active methods to solidify the concepts.” this student struggled greatly on the second assessment and we will be discussing these ideas at his conference.
I think too often we get so caught in the grind of the content we need to teach, we forget that this kind of self-reflection is really the key component to deep learning. It’s not an easy thing to do well, especially when physics teachers are rarely the “touchy feely” types like you might find in english or social studies, but our students are whole humans!
Physics.Teacher.Momma. 