Technical Tuesdays

** revisited after 1 year. Notes at end of post

For the last few weeks I've been hosting a type of lesson in my class that I'm really excited about. It has a lot of potential. Since I do these lessons once a week I call it Technical Tuesday.  I don't always get it right. In this post I'm going to try and summarize what makes these lessons work and what slows them down. I've written two previous posts on the subject but after doing four I'm starting to get the hang of it.

Motivations and Goals

This is my 1st full year teaching physics. Last semester I gave it my best shot and felt that one of the biggest improvements I could make would be to expose the students to more formal physics. For this reason I set out to find or develop a lesson style that would give my kids both and intuitive understanding of physics content as well as exposure to more formal physics notation and problem types.

I also wanted to design these lessons to reduce the amount of time that I spent in front of the class delivering information. I'm not really good at that skill and don't feel that I make it very engaging to my students. In search of a more student centered approach I attempted to build a lesson values experiences over content.

Structure

The set up for these lessons is similar to setting up any project. 

   1. Do something in your subject area
   2. Document your steps
   3. Guide your class through those steps
   4. Document the process. 

The major difference from project planning here is that the "something" you do is connected directly to some bit of knowledge or a skill that you want your class to gain. I've found that it's extremely important to do the lesson yourself first, because it's easy to see if it's engaging or not and how long in should take. My 2nd and 4th Technical Tuesday were both much more successful because I practiced them myself first. 

As an example, this week I wanted to talk about Friction with my class. I made a model of friction out of wood, string and a cup full of marbles. I calculated the coefficient of both static and kinetic friction for the system, then modified the block in order to reduce and increase the friction between it and the table, as measured by the weight in the cup.

Model of friction. Weight in the cup pulls the block across the table once it has enough force to overcome the coefficient of static friction of between the block and the table.

I gave everyone the materials for the model and asked them to answer an open ended question about friction - more on that later. They worked with a partner to use the model to try and increase and decrease the friction in the system, taking notes and keeping track of their experimentation in a graph or chart. I finished the day by having them answer the original question in complete sentences.

Great Questions Get Great Answers

Another key to this lesson model is how you launch it. Just like a project a good launch will help hook the students into the work and frame the lesson as a larger problem to be solved rather than just a worksheet or problem set. The following framework has been helpful when structuring the lesson day. It's a structure that I learned while in a Math Methods course and have found it successful here.

   1. Launch
   2. Explore
   3. Summarize

You'll know that the launch is engaging because you will be showing it to all your friends at school before and after the lesson. It should be something interesting that leaves a lot of questions and leads into the topic you are interested in. It is the item that generates the question for the whole lesson, so it should be robust enough to talk about at some length. 

In the above example I used the following clip.

I only showed the last 2 minutes of the clip but it's a ton of fun. I asked everyone to pick which color they think would win. This led into our question for the lesson: How do you make it easier or harder for something to slide against something else? I tried to put that question in as many places as possible, on the worksheet, on the slides, on the board so that it was clear what we are trying to answer. The more that you focus on one question, the more successful the lesson is. A successful question is open ended and has more than one answer and even has degrees of answers. 

     1. Launch - Slippery Stairs, How do you make it easier or harder for something to slide against something else?
      2. Explore
      3. Summarize

Let's Find Out

​To explore, I showed the students the model set up. We had a short discussion about what they needed to measure to answer this question. In pairs, they all got a block, string, cup, marbles, and shared a balance scale with their table mates. I handed out this worksheet which outlines the task at hand in varying levels of complexity. The least complex had the groups measuring weight only, and the most complex had the groups comparing the force of the block against that of the cup, arriving at the static coefficient of friction. The tasks all asked the students to measure how difficult it is to pull their block before trying to increase and decrease that difficulty. I put a big timer on the screen for 25 minutes and let them loose. While they are working I floated around and answered questions. 

The worksheet isn't perfect, but there are a few important parts that it gets right. It provides enough structure without being stifling. The students are still left to decide how they will carry out their experiments and in what order. It doesn't provide fill-in-the-blank tables for their data either, leaving them to decide how to record the information.

After the time was up I led a short discussion asking everyone to share how they made it harder to slide their blocks. Some added weight to the block or put tape on the bottom. One group soaked their block in water. We then talked about how they made it easier. Some groups taped marbles to the bottom of their blocks, some turned them on their edges. I wrote this on the board. Then I asked "If you were on the Japanese stairs game show but you were allowed to bring one thing with you, what would you bring to make it easier to get up the stairs?" Students suggest wearing weight belts or wrapping their feet in towels or bringing a rope. After laughing about some answers I asked "If you were going to make the stairs even harder, what would you change?". Mostly everyone agrees that they could get rid of the stairs or make everyone wear slippery socks. 

​     1. Launch - Slippery Stairs, How do you make it easier or harder for something to slide against something else?
      2. Explore - Block and String model, worksheet, discussion
      3. Summarize -

So Now What

The summary phase is maybe the most important. For this I gave everyone a couple sticky notes (I love sticky notes). I asked what the original question was. Since it's written everywhere this was easy. I asked everyone to write what their best answer to the launch question on their sticky notes and compare with their neighbors. 

If you are trying this, resist the urge to come up with some kind of class definition or class answer. I think this make the kids think that it's the "right" answer and I prefer that they come up with something on their own. I have groups read their to me and I'll make comments, like "Nice and specific!" or "Thanks for using terms from last week" but that's about it. 

To end I asked everyone to save their best definition sticky in their notebook with their notes from the day and clean up.

​     1. Launch - Slippery Stairs, How do you make it easier or harder for something to slide against something else?
      2. Explore - Block and String model, worksheet, discussion
      3. Summarize - Answer question with table
​

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What Worked

Giving everyone or pairs their own model to work with is much better than having one or two that I show everyone all at once. When the kids get to mess with their own they are much more creative and engaged. 
Focusing on a single question for the whole lesson makes it focused and makes for a satisfying end to the day. It also grounds the experience and gives us some purpose.
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Surprises

I'm still not good at determining how long things will take. What takes me 10 minutes some groups couldn't finish in 30. I am experimenting with allowing groups to continue the work later in the day or attaching more of an assignment to these lessons other than their notes.
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Never Again

Using a launch and explore activity that are not clearly connected hurts this lesson like nothing else. For a lesson about equal and opposite forces I launched with a balance game with students trying to push each other over, then had them launch balloons across the room. The connection didn't quite happen because they were comparing phenomena that felt really different. For success, the launch should have something directly in common with the guiding question and the launch.

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Student Feedback

Students reported feeling that they needed more time and more explicit information about friction and how it works. I provide supplemental knowledge in the form of Khan Academy videos that I the kids can take notes on for credit (they need to do at least 3 of the 7 for full credit) and by holding a "wrap up" discussion the day after where they can ask questions and I can give more direct information about the topic. I wonder if there is more I can do in the moment,

Students also reported that they were engaged throughout the lesson, had fun and learned some about friction. To capture and document this I ask kids to be taking notes during the lesson, saving their worksheets, and writing a summary blog post at the end of every week. I don't collect much evidence of student learning directly from these lessons and I don't do much assessment around them. Maybe I could have some kind of group quizzes or have them do more writing around the topic to increase what I'm recording. 

1 Year Later...

So I'm looking through this after 1 year and I don't do Technical Tuesdays anymore. Here's why I think I was so excited about this..

It felt good to have the students do something science-y.

At this time of my teaching career I wasn't developing projects that had very rich or rigorous content (still working on that). I think that I knew at some level that the class wasn't really learning Physics, or I was self-conscious that they weren't learning enough. I added these Tuesday lessons in to make myself feel better about their learning, not to serve any PBL method. 

In reality, I've since learned how to develop a project that requires more knowledge of science and physics. I'm still getting better, but I have enough success that I can see what I'm trying to do. In a more effective PBL classroom, there is no need to add more science-y stuff in and make the teacher feel better, because the project requires everyone to learn the content in order to complete the work. 

I still find value in the structure of lesson that I was using, and still will use it today, but not so detached from the project. It's now the case that the students need to know some physics concept in order to improve their projects, so I pause the class for a day to give them a structured lesson. This information gets immediately incorporated into their project work.