Modeling Instruction in Physics: End of Week 1

This week has been one of the most intellectually stimulating weeks of my career. I've had so many thoughts going through my brain this week about the teaching I've done and the teaching I want to be doing.

First, it's well known that students come into class with preconceptions, based on their observations of the world, that don't match Newtonian physics. This was a theme in both my preparatory work and my graduate work. So I have some questions built into the beginning of some of my units to get an idea of what misconceptions my students have. But not all of my units. And I don't really use the questions I do have all that well. I try to remember to point out when something we just learned is contradictory to answers they gave on those preconception questions, and that's about it.

Those preconceptions students have are tenacious. Just pointing out and talking about them doesn't do much of anything. Students might modify those ideas slightly, but even that is unlikely. My students learn what to say on the tests and how to do the calculations they need to, but none that shows that they've changed their minds about how the world works. What I need are better questions and problems to introduce the contradictions between their thinking and what we observe, and my students to recognize that those contradictions exist and then work to find what the correct idea is.

Enter everything we've done this week. All of the labs and discussions are designed to bring different students' ideas out into the open and compare them with the physical data from the lab. Not just once, but over and over again.

Students will struggle with this. They will have trouble understanding each other's points and interpreting the data and graphs, and they will be confused. But nothing worthwhile is easy, and only ideas that more worthwhile and meaningful will replace what students already think. And what's more meaningful than an idea you came up with?

I love physics. I love watching the world around me and knowing why it works like it does. There's something awe-inspiring about how it all fits together. And I want my students to have that understanding. But I'm learning it has to be their work that gets them to that point, not mine. I can't take what I've learned from my efforts and distill it into simple phrases to tell them, and expect it to have any meaning for them. Instead, physics becomes nothing but empty phrases to parrot back and story problems to solve. There's no joy in that.