Modeling Instruction in Physics: I had no idea...

You know, when I started this workshop, I thought I had a good idea of what Modeling Instruction was. After all, I'd read teacher blogs, looked at the AMTA website, checked out suggested course info that had been posted online, and been to a couple of workshops on it.

What I thought I knew about Modeling was entirely superficial and nowhere near as powerful. You know - students do the labs first, develop the formulas from their data, and then are better prepared for problem solving. Instead of me working hard to make examples and demos and clear explanations to get them to understand, they'd be doing the work by experiencing the phenomena themselves and thinking about it. Oh, and it's fun, so they like it!

Oh, there's so much more to it! There's a focus on drawing out student preconceptions and creating discrepant events to get them to analyze their own ideas. There's repeated exposure to the same ideas but in different contexts. There's unobtrusively guiding discussions so that 1) there isn't an authority figure and 2) they fully discuss their reasoning and (eventually) determine if it is faulty or not. 

I'm so glad I'm in this workshop!

I'm so nervous for this next school year!