Instructional Strategies
Debate and Discussion
Science and learning are not activities that occur in isolation. Students should have an opportunity and space to challenge ideas and work them out with the teacher and each other. Because of this, activities are designed to occur in front of others in a collaborative space, but it is important to develop a culture of respectful questioning, discussion and debate. One tool that I have found is the TIPERS1 series of books. These provide thought provoking questions that warrant a great deal of discussion among students, helping to draw out misconceptions and set up a place where students are able to learn from each other.
Measuring
Physics is all about making observations and learning from them. Because of this, students need to be able to make measurements and understand the measurement process. Coordinate systems are an essential part of this process, so this unit seeks to have students actively measuring with a variety of devices in a variety of units in order to understand how to measure properly as well as why we use the systems we do. Becoming proficient at measuring and observing forms the basis of good lab work for the rest of the course and beyond. This unit hopes to bring students up to speed and give them the proper skills to do well in physics.
Modeling
The real major focus of this unit is modeling. The entire purpose is to take something that is frequently treated in a purely symbolic and algebraic fashion and make it explicitly geometric. Physics describes the real world and the behavior of objects in it, so the understanding of concepts must be directly transferable to the real world. Making physical coordinate systems and physicals representations of mathematical ideas, as well as focusing on diagramming and drawing relationships is meant to help students internalize and understand vectors arithmetic, as opposed to just perform steps and report a result.
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