4/6 Steve: Three modeling articles

·         key points for thinking about science teaching: These articles include many points that are important for teaching science using modeling.  First, modeling is a mode of instruction where the better you get at facilitating, the more your students learn.  This is different than lecture style instruction where according to the data better lecturers do not actually transfer more knowledge than bad ones.  Second, modeling can be done well even in the first year you try it.  The one teacher sited how his scored improved even in his first year of trying the modeling approach.  Third, modeling classes don’t cover as much ground so it is important to pick topics which are valuable to students in a variety of ways. 

·         interconnections with themes across readings in the class:  some continued themes are the applicability of modeling in a real class, the way that modeling helps students come to deeper understandings, and how there is a mangle to modeling just like real science. 

·         affordances and obstacles of modeling instruction:  these teachers show us that modeling can be tricky if you have time constraints that are not conducive to modeling.  This will vary school to school based on scheduling.  Another obstacle is the decreased content covered when using modeling exclusively.  This may or may not matter depending on the administration’s demands on you.  Affordances include increased understanding as demonstrated by higher FCI scores, more student engagement, more “non-science” students enjoying physics, and more student collaboration. 

·         describe the relationship between computational and physical/representational modeling in your future classroom: I think this would depend on the topic.  For instance, some topics lend themselves to a lot of measurement and discussion of quantitative modeling.  Friction would be a good example of that.  Other topics are difficult to get a lot of numbers from and the class might be better off doing qualitative work with pictures etc.  An example of such a topic would be engines, where seeing the actual layout and showing the process using physical and representational means would be better than just throwing out a lot of numbers.

·         describe the role of modeling in your future classroom: I plan to use modeling on some topics but not on others.  I will survey the landscape of available modeling units and see which ones are best designed and use those when appropriate, but I don’t want to be held to using modeling for every topic. 

·         how were these testimonies helpful or not helpful: these were very helpful because they showed real stories of real teachers and their struggles and successes with modeling.  It gave me a lot of hope to read these particularly when the one teacher discussed how even in his first year of using modeling his students did better.

·         include one or two questions to which other class members can respond, possibly including a science question for the class to explore and model:  What kind of test is the FCI?  I haven’t heard of that before but it sounds interesting.  What are some good resources for finding modeling units online other than the one website mentioned in the article?  I would like to see the actual modeling units that they were able to get through to get some idea of how many different topics they were able to cover in a year.