4/6 - Kim K - Minds On Modeling

           A key point about science teaching that I noticed from these papers is that one needs to actually be a “good” teacher in order for modeling to be successful.  This is because modeling in the classroom is so dynamic and different each time a lesson is played out.  One of the obstacles of modeling instruction is for the teacher to let students drive instruction and learning; however, this is also one of the affordances of modeling since students take ownership of their own learning and figuring out answers.  Another key point of modeling is that a teacher will not have time to cover all the content he/she would like to cover.  If modeling instruction is executed correctly though, the students will be able to apply their knowledge of how certain phenomena work and apply to unfamiliar ones with success.  I really liked that Schober felt that he got to know his students better through modeling instruction, and that is definitely an affordance in my eyes.

In my future classroom, I hope to maintain a classroom environment where students ask thoughtful questions to each other and listen to each other’s explanations of their models.  Getting students to cooperate in this manner will allow for me to get all students to succeed and come away from my class enjoying it more than any other science class.    I plan on using computational modeling to aide in students’ thinking about phenomena that are not easily represented with a physical model.  It would also be advantageous to use computational modeling as a way for students to manipulate various factors in complex systems (e.g. Climate Change Modeling).  Often times, I would probably ask students to create a physical model of a phenomena we would be working on and then “go deeper” with a computational model that they could manipulate.  Overall, I thought the testimonies were more insightful than necessarily helpful.

Question:

With using modeling in your future classroom, would you treat regular students different from AP students?

4/6-Elizabeth-Models and Blocks

In their articles, Finkbeiner and Braunschweig both discussed their experiences as teachers and their introduction into the world of modeling physics. 

1.     key points:

·      depth over breadth

·      teachers and students are partners in learning

·      modeling includes student inquiry, cooperative groups, designing experiments, creating diagrams, argument and explanation, and deployment of the model

·      modeling teachers achieved higher gains in Hake’s studies of FCI

2.     connection to other readings:

·      Both Finkbeiner and Braunschweig discuss the process of modeling within the classroom, which have been discussed in many previous readings, including Schwarz’s article.  In his article, Schwarz emphasized that successful modeling is an interactive process that involves constant revision, argumentation, and investigation.  Furthermore, he notes that modeling is an ever-changing process where the students are constantly revising, and changing their models.

3.     affordances and obstacles

·      Through these 3 articles, the positive outcomes of modeling are very evident.  After even 1 year of modeling, Finkbeiner and Braunschweig both experienced increases in testing results.  Furthermore, students (in the Braunschweig article) expressed more of an interest and understanding of the physics concepts.

·      Modeling also allows for a coherent structure (in part because of the 90 minute period), which is essential for student success.

·      There are always obstacles/struggles that teachers face, such as covering a certain amount of material in a short amount of time and not interfering with student collaboration.

4.     computational and representational modeling in my classroom

·      Based on previous readings and discussions, it is essential that computational and physical representations should be used in the classroom.  I think that physical models would be heavily used in the beginning of the year as students are more familiar with them.  As the school year progresses, computational models will be introduced and furthermore, as the students become familiar with them, manipulate them themselves. 

5.     role of modeling in my classroom

·      Ideally, modeling will take a prominent place within my classroom.  Based on studies and articles, including the 3 we just read, modeling improves student learning and understanding dramatically.  Thus, it would be great to include it everyday.  However, I think modeling will mostly occur during lab days, which are once a week.  Ideally, I would like to include modeling instruction at least 2-3 times per week. 

6.     testimonies helpful or not?

·      I really liked these articles because I wanted to know how teachers who didn’t know about modeling and had never used it in a classroom approached it.  Their positive outcomes and high success were great and good to hear.  However, a lot fo schools do not have block schedules like that (90 minutes) so I was just wondering how successful it would be in a shorter class.  While Finkbeiner did discuss the obstacles teachers face with 45 minute classes, I would like to hear advice about the best way to model in shorter class times.

7.     Questions:

·      Are the tests that the authors looked at to gage their success reliable?

·      What if students do not correct their misconceptions? 

·      Should teachers engage in modeling everyday? 

4/6 Laura - Modeling and all that Jazz

            I thought it was really interesting to read the perspective of teachers actually implementing modeling in their classrooms currently.  In the Braunschweig piece, I especially enjoyed reading the student’s responses to modeling curriculum.  It was exciting to see the theoretical benefits we’ve been discussing in class (comprehension, confidence, identification as someone who can, etc.) represented in their perspectives, which covered both cognitive and socio-emotional gains in a pretty impressive show of metacognition. Braunschweig’s emphasis on positive communication encompasses a lot of what we’ve learned about in psychology and classroom ecology as key to a strong learning community, and it was great to see an actual example of how to achieve this.  I will definitely be incorporating his ‘questions-only’ peer feedback strategy for whiteboard discussions in my future class! As a music lover, I also identified with his closing jazz metaphor, which I think astutely highlights the beauty that can be created through collaboration and flexibility. 

            While Finkbeiner’s writing style was slightly less engaging, I thought it was really valuable to see the tangible results of modeling – especially from someone who seems a skeptic.  His points contribute to our ongoing discussion of depth versus breadth, confirming that students understand as much and more through modeling even when fewer concepts are covered.  In Schober’s piece, I liked his articulation of all the different pedagogical techniques encompassed by modeling, including “engagement tools such as Socratic dialogue, individualized instruction, multiple representations of phenomena, kinesthetic experiences, cooperative learning and emphasis on coherency of concepts,” which we have been learning about all year in many different classes.  With so many excellent strategies readily incorporated, its no wonder that modeling is so successful!

Questions:

- All the papers we read this week were from the perspective of physics teachers, how do you think teaching modeling will differ for other scientific disciplines?

- How can we help students, like the one who reported the drawback: “It puts a lot of responsibility on the experimenter to think," see the value in more challenging approaches, especially when they may have never been asked to think in this way before?  

4/6 David Bergsmith Modeling Approach to Teaching

       A model approach to teaching uses ideas from students, drawing upon previous knowledge and asks students to make observations, plan and test hypotheses and make revisions. Braunschweig talks about using this approach in his experience with a model based approach to teaching. In his teaching, Braunschweig’s students make a list about factors that effect the swinging of a pendulum. Students use what they already know to first make a list of all possible factors. The class revises the list and is asked to explain and argue which ideas make for good choices to consider. This form of reasoning builds scientific knowledge and may also allow addressing misconceptions.

       These accounts of a modeling approach to teaching all ask students to explain and argue their thinking throughout the class. Schober says that discourse in the class between students and teachers and between students is the most important factor in determining the success of this approach to teaching. “The questioning strives to reinforce key ideas and definitions; confront misconceptions; and provide students with opportunities to elucidate the model, extend the model to new situations, applications and contexts, and establish connections among the verbal, diagrammatical, graphical, and mathematical representations of phenomena.” Schober says in his account of model-based instruction. These conversations in the classroom build knowledge among the students and this description of what the conversations should include is most helpful of all the accounts.

       Modeling instruction may cause a decrease in the breadth of topics covered in class. With this obstacle in place, instructors should also focus on developing scientific investigation and academic skills such as literacy and numeracy. Teachers can place focus in class upon asking reasoning questions such as asking for explanation and allowing argumentation and looking for evidence that was used when forming conclusions. Effective and clear explanation and argumentation skills will allow students to be inquisitive about questions they may face on standardized tests and in the real world. While modeling instruction does not always allow students to explore all topics during the course, the focus of developing an inquiry classroom and students as investigators may outweigh the shortage of breadth of content in the classroom.

       Modeling, both computational and physical/representational will serve as a means of reference and comparison in my classroom. Students will be able to use models as shared experiences to construct knowledge and in application of concepts and relationships. Models and the phenomena explored in models may be used as evidence when describing concepts and the construction of theories. Computational modeling may be used more than physical/representational models due to the possible manipulation and exploration of relationships. However, as a teacher I will have to make decisions about my class and what types of models will best help construct knowledge for my students. My students should also have opportunities to use all types of models and then explain, argue and revise their thinking through the exploration of use of models.

       Are there models that show how hand soap cleans your hands? Possibly showing the differences in antibacterial soap and non-antibacterial soap? This could be an effective model to explore the replication of prokaryotic cells. If there aren’t models that represent this, what ideas do you have about it?

4/6 Caitlin Farney Modeling Modeling Modeling

The authors of this week’s readings discussed modeling taught in physics classrooms. A common idea that all three authors discussed was how modeling is very different than traditional teaching because it makes students more active in the classroom. Being more active, according to the articles, helps the students learn and understand the material more deeply. Another theme was authenticity. Finkbeiner mentioned that, with a modeling teaching method, the “student’s classroom experience is more closely related to the physicist’s.” This theme was important in other articles we have read, including the Shwarz and Sampson articles. When the students have the chance to act as scientists and engineers, the material becomes more meaningful, and the students have a better opportunity to learn important science practices.

Finkbeiner and Braunschwieg did both have concerns with the modeling teaching method. They were both concerned about time. Not all classes may reach the same conclusions at the same time, so the pacing can be difficult. This lead to Braunschwieg and Schober mentioning that there is more active planning and instruction that has to be done on the teacher’s part. It might take me some time to learn how to effectively teach using modeling. Both authors also discussed not being able to cover as much material as traditional teaching would be able to cover. However, Finkbeiner and Schober did report a rise in their student’s test scores, which shows how this might not be that big of an issue. The students may not be learning as much material, but they are learning certain concepts well enough that they are able to predict and figure out other problems.

These articles were a little different from the other articles we have read because the modeling that the authors are using in their classrooms is not computational modeling, but physical and representational modeling. However, the teaching methods are still similar. The students still get to create their experiment, analyze data, discuss what they observed, revise their ideas, and then create a model to represent what they observed. On the other hand, there is a little less of student agency, as the experiments in these articles are paradigm experiments. In my future classrooms, I will have to decide when each modeling method will work the best for different lessons, such as evolution concepts versus physiological systems.

Can the whiteboard part of the modeling cycle be directly translated into a computational modeling unit? Also, all of these examples were of modeling being done in physics classrooms. How easily can parts of the modeling cycle be used in another science, such as Biology, where some concepts are a little less formula based (such as taxonomy)?

4/6 Dan - Modeling Articles

key points for thinking about science teaching
All three articles made the argument for the effectiveness of using modeling as a core approach to teaching science. They all also agreed that the benefits of modeling, like student engagement and inquiry, far outweighed the costs, like not being able to “cover all the material”. (Essentially depth vs. breadth) The Braunschweig article also raised the point of teachers learning to take a back seat to student discussion and resisting the temptation to provide input all of the time. I think this is an especially important idea - it can be extremely difficult to watch students explore a path that may not be correct and not try to correct them.

interconnections with themes across readings in the class
The biggest theme that I saw connecting across readings was the value in letting students discover for themselves. These articles provided actually data to support the idea that learning through modeling help students make stronger connections to the content.

affordances and obstacles of modeling instruction
Certainly time is a great constraint for modeling. Braunschweig discussed the benefits of block scheduling versus traditional scheduling, where classes only meet for 40-50 minutes at a time. The longer periods allow students to get deeper into experiments and reduce the need for superfluous homework assignments. Schools also need to be onboard with the idea of covering fewer topics in greater detail. However, the practices that students use to learn will far outweigh any specific equations or definitions they might miss while using modeling.

describe the relationship between computational and physical/representational modeling in your future classroom
Even in our class we have talked about the benefits of designing or building a physical or representational model before trying a computational model. I would imagine that many of the intro labs that start a modeling cycle would be a physical model, rather than computational, just to allow students easier access to the different variables in play. I also think that the content will drive the type of model that is used. In mechanics, physical models would be more accessible and easy to interact with. With topics like E&M, it might be valuable to build computational models to explore how these forces work at their base level.

describe the role of modeling in your future classroom
It is hard to predict at this point exactly to what extent modeling will used in my classroom. I would want to explore resources for physics topics and see what types of projects and questions have been successful. It is certainly a method I want to explore more, but it is hard to say “I want to use modeling exclusively” with 100% certainty.

how were these testimonies helpful or not helpful
I enjoyed reading these testimonials because they explore some actual practices that teachers use in their classrooms, rather than just the theory of modeling. It was also nice to see some concrete data of how much modeling helped students improve.

include one or two questions to which other class members can respond, possibly including a science question for the class to explore and model
The articles seemed to be describing the same process or cycle for modeling. Is this the most common method? What other processes are teachers using?

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.