This post
describes my visit an all-female K-12 school on the upper east side in
Manhattan. The school is small, with a class size of about 60 students
in each grade, 15 students to a classroom. I spent most of a day at the
school, and sat in on two ninth grade physics classes, one senior level
AP-style course, and one student-teacher interview about an independent
research project. What follows is a rough account of what I saw during
my visit, and my impressions of what the program seemed to emphasize.
The teacher I spent most of my time with took a great deal of time out
of his day to discuss the program at the school, and gave me totally
free access to any class I was interested in seeing.
This
school has been teaching physics first for about eight years. Since
students are not required to pass any external standardized test, the
priorities of the class are set entirely by the department, and there is
a lot of collaboration between teachers to decide what these priorities
will be. Four members of the current science department have taught
the ninth grade class, though there are currently only two current
teachers of ninth grade. At least two of the four individuals who have
taught the class through the years have degrees in biology, not physics,
though they felt that there was adequate communication and
collaboration within the department to make their physics teaching
experience effective and enjoyable. For every science class taught by
more than one teacher, teachers meet at least once a week to discuss the
class.
I talked at length with one teacher about a project that
students do near the beginning of the year that is entirely based on
scientific process and isolating variables. This teacher called it the
"whirlybird experiment," and it recalled for me the "Internal
Assessments" of student-designed experiments required by the International Baccalaureate program. (Chris Hamper has produced an extremely valuable resource for these IB Internal Assessments in Design
that provides a nice overview of the focus of these assignments.) Each
ninth grade class does a class-wide experiment relating two variables of
a paper "whirlybird":
drop height and flight time. The class then analyzes the data they
collect by graphing one variable against another in Excel, and
calculating a linear regression, discussing "error" etc. Students are
then required to develop their own investigation into two quantifiable
variables of the whirlybird, such as "# of paper clips vs. flight time,"
where they hold all other variables constant. To me, this exercise
falls into the category of "things that ninth grade physics can do uniquely well.
Physics, moreso than biology or chemisty, uses instruments and
variables (stopwatches & meter sticks to measure time and distance,
etc.) that students understand intuitively, so the emphasis becomes the process of doing science.
This exercise communicates early on in a student's science education
the message the science is a discipline based on collecting and
interpreting data. Coming out of middle school, many students have
developed the impression that science is something that comes out of
textbook or off the internet, and a ninth grade physics class can give a
student ownership of their own science education in a very powerful
way. (This emphasis was also clear from the teacher's introduction to
accelerated motion. At one point, he asked students to decide whether
they thought a falling ball was accelerating. His follow-up question to
this was, "What evidence do you have to support that claim?")
Much
of the focus of inquiry-based science education seems to be on giving
students this same sense of ownership of their own understanding. This
type of approach develops the skill and intuition to look at a problem
as a scientist would, and to expect that a scientific claim should be
supported with evidence. Perhaps moreso than any physics concepts or understanding, this skill seems to be applicable in all spheres of life.
This
teacher has also done an excellent job of presenting students with a
comprehensive rubric for lab grading, and making his priorities clear.
He uses the class-wide whirlybird introduction as an opportunity to show
them an ideal lab report, and then turns them loose to present their
own findings. He does about one full lab report per term (4-6 in a
year), but he expects these assignments to be substantial and
comprehensive. The lab grading rubric has evolved a lot through
discussion with the science department, but the priorities of a lab
report change from grade to grade. The teacher felt that the differences
in focus between the disciplines make it difficult to keep consistent
priorities from grade to grade, but that all classes emphasized that lab
reports were for presenting unique findings within a larger context of
research, to reflect the structure of science outside the classroom.The
ninth grade course is called "Conceptual Physics." On the day I
visited, students were studying free fall using standard equations of
accelerated motion. I saw ninth graders complete a lab where they
estimated the height of the room by measuring the time it took for a
ball to fall this distance, and then the teacher dropped the same ball
out the window to estimate the height of the physics room on the sixth
floor. The questions on the test that I saw, and the problems that were
being discussed in class tended to be centered around quantitative
problem solving, though the teacher pointed out one question about
relative velocity that asked students to "explain" how one observer
could perceive the velocity of an object to be directed northward while
another observer perceives the same object to be moving with southward
velocity. Since kinematics tends to be heavy on quantitative problem
solving I imagine my observation was skewed toward the quantitative, but
the problem-solving methods I witnessed mostly stressed the procedure of how to approach an algebra problem with these variables, etc.
This
procedure is something that I chose not to emphasize in my own
kinematics unit, so I think I was looking closely at what this school
has chosen to do with this material. I'd see this an example of a style
of problem solving that is hard to do as well at the ninth-grade level
as it is with older students, simply because of the limitations of a
ninth grader's algebra skills. The teacher clarified to me in a recent
email that he feels comfortable stressing algebraic problem solving
because all ninth graders at the school have passed Algebra I by the
time they take physics. (If they haven't completed an Algebra course,
they enroll in summer school before their ninth grade year to get them
up to the math proficiency level of their classmates.) In discussing his
12th grade physics class (designed in part to get students to pass the
mechanics AP test), the teacher mentioned that he thought of this class
mostly as an "applied math" course, and that this reflected a personal
priority of his. I imagine that this priority extends to the ninth grade
as well. (Certainly, this teacher is not alone in emphasizing
quantitative problem solving in a physics class!)
In
my view, the fact that the school is all-female is a positive aspect of
physics at this school. In my experience with a mixed-gender physics
class, boys can often dominate a discussion. This isn't because the boys
are more competent with the material, but rather because they are often
more eager and competitive with each other. Girls can get lost in the
mix if a teacher doesn't actively pull them into a discussion. At an
all-female school, it seemed that ambitious girls were free to pursue
their interest in the subject without the fear that their interest will
be viewed negatively by others in the class. Some girls stayed quiet
throughout class discussion, but this wasn't because of a gender
difference. All the physics teachers at this particular school are
male, so students do not have a role model of their own gender to look
up to in the subject, but they are certainly not the only school with
this problem.
The ninth grade
physics class at this school is popular and successful. This seems to
be in a large part due to the dedication of the teachers, and these
teachers have the full support of their administration. For many
students, the ninth grade physics class is the only physics class they
will ever take, and the course seems like a comprehensive collection of
introductory physics concepts and problem-solving methods.
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