TYC 21 Region Meeting Fall 2000 Friday night:
Tom Isherwood: Speaking on Scholarship Teaching

Good dialogue initiated about joining forces with other disciplines to improve scholarship research.

Not limiting the definition of scholarship to discovery, but to broaden it's scope.

Things that keep coming back:
Dewey's "learn by doing"
Paget's levels of learning
Bloom's Taxonomy of questioning

This question bridges all disciplines.

How come students learn easily, a concept I think is difficult, yet find so difficult, a concept I think is simple?

MSC has "teaching circles" - seminars on teaching difficulties.

How do you get them started?

Faculty members get an idea, and send everyone an email about the idea, along with the time and place. Those interested show up.

Also a committee on first year experience - for both students and teachers

How to perpetuate the ideas generated? Depends on a small group of pioneers to try it first.

How to generate this small group of pioneers that cause innovative ideas to grow and bear fruit?

There's no profession on earth where one has the freedom to create their own work environment like teaching at a college or university.

The best thing an administration can do is to allow them to do that.

MSC also has a Faculty Development committee funded with $25000 each year to spend however they see fit.

Best way to get things done initially turned down? Say " can we do a study?"

Saturday morning
Linda Grynkewich holds 12 degrees, miscellaneous masters degrees and 3 Phd's, teaching physics, chemistry, meteorology, and cognitive psychology, has lots of teaching excellence awards, a bunch of patents, and a few businesses.

Talking about Physics Ed at the Secondary Level.

The focus this morning:

What is the focus of the education of science teachers. Science literacy. Prepare people for jobs in scientific areas.
Two areas, content and methods.

What are the best ways to teach and learn?
You can have all the right methods, but, if you don't have the content knowledge, you will not inspire confidence in the students.

We need to develop a community of learners.
Because many teachers have the passion for science, but do not have adequate expertise in the subject.

She mentions a program in which teachers work in scientific companies, then take this experience back to the classroom.

What is your goal as a college teacher for high school and middle school ?

Research is clear: We are not getting the best, most intuitive thinkers in science, because we commit cognitive discrimination. We force out all those that don't think in a certain way. NSF funded lots of research on this topic.

Assessment is extremely important. If you're assessing as well as you're teaching, you are to be commended.

Gift-Georgia Instructional Fellowship for Teachers-

Partners in Education:

Lots of discussion of how to get "in" to the school system. Lots of discussion about starting from the top, go see the administration and or superintendent.
Consensus seemed to be to start with principal's office or superintendent's office.

Comment: Might try to talk to teachers themselves.
Workshops for teachers.

Teachers themselves don't want to know anymore than some minimum.

Great to be good backup for the local system.

Trouble is getting teachers to ask for help.

Panel: Linda G, Jamie Aiken, Rhonda Toon

Establish an alliance with the school system.
Each teacher lists kinds of things he or she will be willing to do for the school system.

Great dialogue about involvement with local school systems.

Linda said it's very important to get involved at the middle school level.

Jamie said we need to be involved at the very bottom, and prepare elementary teachers to do labs before they become teachers.

Rhonda is the shy type: She just said she was with GYSTC

Introductions (Brief)

Paperwork session: Filling out
expense forms.
Evaluation form

Next Session:Panel Discussion on "Role of Two Year Colleges in Supporting Physics Education in k-12 Schools.

Trying to come up with ideas for some sort of output from this meeting.

How to enable donating equipment to high schools? ?I did not record any direct response to this, did anybody?

Bibb Co. Had lots of equipment that was in need of refurbishing, got help from local university.

Doug to Rhonda: what exactly do you do?

Rhonda does? GYSTC -16 of them in the state. Started ten years ago. Collective point for encouragement of science interest in k-12 , supported by industry and business. Offer classes and activities for almost any kind of youth group imaginable.

Nick Parker: How did this get started?

Lady in Marrietta, reading about the problem, and saw no help. She got it together. State match. They have to raise $30000 locally before can get matching from state, 30000 from ?

Ali to Linda: Is there an age at which interest is optimal?

Linda: Middle school

Jamie's students do shoebox physics with local grade school class. Also had to do a teacher prep: telling the teacher well enough about the experiment so they could do follow up discussions.

Eric Sun: Is it just science? Maybe we need a lot of revivals.

Jamie brought QCC's. Quality Core Curriculum

Teachers have a book of stuff they are expected to teach kids, most of which parents should be teaching.
Chuck agrees, but it's a can of worms.

Jamie sez, ask the teacher, how can I help you?

Chuck: There is a great deal we can do, his belief is that there is a limit to what we can do without parental support.

David: our topic is what to do at middle and high school. Let's stick to that.

Jamie: We need to get prospective teachers to take a course in which teachers develop their own experiments and work through them.

Is this lab appropriate, does it teach what I want to teach.
What labs needed for acceleration, force, etc.

She had a guy (Quizenberry)tell her what kind of labs appropriate for each topic.

What is the best way to get this idea across hands on?

CHAD says we can't dictate what courses potential teachers can take.

Jamie sez people like Linda should be able to dictate this.

Doug Young sez: They can tell students what they think are best for them to take.

Chad again
chris
Jamie

all too fast for me to get down.

Linda sez people ask who should take this course?

Jamie: Let's look through this book and see how useful it will be to you as a jr hi science teacher.

Maasha: How is teaching science different from English? In both you have to know the subject.

Jamie: What do you mean? Followed by lengthy dialogue between her and
Maasha about this.

Martin: My wife is a middle school teacher. He goes to the teachers. He gets the calls and ask to help out . Many don't have any idea.

Doug said: Our students can't tell people how to teach science.

Eric Sun: workshop idea.

Idea: An NSF grant, or ? to create and conduct workshops for high school and middle school teachers, including funding.

Team teaching works really well.

Jamie still wants a class that duplicates what she got from that experienced high school teacher.

Couldn't we get a good high school teacher to come teach that course?

Alex Dickison speaks.

Perspective where tyc21 is on this. Funding runs out in February. Lets fund meetings like this.

The point is, tyc21 have been approached by nsf and said it would be a shame to let tyc21 just go away. How can we use it to spark continued effort?

Over half the science teachers take all their science courses at junior colleges. So, just teaching content is dropping the ball.

Can we start some initiative regionally to develop this topic, that can be stretched nationally?

Me and Linda- Let's do it!

Breakout sessions:

Linda G.
Chad D.
Maasha
Richard Parker
nick

Alex Dickison
Chris Wozny
Chuck Pearson
J.B
Doug Young

Ali Yazdi
Charles Johnson
Imad
Katie Grossman
Mrs Maasha

Jamie A
D. Lawing
Missavage
Sanjeev
J. Balduz

Jamie's Breakout session

Course for 2 yr college for science ed majors

infusing technology?
Pre-service lab course

How are you going to make a lab that you can equip
that does what you want it to do
that you can build on

Jamie believes they need this spread over 18 weeks.

Sanjeev: but they don't have time..

You're going to have to understand this stuff.

She offered classes . The folly was in her setting up the labs for them.
She wants them to come up with the ways to prove a physics concept.

Sanjeev says, what should we put in this grant proposal.

Purpose: to teach potential education majors lab methods to illustrate concepts.

Mechanism:??

Sanjeev: Just labs or beyond?

Jose: for people that have had no college physics yet.

After Lunch

Eisenhower grants- Gail Pollock

can get 11.1 % of salary to do workshops to teach teachers how to teach what you want them to teach to get kids ready to take your courses.

Can get forms off the webpage.

Chris sez get people like you to read your proposal.
Attach a detailed syllabus - be very specific

Include time of day , follow up sessions, topics

can buy equipment for the students with grant money.

Group Proposals

Chad

15 - 25 physics-physical science labs 6, 9, 12 grade separate set for each grade
set of workshops
participants would be given a stipend, get credit of some kind
coop with gystc

in-service/pre-service

teach them how to do these labs and how to administer them.

Not necessary to write labs, just get them together.
Pick a set of labs we think would be appropriate and effective
include some kind of evaluation procedure.

Jamie: A course for freshmen education majors for laboratory methods.
Give me a fish and I can eat today, teach me how to fish and I can eat for the rest of my life.
They need to have some idea for where they are going to go.

It will also prepare them for the courses in physical science and physics later.

Opportunity to go through this process before you get in the classroom.

Field trip to Lowes!

Major problem: getting it fit into the curriculum

Note takers opinion: This needs to be a NSF or some other federal funded program, done on local levels with assessment, then use this data to enable federal govt to put pressure on state education programs to include something like this in their programs.

Ali:

To conduct two week summer or/and weekend workshop (where possible) for teachers (k - 12) Hold summer meetings in a central location with dormitory and use some incentive to bring in participants.
If in an area where industries available, get them to come in and help do these workshops.
Workshops + Partnership between industry and local ed institutions.

Target Introduce physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, physical science - science of nonliving matter, to 6, 9 & 12 grade teachers

Ali notes that Powerful Ideas in Physical Science is a text that is written for k - 12 teachers.

Alex:

including all other groups with interest in education to hold workshops, share or if possible provide equipment, and technology possible limit the topics looked at for a year to one or a small number. Do another topic next year.

Workshops-continual- regular periodic meetings

local

A partnership of 16 - elementary

Some kind of topic concentration for each year.

Feedback from college to elementary on what they should be teaching, and from elem on what college should be teaching prospective teachers.

David Lawing presses for some final commitment from the group for some kind of output from this meeting.

He got no commitment.

Jamie suggested a monthly club meeting of some kind.

Sharing Session

Chris

has participated in 3 Eisenhower grants.
Gotta get 12 people to participate. Two weeks right after they get out of school at end of school year is best.

Try to get a principal to endorse program.
Need to go to schools and sell it aggressively.

He did one on science kits
He used something from project sense from statesboro, Ga.
Be able to do stuff with your students just like we are doing with you now.

But only had one kit checked out one time.

Not a panacea.

Bottom line: participation in workshops is difficult, effectiveness is virtually nil.

David: The don't need pedagogy, the need content.

Jamie and company: (Georgia has degree in materials science engineering)

Demo CBL lab that she uses.
Exploring Physics and math using CBL
and Photogate timer.

Next she does the newton's 2 law experiment with two masses and pulley.

Microphones great for teaching sound and interference.

Gets embroiled in discussion about learning how to graphs manually vs knowing how interpret the graphs.

At Mercer, used to have a data analysis book students had to buy.

J. B. Sharma is next.

Talks about webassign. Wonderful medium, great grade book
He also uses webct to make up quizzes.

Hwk is 20 %. Exams are 25 %. Labs are a separate course.

Charles Johnson talking about
video sources uses of internet for teaching physics.

post homework assignments & solutions
posting messages and old tests, and examples from class.

He uses smartboard. this new one is only $500 Ibid ?
Check pcconnection
Interactive ones are $2700
p;

His website

http://www.sgc.peachnet.edu

lab uses for websites.

Online lab manual.

He put his own on internet.
Submission of lab reports by email.
Perform lab online.

Not read lab before class

he video taped prelab discussions
put it on web!

Gets assistant to put it in video format.

Need to get Real producer and real server. Already paid for by state of georgia if you're in georgia.

Sample labs.

Videos max of 4 minutes so they can download them at home. They can run this streaming, (means they don't have to down load it)

10 of these take up about 100 mb of hd space.

Helps students who are visual learners.

Ali's Turn
Thanks to David Lawing for great workshop.

Followup on getting a proposal out of this meeting.
Suggests have next meeting at alex city
fall 2001 will be back in middle georgia, Amad will host it.

Ali wants to hand to torch to someone else.
Possible candidates:
Chris Wozny and Martin Okafor

will discuss it with the tyc21

He has more problems on his web page from his project.

http://www.jscc.cc.al.us/~ayazdi

Next meeting: someone from ed research on teaching methods??

When?? Need to get this settled quickly.

We still need a grant proposal.