Gateway to Physics -Inquiry Modules and In-Service Workshops for Advanced Level Middle School Physics Teachers

Leading team:

Prof. Edit Yerushalmi

Project team:

Boaz Katz
Efrat Blau
Uri Barak
Marina Bernholz
Genia Khaikin
Carmel Gorni
Zeev Krakover

Former Project team:

Dr. Amnon Hazan
Dr. Zehorit Kapach
David Perl
Michal Sigron
Dr. Elon Langbeheim
Nancy Shalev

Secretariat and Administration:

Jenna Kaufman

Brief

Launched in 2018, the Gateway to Physics program serves as a upscaled platform to address two unresolved educational challenges: 1) Integrating mathematical, theory-based modeling, a hallmark of physics courses, with disciplinary norms and goals of other scientific disciplines in middle school physics teaching; 2) Identifying design guidelines and feasible learning goals for PD frameworks that leverage the resources of out of field teachers to facilitate professional growth of both out of field and in field teachers. Gateway to Physics consists of classroom and PD modules developed and carried out by the team both for 3-4 day professional development workshops (2019-2020, ~6 workshops, ~150 teachers) as well as for a network of professional learning communities (2021-2024, ~15 PLC's, 30h/60h, ~250 teachers). The design guidelines consider that in the national context, Biology and Chemistry teachers are more experienced than Physics teachers in engaging students in experimental research practices in the context of open-ended inquiry and are more familiar with the particle model, considered part of the chemistry middle school curriculum. On the other hand, they lack both a conceptual understanding of the physics subject matter, and experience with mathematical modeling. Thus, the PD modules we designed are inquiry-oriented to allow teachers to make use of their epistemic resources in experimental design. The topics were common physics classroom demonstrations (e.g. falling objects), but considered motion in the air or water, a context more relevant to biology and chemistry teachers, allowing them to reason with the particle model, instead the simplified context of objects in vacuum. As the analytical mathematical derivations are beyond the scope of middle school physics, we designed a short (4 h) computational modeling module to derive theory-based explanations. Learners were required merely to alter a prewritten code and reflect, to conceptualize the meaning of the code. The teachers experienced the modules as learners, discussed the underlying pedagogical strategies, shared classroom experiences with community members, and discussed responses to challenges emerging from the field.
To facilitate professional growth of both out and in field teachers, we incorporated interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation activities into the network of Gateway to Physics PLCs that has taken place since 2021. These activities follow design guidelines to facilitate argumentation in which learners critically examine and seek to resolve their different perspectives, with an eye to encouraging teachers from different disciplinary backgrounds to articulate and negotiate their respective epistemologies.

Research

Two studies, conducted with Dr. Elon Langbeheim and David Perl, focused on the incorporation of a computational component in short inquiry projects in the PD workshops. We found that even within this short interaction with the computational module teachers, with and without prior programming experience, expressed confidence in modeling the phenomena at hand. However, teachers’ prior experience with programming was strongly related to their self-efficacy to integrate the computational component in classrooms.
David Perl, a PhD student, co-advised with Prof. Baruch Schwarz, from the Hebrew University, is conducting in-depth examinations of teachers' discourse to examine the relations between the group composition, the type of discourse that develops (e.g., deliberative, disputative, consensual), and the learning outcomes (e.g., enhancement of epistemic practices). In a Science Education paper we report how the instructional design helped shape interactions and power relations among teachers as well as expand dialogic argumentation that combined mechanistic and experimental reasoning with theory-based reasoning. A coding tool was developed to examine both the dialogic and epistemic aspects of teachers’ discourse across many groups. By juxtaposing these two features, we show how the dialogic characteristics of the discourse (i.e., the type of talk) enhance epistemic practices and enriches the physics discourse, which is commonly overpowered by the theoretical approach to reasoning and investigation. We also show, using the boundary-crossing perspective, how the participants, biology teachers, used various boundary objects to facilitate the implementation of inquiry in physics (e.g. teachers investigated phenomena related to school physics but used their knowledge of microscopic interactions or experimental practices imported from biology instruction to investigate them). Finaly, we have shown that heterogeneous groups of teachers (i.e., with physics and biology backgrounds) produced, on average, more deliberative and epistemically rich dialogues compared to homogeneous groups (i.e., only physics or only biology). However, this average advantage masked considerable variation: A hierarchical cluster analysis identified a distinct cluster - composed exclusively of heterogeneous groups - that exhibited significantly more productive dialogues. A follow-up analysis indicated that participants in deliberative heterogeneous groups tended to challenge each other directly and how direct challenges created space for deliberation in heterogeneous groups. These studies improve our understanding of Out of Field and In Field teachers’ epistemic practices and the relations between argumentation and epistemic development.

The network of Gateway to Physics professional learning communities served also in another study focused on better introducing the concept of energy as a crosscutting concept. Researchers have suggested curricular approaches that focus on how energy forms can be converted into internal energy. Along these lines, we developed a novel 2-dimensional particles-and-springs simulation of a bouncing solid, depicting the transformation of macroscopic mechanical energy into internal energy as the solid comes to rest, as well as an accompanying instructional module guiding students in exploring the dependence of irreversibility on the number of particles. MSc student Efrat Blau Barak, co-advised with Prof. Boaz Katz, studies teachers’ PD with respect to the integration of this novel approach to teaching energy in middle school.

Our thanks to the Eddie and Jules Trump Family Foundation, to the Israeli science foundation and the Ministry of Education for their support of the project.