The Physics Education Component of PeTeL – Personalized teaching and learning center

Leading team:

Prof. Edit Yerushalmi
Prof. Emeriti Bat Sheva Eylon
Dr. Giora Alexandron
Dr. Asaf Bar-Yosef
Michal Walter

Project team:

Tamar Aviv
Noga Ben-Simchon
Matan Brunovski
Yona Yael Chalamish
Leilah Dafrawi
Arik Gilboa
Oren Guilatt
Ziv Gvirzer
Noam Haber
Dafna Har Sagi
Eliran Hen
Matan Hertz
Abed Masalha
Tanya Nazaretsky
Gilit Porat
Lior Yusov
Gilit Porat
Ayelet Shaked
David Shani
Elad Yacobson
Ariel Ziv

Secretariat and Administration:

Rina Kimchi

Brief

In 2016, a large-scale research, development and implementation program was launched in PeTeL Physics. In the first phase, a leading group was formed, comprised of expert teachers, technology experts and researchers from the Department of Science Teaching at the Weizmann Institute. This group developed a preliminary repository of interactive content which provided the basis for the version made available to the teachers who would later join. In the second phase, the leading group mentored a teachers’ Professional Learning Community (PLC) of early adapters, who employed the initial version of the environment in their classrooms and collected data in order to improve the environment and content. In the third phase, the environment was made available to physics teachers across the country.

In the year 2021 there are 460 teachers who actively use PeTeL Physics, and about 20,000 students are registered from more than 600 classrooms. From August to October 2020, over 250 teachers participated in PeTel workshops, with many of them continuing professional development activities in PeTeL Physics communities.

Development and Implementation

The unique architecture of the PeTeL environment integrates shared content repositories, a Learning Management System (LMS), and a variety of sharing mechanisms between teachers, including elements inspired by social networks which encourage swift and convenient connectivity between teachers.

The content repositories include:

A Shared Repository of items, shared by professional content developers and selected teachers, which are tagged and cataloged according to the syllabus. The teachers may share items to the repository, search for content, transfer items to their personal teaching space and critique them for the benefit of other teachers. There are currently about 630 interactive physics activities spanning the entire syllabus.

A Peer Environment, catalogued according to the teachers who shared the content. The environment enables teachers to share, view and copy teaching sequences from courses developed by their peers. The sequences are tagged according to their developers. There are currently more than 150 teaching sequences (courses) in PeTel, were shared by teachers and inspiring them..

In the last five years, implementation aiming at personalized teaching, accompanied by the PeTeL environment, was carried out by about 500 physics teachers: some from the physics teachers’ PLCs and some from other frameworks (e.g., the Physics Mentors, the Rothschild Weizmann program, Hemda, Mashar). The teachers implemented personalized teaching sequences from PeTeL customized to their classes, employed data about students’ knowledge provided by PeTeL, and followed lesson plans shared by their peers and supplemented with their considerations; This was done simultaneously with the professional development of 15 “mentor teachers” who accompanied these teachers techno-pedagogically.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the scope of implementation was increased to also service the physics national teacher center. Teachers have participated actively in many activities conducted by the physics PeTeL team, and the teachers have made extensive use of PeTeL’s resources among their students.

Research

The PhD thesis of Dr. Asaf Bar-Yosef, supervised by Prof. Bat-Sheva Eylon, focused on about 195 physics teachers who accompanied their teaching with the PeTel environment for two years. The study dealt with the question of how digital environments promote personalized teaching and learning, in three contexts: interactive content design in PeTeL; the relationship between PeTeL’s architecture and how teachers function when in using it; and the practices of teachers who employed the environment in their classrooms. The research involved the development of the DPI model (Data-based teaching, Personal customization and Interactivity of the participants), which enables the characterization of content-development processes and teachers’ usage in digital environments. The DPI serves as a research tool to examine the degree of teaching and learning personalization enabled by the environment.

The study’s findings demonstrate the importance of collaboration between teachers using the environment to create multifaceted functioning: Teachers’ use of the sharing mechanisms mutually enriched their performance, both as consumers and producers. As designers, teachers have integrated items from PeTeL’s repositories with items that they created themselves, in diverse ways tailored to their personal teaching needs. in addition, the activities in PeTeL and its unique architecture have been found to be key factors in promoting personalized teaching and learning by teachers.

During the same two-year period, a study was conducted by Michal Walter, supervised by Prof. Bat-Sheva Eylon, Dr. Esther Bagno and Dr. Hana Berger, examining how to cultivate the considerations of physics teachers to promote “learning-centered” teaching and how to integrate diagnostic-based data into these considerations. The study was conducted in the physics teachers’ communities, and the results indicated changes in teachers’ learning knowledge, perceptions and attitudes, and teaching practices.

The group is currently conducting research for an MSc degree by Mr. Eliran Chen, supervised by Prof. Edit Yerushalmi and Dr. Giora Alexandron. The research involves the building of automatic diagnostic tools for teachers, which will provide information on performances of subgroups in the class that exhibit difficulties characterized by common content categories and skills. The research integrates the development of item assemblies on the basis of orderly task-analysis, identification of factors that underlie difficulties shared by large groups of students, and a comparative study on products anchored in the knowledge of teachers and experts.

Our thanks to Gideon and Hana Hamburger, to the Eddie and Jules Trump Family Foundation and the Ministry of Education for their support of the project.