Modeling totally revamped my teaching and gave me a way to make my students mentally active in class. It also gave me a cadre of like minded physics teachers with which to collaborate. This group is still my best source of information, advice, inspiration, etc. Physics teachers are often isolated in their schools. The Modeling workshop freed me from isolation.

Another very valuable experience was my two years of teaching in Arkansas with Teach For America. I learned a great deal about the inequities in education across the United States that might never have been revealed to me if I hadn’t joined TFA.

My teacher training program, although ranked very high nationally at the time I was a student, was not a very valuable experience. It was theoretical instead of practical and not very rigorous. I still don’t understand why strategies like Modeling, which has an excellent track record and is research based, aren’t a part of teacher training programs.

The worst aspect of the program was the interminable courses that were supposed to prepare us to teach but consisted of nothing more than professors lecturing to us on the benefits of hands-on, student-centered classes. The worst was the educational psychology course. it could easily have been tailored to helping us to understand student development (Piaget), but was obviously not geared toward teachers in the least.

The most valuable things I’ve learned over the course of my career have come from two associations. The first was with the Exploratorium Teacher Institute in San Francisco, where I learned the importance of building physical models for students using cheap materials that they could put their hands on. I was one of the contributing editors to the original Science Snackbook and Paul Doherty and Don Rathjen were my inspirations (still are)!

The second association is with the Modeling Workshop Program at Arizona State University. I spent two summers learning the Modeling Method from Rich McNamara and Kathy Andre Harper at the University of Maryland and St. Albans School in Washington, DC and it has changed my teaching forever. It provided a framework for all that was missing in my teaching: a way to be sure students are engaged and successfully building their own mental models while working together to reach a consensus about the experiments on which they are basing their understanding. Modeling also provided the pedagogical framework to allow me to develop my own curriculum materials and remain true to the idea that students are capable of constructing their own knowledge if I will only “shut up and listen” and “get out of the way”. Since those initial workshops I have learned even more from other Modelers (Larry Dukerich and Mark Schober) and from the many teachers who have participated in workshops I have led. Professional development is an ongoing process and even an old dog like me learns new tricks every year!

Missing were a few things. Paid summer workshops, introduction to professional meetings, research opportunities, results of brain research and how to integrate it into practice, how to deal with the mound of special education and 504 work, connections to higher ed and sending schools, and how to deal with make-work/non-teaching work (study hall, cafeteria supervision, . . .)

My most valuable experiences in education, summer workshops at NASA Ames and ChemCom. The ability to network with veteran teachers has helped in the development of innovative curriculum and the sharing of strategies when working with students.

What is missing today? The ability to have a fluid and dynamic curriculum. Having to adhere to strict pacing guides and preparing students to take a state mandated test that does not accurrately show the knowledge and practical application of the course. Additionally, there is no follow up training or support for an annual multiple-choice exam.

With the changes in priorities in curriculum and testing, encouraging critical thinking of students has become a lost art. The role of critical thinking and problems solving is the ability to reason, the assessment of content and its realtionship to the problem, and developing connections to understanding content. This is an area that I have struggled with in the classroom. I have developed a variety of alternative formative and summative assessments to encourage critical thinking.

What were the least valuable?
All of my theory based education classes, including student teaching as I did not have a good teacher to student teach for (they were not rehired the following year). My practicum experiences as teacher’s aides included basically copying and grading papers with litle/no time for observation or working with students.

What was missing that you found you need TODAY in your work?
Learning how to manage all of the things that are asked of me at the same time. I have 200+ students with classes of 32-33 and am struggling to keep up with all of the paperwork, grading, and “extra stuff” that is not actually “teaching”.

I need a better sense of how kids learn, why they have troubles with specific concept and what specific interventions could be used. BEtter yet, teachers need a connection to science education researchers, and to university science types. This would allow us to get needed information on more of an as needed basis.

Perhaps because I was coming from industry and hadn’t done much of this before, I found the portfolio useful in articulating my thoughts and feelings about teaching. Even now, after teaching for seven years, the reflections still resonate with me. And I still actively seek out student voices in my classroom each year to gain their perspective on learning. I think that both these exercises are still helpful to “frame” my overall teaching philosophy.

I thought ed psych was a useful course just to help me realize the relatively dismal state of educational research compared to the quality of research I was used to as a working chemist. That said, I often wish that I could have taken the course after teaching a couple of years because the ideas presented were all “academic” until I got into the classroom.

At the time, Bryn Mawr was offering a course called New Pedagogies in Science and Mathematics. It was a seminar course with speakers coming each week from various educational backgrounds to talk about how they were teaching math or science. It was helpful for me to begin to think flexibly about how I might teach a course.

Right now, I wish I had more knowledge about how to write assessments. I didn’t get this at all in my teacher training. It is difficult to know what I should be trying to assess and how. There are so many levels that one can approach assesments and I can’t seem to find any core of information that gets at what is most important.

Of course student teaching was the most helpful of all. I don’t think there is any way that my classroom experience as a student could have given me a sense of what it is like to be in charge of five classes of 10th graders.

It is interesting to compare teacher training to a graduate research program for a PhD. (say in chemistry). I felt like the process of graduate research was very similar to what I ended up doing as a industrial research chemist and the prerequisite coursework meshed with the research. You could see why you were required to take the courses as you needed them to do your research. The teaching certification program was not at all like that.

As I think about it, the comparison is intriguing. As one who hired PhD chemists in industry, I often told them that the most important part of getting a PhD was not the information they learned but that they learned how to learn. As an industrial research chemist, their jobs often entailed learning a new area up to the current state-of-the-art and then get going with research contributing to the field. I’m not sure if there is an equivalent assumption in teaching certification. Could a teaching certificate be seen as the begining rather than the end of an educational process?

The format of the workshop was to work through a high school physics curriculum while alternating in roles as student and teachers. To “play student” well, you had to think about how students would think and react to the lessons. To prepare you for the student role, reading and instruction were provided about typical preconceptions students bring to the class with them . When you were acting in the teacher role, others teachers became your students and gave you more realistic practice.

Every time the group met again, we shared classroom stories and worked through challenges. This was especially valuable because we saw each other off and on for two years, all had the same training and were attempting to teach in the same way. I stay in touch with my instructors and some of these teachers to this day. Through the modeling instruction program, I remain in touch with hundreds of teachers nationally through an active list serve. Connecting me with this community helped to break my isolation in my own classroom.

The curriculum of the modeling workshop included use of technology for labs at several different levels, so I got valuable experience and training.

Finally, the workshop completely transformed my approach to teaching to the extent that I never lecture, but instead guide my students to think and construct concepts through labs and graduated exercises. The workshop gave me valuable tools and practice to make the student discourse productive so that I had a better idea what the students were thinking and how to intervene.

The modeling workshop is the most effective teacher training I have ever received. Nothing else in my experience even comes close. It is responsible for me remaining a high school teacher today. In addition to the teaching methods themselves that I learned in the workshop, I think the things that set it apart are the practical hands-on simulation of a classroom, intensive nature, supportive community and ongoing follow-up that enabled me to be successful.

Just yesterday, a student returned from college and visited my class. He gave a spontaneous testimonial and said that he felt much better prepared than his peers in his physics class. Many of them were more mathematically adept and prepared, but he understood the concepts and could explain what was supposed to happen. That was giving him an advantage. I attribute this type of success to what I learned from the modeling workshop.

In the end, I think I would have preferred to spend time each semester in a school with science teachers and without the pressure to just step in an perform like a master on the first day of my final college semester. Contrary to popular opinion, “being thrown to the wolves” is not a good way of attracting and inspiring future teachers. In fact, I think teaching is the only occupation that uses this method; I have never met a surgeon who began leading an operating room on his or her first day.

In summary, my teacher training program could have improved with more technology training, more on-the-job experience, and less lecture.