Emily H. van Zee

Making Science Teaching and Learning Visible Through Web-Based “Snapshots of Practice”

Documentary websites known as “snapshots of practice” provide vivid examples of teachers’ inquiries into issues they have formulated in the context of their own teaching practices and students’ learning. Designed with assistance from Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, snapshots of practice can be accessed in the K–12 section of the Gallery of Teaching and Learning (http://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org). Analysis of prospective teachers’ reflections on science-related snapshots of practice indicate that this use of technology enhanced their understanding of inquiry-based approaches to instruction. The paper also illustrates how prospective teachers used an electronic toolkit, http://www.cfkeep.org, to construct their own snapshots of practice in order to represent what they had learned in a course on methods of teaching science in elementary school.

Encouraging Prospective Teachers to Engage Friends and Family in Exploring Physical Phenomena

Involving people outside of a science course can foster learning for students enrolled in the course. Assignments involving friends and family provided such opportunities in an undergraduate physics course for prospective teachers. These assignments included reflecting upon prior experiences, interviewing friends and family members, engaging them in exploring physical phenomena, and teaching them with relevant websites. The six strands of science learning articulated in Learning Science in Informal Environments (National Research Council in Learning science in informal environments: People, places, and pursuits. National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 2009) provided a framework for analyzing the prospective teachers’ responses. Through such assignments, the instructor created opportunities for the prospective teachers to use and build upon knowledge learned in class as well as to gain confidence and experience in facilitating the learning of others.

Upper‐Division Activities That Foster “Thinking Like A Physicist”

In this targeted poster session, curriculum developers presented their favorite upper‐division activity to small groups of session participants. The developers and participants were asked to identify hidden curriculum goals related to “thinking like a physicist” and discuss how the different styles of activities might help students achieve these goals.

Documenting and Interpreting Ways to Engage Students in ‘Thinking Like a Physicist’

The Paradigms in Physics Program at Oregon State University has adapted a variety of interactive pedagogies to engage students in ‘thinking like a physicist.’ Video recordings of class sessions document what the students and instructor say and do. This paper discusses development of narrative interpretations of such videos. Examples are drawn from two detailed narratives of activities during which the main ideas emerged during the wrap‐up discussions rather than during the tasks that the students had been doing in their small groups. The goal of these ‘compare and contrast’ wrap‐up discussions was to help the students envision connections among geometric and algebraic representations of the mathematics they would be using during the coming weeks of instruction in quantum mechanics. The purpose of the narratives is to provide examples of wrap‐up discussions with commentary about ways in which the instructor was choosing to guide this process.