Shawn M. Bullock, Ph.D.
shawn@shawnbullock.ca
Posts tagged Physics Education Research
Canadian Association of Physicists’ Congress 2010
Jun 8th
I was pleased to attend the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Physicsits.
The title of my talk was “Constructing Knowledge about Teaching and Learning Physics.”
Click here to download the PowerPoint presentation.
My thanks to all who attended.
Problem Solving in the Physics Classroom (OAPT 2010)
Apr 30th
On Friday, April 30 2010, I presented an invited workshop entitled Problem Solving in the Physics Classroom at the annual meeting of the Ontario Association of Physics Teachers. The abstract to the session follows:
As physics teachers, we can readily agree that our students should be able to solve challenging and meaningful physics problems. At the same time, many students report that framing a problem is the most difficult task that they encounter in both high school and undergraduate physics courses. In this hands-on workshop, participants will explore a number of research-based approaches to engaging students with a variety of problem-solving techniques. Some of the topics to be explored include the nature of a problem, problem classification, planning for problem solving, collaborative learning, and the importance of self-monitoring during problem solving. The workshop will provide an experience for participants to do a variety of problems, using the techniques that will be presented, with a view to thinking about how these techniques might be implemented in a physics classroom.
Click here to download the PowerPoint presentation. Click here to download a PDF version of the handout.
Thank you to all who attended.
National Association for Research in Science Teaching 2010
Apr 1st
On Monday, March 22, 2010, I presented a paper titled Beyond “repeating the textbook” and “problem-solving”: Teacher candidates talk about learning to teach physics. The abstract to the paper follows:
The way that science teachers learn to teach is profoundly influenced by the effects of what Lortie (1975) called the “apprenticeship of observation.” Teacher candidates’ long experiences as students in schools serve as a powerful acculturation into a dominant culture of teaching and learning. Science teacher candidates come to pre-service teacher education program with a default set of ideas about what science teaching and learning look and feel like. This paper is an in-depth study of how physics teacher candidates’ visions of teaching physics develops over the course of a B.Ed. program with a particular emphasis on how they construct professional knowledge during field experiences and in the context of a physics curriculum methods course. The results indicate that the practicum, a familiar and often unquestioned feature of teacher education, tends to encourage candidates to adopt conservative views of education. Attention to student-centred, active-learning pedagogy in a methods course, however, has the potential to disrupt many assumptions about teaching and learning. This paper considers the notion that coursework need not be perceived by teacher candidates as irrelevant to their development as teachers. A coherent pedagogy of teacher education can help candidates to reframe their understandings of how to teach.
Thank you to everyone who attended the presentation.
Download the paper | Download the audio podcast (21:48)
EDGE Conference 2009
Oct 16th
The EDGE Conference 2009: Inspiration and Innovation in Teaching and Teacher Education was held in St. John’s, Newfoundland from October 14-16, 2009. I presented a selection of findings from my doctoral dissertation in a paper called Challenging the cultural routines of teaching and learning: Lessons from a physics methods course.
The abstract for the paper:
Teacher candidates know how to mimic the surface-level features of teaching they have witnessed over many years, yet it is unlikely that they have ever considered the complex pedagogical decisions made by teachers every day. The relevance of this extensive prior exposure of teacher behaviour to how teacher candidates learn to teach has received little consideration in efforts to improve preservice teacher education. The data provide considerable evidence that how a methods course is taught can be a significant catalyst that encourages teacher candidates to carefully examine, in deep rather than superficial ways, their prior assumptions about teaching as they construct professional knowledge from experiences in a preservice teacher education program.
Thanks to all those who attended the presentation.