Using Google+ Hangout to Discuss Physics Curriculum and Assessments

In this helpful blog post, high-school physics teacher Casey Rutherford describes how he set up a six-person virtual Professional Learning Community (PLC) of singleton physics teachers around the country, using Google+ Hangout to conduct weekly “in-person” discussions (this allows up to nine people to see each other and also view different types of documents). Rutherford’s group decided not to record its sessions to maintain confidentiality. 

The original impetus was a directive from Rutherford’s Minnesota school district to implement PLCs, which left him high and dry since he was the only teacher in his school teaching certain courses. Undaunted, he sent out a tweet asking for virtual PLC colleagues, got ten responses, and narrowed the group to six teachers who were teaching identical or almost-identical courses and were willing to commit to a weekly one-hour Thursday evening chat. The teachers’ schools are diverse: public schools in Minnesota, Iowa, and Pennsylvania, a private boarding school in Delaware, a private Jewish girls’ school in New York City, and a charter school in upstate New York. 

One of the group’s first steps was developing a common interim assessment for constant velocity motion, which several teachers proceeded to give to their students. Looking together at the results was informative – students surprised their teachers by applying a concept they had learned in a different part of the course, even though it wasn’t mentioned in the question. The group fell into a routine of having members “bring” student work to each meeting for them to examine and discuss. 

“Thus,” says Rutherford, “whenever I give a quiz I scan or take a picture of some examples that represent common or interesting mistakes students made on the quiz. Others do the same. Not only do we get the chance to see how each others’ students are responding to similar questions (it really helps here that we all use, at the core, the Modeling Instruction curriculum), but we can discuss how to best help students avoid pitfalls and misunderstandings. A typical night starts with a check-in on how things are going and, often, advice for someone who is struggling with something. Then someone posts a link to a quiz and we take a minute or two to look over it. Someone notices something, and discussion ensues. As discussion slows on one quiz someone posts another. There is no rule or defined procedure here, but it seems to work well. Often these quizzes lead to discussions on instructional techniques.” Rutherford took one idea from the discussion and tried it with his students the next day and was “blown away by how much they liked it.” 

“It’s humbling and sometimes embarrassing to share work that your students produced that is not perfect,” he continues. “A great PLC meets those imperfections with empathy and advice rather than with judgment. We’re all in this together, and all students make mistakes. In fact, one thing that I have become more convinced of as a result of our meetings is that the very process of making mistakes is essential to learning. Lots of research in science education, physics in particular, points to the idea that in order to learn and retain scientific reasoning, students must first wrestle with the dissonance between their own thinking and scientific explanations.” 

How did six months of virtual collaboration change Rutherford’s teaching? He says he’s changed some unit placements, improved the way he teaches specific topics, added representations to help students visualize concepts, gained new insights into students’ misconceptions, and increased his “big-picture view of learning physics through a cyclic treatment of the various models (rather than treating topics as isolated units). I can only imagine what further meetings will lead to!”

“A Physics PLC: Collaboration at a Distance” by Casey Rutherford in Learning and Physics, Feb. 16, 2013, 

http://learningandphysics.wordpress.com/2013/02/16/a-physics-plc-co...

From the Marshall Memo #473