What Physics Education Research Has to Say to All Teachers

Last Friday, I attended the eLearning Strategies Symposium, sponsored by CLRN and CUE. The opening keynote speaker was Dr. Eric Mazur, Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard. I had been very familiar with Dr. Mazur's work, not in physics, but in Physics Education Research (PER), though I had not previously seen him speak. (I wrote a little about his book, Peer Instruction, here.) His keynote was titled "Confessions of a Converted Lecturer", and it inspired me to write about how the lessons of PER can and should be applied more widely.

Many of you know that I taught high school physics for sixteen years before taking my current position. (I intend someday to return to teaching physics, so I don't think of myself as an ex-physics teacher.) In that role, I was a member of AAPT, attended a number of their conferences, and followed the journals. In the late 90's, as I was starting my career, Physics Education Research was getting off the ground as well, led by researchers such as Lillian McDermott, Joe Redish, David Hestenes, Richard Hake, Eric Mazur, and many others, mostly taking off from the seminal earlier work of Arnold Arons. PER explored how people learn physics best, and found that it was NOT through listening to lectures. Researchers found that students who were taught through interactive engagement strategies learned more and retained it longer than students who were taught through traditional lectures. These researchers developed more and more tools for turning introductory college lectures into interactive classes. Some of these strategies were developed by Mazur, and published as Peer Instruction. In 2012, several of these teachers and researchers were featured in an NPR interview, to which you can listen here.

The vast majority of PER took place at the college level; I was one of the few high-school teachers to take an interest. Yet, the general results of PER were what high-school teachers have known for years: at best, lecturing produces small and shallow learning results. For deeper, more significant understanding, students need to interact, engage with the content, and learn through inquiry. My physics classes were always taught with inquiry methods, to the point where my students got frustrated with having to discover everything for themselves. ("Why won't you just tell us the answer?") I was able to take many of the tools produced by PER and either use them directly in my classes or adapt them to be more appropriate for high-school students. Most notably, I used McDermott's Tutorials in Introductory Physics; some strategies from Mazur; Ranking Tasks by O'Kuma, Maloney, and Hieggelke; RealTime Physics by Sokolove, Laws, and Thornton; and textbooks by Randy Knight, the first texts written with the results of PER in mind.

Now in my current role as ToSA for Technology and Learning, I find myself learning about 21st-century skills and helping to support the Common Core transition for our district. The more I learn about the skill expectations embedded within CCSS and the instructional shifts required, the more I find myself realizing that they are some of the same ones identified by PER over the last 15 years. CCSS, at its most basic, is about having students learn from texts (broadly understood) rather than from teachers. This is inquiry-based learning, and it's not just for science classes any more. Teachers in all subject areas are expected to guide their students in examining materials and drawing their own conclusions: constructivism writ large.

Creative Commons licensed image from MIT OCW
ocw.mit.edu/high-school/physics/

To which, PER says, "It's about time!"

Dr. Mazur's keynote speech from last Friday will be posted on the eLearns.org website shortly. When it is available, I highly recommend that you take some time to watch it. There is some physics in the talk, but don't focus on that. Focus on the lessons for education at all levels, in all disciplines, that Physics Education Research can provide.