Active Physics Teacher Community

University Of Massachusetts Boston, Dorchester MA

Investigators

Abstract

The number of students taking physics in the US is increasing because state requirements and the success of the Physics First and Physics for All Americans movements encourages schools to teach physics in the ninth grade. Schools that adopt these initiatives must move from a model of teaching academically high performing 11th and 12th grade students to a model that works for all 9th grade students. The demographic changes and the increased diversity present challenges to physics teachers. To address this challenge, the traditional professional development model is augmented by an online professional development platform - the Active Physics Teacher Community - that provides just-in-time support for teachers as they are enacting targeted units of the Active Physics curriculum. Teachers are helped in preparing lessons by providing them with formal instruction related to the lessons they are teaching in the classroom. In addition, a moderated forum allows teachers to share classroom experiences, successes and questions with other teachers using the same lessons and the same curriculum and to compare their experiences with other teachers who have used the lessons. Thus teachers are supported both in learning the content and also in representing and formulating the subject in a way to make it comprehensible to others. The study will be done with teachers in large urban centers using four units of Active Physics. One unit of Active Chemistry is also tested to determine the generalizability of the professional development model. In addition, the materials developed and lessons learned are archived in the Active Physics Teachers' Resource Center, a web-based interactive repository to be hosted by the publisher.