05 summer - carey, anne, casey
conservation of energy, sans friction

This was the first time we watched video of each other teaching, and so we mostly watched for style. Though we may not have articulated it as such, the question we were answering was “how did you carry out the lesson?” Though this was helpful for consistency between each other, we didn’t address student understanding through video watching. One main difference was that Casey was able to do the “bowling ball demonstration”, but Carey and Anne did not. Although it didn’t foster much critical thinking, it was valuable in that it was really effective at grabbing students attention to get them engaged in the lesson.

Casey tried a razor pendulum activity as an assessment, in which a swinging pendulum gets cut by a razor at the bottom of its swing. Students were asked to calculate the landing point of the pendulum bob based on conservation of energy and projectile motion. Anne and Carey did not do this activity. While students were eventually successful in it, they struggled with finding a good baseline for gravitational energy and applying the concept of energy. The projectile motion aspect just compounded the difficulty, but didn't provide any insight into whether students understood the concept of conservation of energy. After reflecting upon the first year of this activity, in order to take the emphasis of I added in an option in which students could "buy" hints to help them solve the problem, at a cost to their final score.

documents and resources

• document – updated lesson plan for conservation of energy lesson sequence

(c) 2009 ronnster/oharanator productions