07 summer - katie b, dana
constant vs. not constant motion

This summer meeting was a difficult one. At the previous spring meeting, we had started to discuss starting over fresh on our lesson study. This included switching groups around and actually attacking a physics lesson rather than our more familiar chemistry. Dana and Kate both were going to be teaching an integrated physical science class the coming year, and we decided to broaden our horizons and stretch ourselves to work on a lesson about motion. Looking back, this was a huge topic to approach. We started with “motion”, and with the help of a resource teacher, started to narrow the focus until we ended with a clean, simple learning goal (see goal posters attached below). This was not easy; we struggled with content, with writing a learning goal and differentiating it from student activities, and with organizing our thoughts. Once we managed to focus our ideas and truly understand the content we wanted to teach, we had a moment of fear and realization—how many times had we taught this and not really understood it ourselves? How many misconceptions had we taught our students? It was hurtful to our pride and our professionalism to realize this.

These challenges helped us to feel invested in this lesson study, as well as dedicated to making sure that, as we taught it, we were achieving our goal. After spending so much time struggling, we hit our stride, created teacher notes and student materials for both constant and not constant motion, and went back into our bag of tricks from previous meetings and pulled out Diagnoser questions to use as pre and post-tests. We finally had a lesson plan that we were proud of, and had the confidence to implement it immediately in the classroom.

documents and resources

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