Pathway –24/7 Online Pedagogical Assistance for Teachers of Physics
Dean Zollman & Brian Adrian
Kansas State University, 116 Cardwell Hall, Manhattan, KS 66506; 785-532-1824; fax 785-532-6806;
Scott Stevens, & Michael Christel Carnegie Mellon University
The Physics Teaching Web Advisory (Pathway) is a research and development effort to demonstrate the ability to address issues of many physics teachers via the Web. Pathway’s “Synthetic Interviews” are a unique way to engage inexperienced teachers in a natural language dialog about effective teaching of physics. These virtual conversations and related video materials are now providing pre-service and out-of-field in-service teachers with much needed professional development, and well-prepared teachers with new perspectives on teaching physics. In effect Pathway is a dynamic digital library and goes beyond creating a collection of teaching and learning materials. It provides continuously improving assistance and expertise for teachers, all of which is related to the results of contemporary physics education research. The database is a growing digital library and now contains about 6,000 different recorded answers and over 10,000 question/answer pairs. Pathway is available at http://www.physicspathway.org
Supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants 0455772 & 0455813.
Showing posts with label invited. Show all posts
Showing posts with label invited. Show all posts
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Zollman, AAPT Summer 2009 Invited
Interactions between the Art & Science of Physics Learning-Teaching
Dean Zollman
“Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner, put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and in the way he understands it,…”* Long before physics education research began studying how students learn physics, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) expressed much of the goals of physics education research. Teaching is the art of realizing our students are not us and understanding how they learn topics which came easy to us. Some “natural” teachers seem to do this automatically and we can learn from how they do it. At the same time, research on the teaching-learning process can go a long way toward helping all of us understand how the student understands physics. This interplay between the art (what some teachers do naturally) and the science (physics education research) is the foundation for the continual improvement of physics education.
* Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author , 1848 English translation, Princeton University Press, 1998, available on Google Books.
Dean Zollman
“Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner, put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and in the way he understands it,…”* Long before physics education research began studying how students learn physics, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) expressed much of the goals of physics education research. Teaching is the art of realizing our students are not us and understanding how they learn topics which came easy to us. Some “natural” teachers seem to do this automatically and we can learn from how they do it. At the same time, research on the teaching-learning process can go a long way toward helping all of us understand how the student understands physics. This interplay between the art (what some teachers do naturally) and the science (physics education research) is the foundation for the continual improvement of physics education.
* Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author , 1848 English translation, Princeton University Press, 1998, available on Google Books.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)