In the fall semester of 2024, I taught grade 11 physics for the first time in many years. I was surprised by my students - surprised by their weak math skills and the disconnect between their learning habits and mark expectations. These students were noticeably different from my students of the past. Was this a lingering pandemic hangover or part of a gradual change that I only noticed because of my absence from physics teaching? Whatever the reason, I was caught off guard and not able to adjust. So this semester, I decided to make some changes to meet this challenge and help my students better develop their learning habits and physics skills.
Understanding versus execution Long time readers of this newsletter will know that I am a big fan of conceptual learning. Fifteen years ago, my school adopted a cooperative-group, inquiry-based approach to our physics courses. Even though I used very successful models from physics education research to guide my lesson design, my first attempt at the grade 11 course was a bit of a disaster. My students seemed to do fine with our daily investigations, but their test results were terrible. I even had to go back and reteach the entire energy unit. While the conceptual approach helped their understanding, it did not help them with the execution of their skills. They quickly became bogged down in their work as the challenge level increased. I had to make a lot of changes.
The amazing and expanding time for assessments Fast forward roughly ten years. We now have a well-balanced physics program for conceptual and skill development. But over this time, I noticed students becoming more risk-averse and developing bad habits for assessments, causing them to take huge amounts of time for “simple” questions. Now the blame game is too easy to play. This could be caused by marks pressure for university, special education accommodations that hinder rather than help, or declining math and reading skills. Whatever the reason, the wheels of learning seemed to turn well enough during class but would grind to a halt during assessments. Quizzes were becoming full period endeavors!
A new hope for skill and habit development So what can be done? Rather than spending our energy wishing for our past students to return, let’s figure out how best to serve the students we have. I have written about aspects of skill and habit development over the years for the OAPT. Interested readers can delve into our archives for a bit of background:
My solution for this semester builds upon the work I described in these articles and adds four new elements to my grade 11 course: a habit metacognition assignment, skill builder drills that start each class, skill videos for extra help, and improved training for tests.
How are your habits? To improve, students need to reflect on their learning habits. This is the starting point for change. I modified a habit-focused metacognition assignment that I wrote for our grade 12s and asked students to complete it during the first week of the course.
This is the first homework in our motion unit handbook, which helps students connect their current learning habits with desired mark results. Students calculate a “habit score” and then look up in a chart the grade I have roughly assigned to students with this score.
The example shown above was very common from my current group of students: high mark aspirations and middling habits. Recognizing this disconnect is the first step to help students improve.
A biased perception of skill and effort Many students have a glaring disconnect between marks expectations and learning habits. But before we “tut, tut” and mutter “students these days…” we should reflect on the psychology of learning. No student (or teacher for that matter) can see the considerable work and effort that other people invest to perform at a high level. After all, we are busy living our own best life. Occasionally, we do notice the high-performing student waltz into class, write the test quickly, and do well. For us spectators, the work seems easy for this student, completing their tasks with little apparent effort. We don’t see the tremendous effort expended behind the scenes, often at home but sometimes right in front of us, as if we are blind to it. This must be a kind of cognitive bias, but I have never found a label for it — maybe the “talent bias”? As a result, we say those students are just “naturals” or “smarter” than others. I remember well from my teenage years after piano performances, I would get angry when people offered a compliment saying “how talented you must be.” I wanted to impolitely reply, “do you know how &*$% hard I worked to do that? Do you?” I felt the “talent” label really devalued my efforts. Now getting back to our classrooms, I suggest that well-meaning students with weaker habits often try to emulate the stronger student, at least the part of the performance they perceive and likely envy. So the weaker student, just like the well-practiced student, imitates their small effort and expects a kind of magic to happen like it appears to for the stronger student. This is what they see the strong student doing (little effort), so this is what they will do. And, when the inevitable poor results arrive, the cognitive defense mechanisms go up: “oh, I’m not really interested in this” or “I’ve never really been good at this kind of stuff (so there is no point in trying)”. Somehow, we have to help students break through mental barriers like these and begin the heavy lifting, the hard work, of skill building.
A skills workout I explain to students that skills are short tasks or things that we do repeatedly in the practice of physics. It’s like practicing your layups in basketball or dribbling the soccer ball. In fact, the process of learning is often better exemplified in team sports than it is in our high school classrooms! What does the coach start each practice with? Skills! The goal is for skills to operate fluently, meaning they can be executed quickly and accurately with little thinking. To support this in my physics class, I added skill builder activities that start almost every lesson. Students are presented with a series of similar, short questions, and are challenged to complete as many as possible in one minute of time. I challenge them to work as quickly as possible, but only as quickly as they are able to work accurately. Here are some examples of these from our motion unit:
These slides show the original questions along with the answers (usually to the right). Skill builders can be found near the start of each lesson in our unit PowerPoints. The second page of the motion unit handbook is where we record our skill builder work. At the end of a skill builder, I ask students to give themselves a score based on how many they correctly answered out of the number they attempted. I don't collect their skill builder results; I simply circulate through the room during the minute of time. All students participate and seem to do so earnestly.
Skill videos The next element I have added to support their skill development is a series of explanation videos for key skills from each lesson. Sometimes you need to hear a person talk through a skill. Every skill has a lot of implicit knowledge that guides its use, knowledge that becomes invisible as the skill becomes fluent. This knowledge is hard to recognize and articulate by the teacher. After 27 years, I am still discovering things that I do and think that are part of my physics skills but have never explained. In the videos and in the design of our lessons, I have attempted to break down skills carefully, identify the hidden knowledge behind their operation, and provide opportunities for students to practice. These details can go by fast during a lesson or in-class activity, so their careful exposition in a video is a valuable resource. Here are the motion and forces video playlists:
Immediate, regular feedback Skill development doesn’t work well in a vacuum. If students are diligently practising incorrect or inefficient habits, they won’t improve. With each set of daily homework, my students receive two rounds of feedback. We post the solutions to all the homework on our course website. The final step of our homework process is to compare your work against the solutions and use a different colour (we call this “blue-penning”) to make corrections and improvements. The student’s corrected work is submitted at the start of the next class.
After the lesson gets going and students are working in their groups, I spend about ten minutes reviewing their submitted work to see how carefully they made their improvements. I very quickly circle anything that needs further work and return the set of homework to the class using a “G”, “Y”, or “R” traffic light feedback scheme. They record the feedback in their progress charts and are responsible for making further improvements by the next class.
This process allows students to regularly compare their work to high-quality models or to get unstuck if they are not sure about something. I remind them that the “G”, “Y”, and “R”s are not marks, but rather feedback to help them to improve. They reflect on their work at the end of each unit and propose a “homework mark”.
This might not be Ministry of Education gospel, but it is extremely effective because it encourages work completion, continuous improvement, and attention to detail in skill development.
Test preparation I have been meaning to write an article about teaching students how to study. It is my long experience that when you ask students to study for a quiz, test, or exam, students do all sorts of crazy, unproductive things. As part of my package of studying advice, I talk about skill preparation. Students begin by identifying the skills they need for the assessment. We use a learning log to do this, a daily summary of the new skills and ideas introduced in each lesson. Our students use these in grades 9 and 10, and continue using them in grade 11, except that they are now responsible for identifying the skills themselves. Here is the sample entry we give them:
Studying should involve practicing skills with the goal of building their speed and accuracy. I encourage students to find practice in the homework they have already completed or to use the skill builder activities a second time — hopefully they will notice their scores improve!
Test writing A final component of our look at skills is their use in testing. Starting in grade 9, I teach students about my patented three-pass process for writing a quiz, test, or exam. The goal of this process is to go through the entire assessment three times and then you are done!
In the first pass, students read the assessment carefully; this is always done slowly and thoughtfully. Highlight! Underline! How many times have you missed one word, making your entire answer to a question wrong? Students sometimes want to skip this pass because they are panicking about getting the whole assessment done in time. However, the extra benefit of this first pass is that our brains start to work on the problems while we move on to read the next, making it a wise investment of time. Of course, if your tests and just too long, you will only reinforce the feeling of panic and encourage scattershot work habits during assessments.
The second pass through the assessment is when we answer the questions, executing our skills quickly and accurately. I emphasize how this work should be done at a quick speed — not rushed, but at your upper fluent speed. This is a bit like a musical performance: it might be swell that you can play all the notes of that Mozart piece, but if you perform it three times too slow, its not a successful musical performance. (Which makes it especially important for teachers to choose pieces that the vast majority of students can actually perform at our expected high standard in the time we provide them) I also caution students about bad habits during the second pass: don’t get bogged down when stuck on a question and don’t just sit there waiting for divine inspiration. Move on! I use lots of sound effects while describing this, “and the second pass, boom boom boom boom. You're using your skills quickly and accurately. Don’t let yourself get stuck.” This pass takes most of the assessment time.
Finally, during the third pass students double-check their work. This is done slowly and carefully. I prompt them to remember all the details that I highlighted in the feedback on their daily homework. Once the three passes are complete, you’ve done what you can - hand it in! This is what it means to give something a good, careful try. I don’t encourage students to sit there, stare at the page and grind things out to the fullest possible use of the assessment time. Three passes and done! I provide suggested timings for each pass, tailored for each assessment. For our first physics quiz:
And… how is the new semester going? Well. It is always hard to compare because every class is different in so many charming and unusual ways, and this is hardly a controlled experiment with large sample sizes. But I do observe that my students are handing in their quizzes and tests in the time provided and are doing well by my traditional standards. My IEP students are completing their assessments in the regular class time. (It is important to be mindful: IEP students with cognitive processing issues still need extra time. The training discussed here is meant to address other challenges that IEP students deal with.) Our motion unit test always has a surprise question thrown in. Here are some student responses from this semester:
Our goal is to help students become expert-like thinkers and practitioners of physics. With these changes to my course, I think I am better helping them with their first steps in this direction.
