PHY 311 -- Teaching High School Physics
PHY 312 -- Teaching Physics from the Historical Perspective
(Inquiry!)
Physics Teacher Education Program
Illinois State University
Carl J. Wenning, Program Coordinator
Spring Semester 2007
(last updated 1/22/07 - added "themes" described in PHY 312 syllabus)
NOTE: Each of your lesson plans must be inquiry oriented.Your lesson plan should be for a lesson, not a lab. The latter is a separate assignment. See Levels of inquiry: Hierarchies of pedagogical practices and inquiry processes for a clear distinction between lesson at lab. See Teaching about the nature of science: Essential understandings and practical procedures for suggestions about how to incorporate Nature of Science activities in your lesson. (Please ask the course instructor to fix this hyperlink if it is missing when you read this. As this web page is being updated, the article is under development.)
This approach assumes that before beginning to plan a lesson, the teacher candidate will have:
Statement of Key Question(s): The goal most certainly should be inquiry oriented. The focus of each of your lesson plans should be on having students answer one or two key questions based on their use of inquiry practices. A teachers simply asking lots of questions does not an inquiry lesson make.
Salient Teacher and Student Behaviors: Students should be actively engaged in such things as hypothesizing, experimenting, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, and drawing conclusions based upon empirical evidence. Avoid expository lecture-based approaches.See the Inquiry Lesson Scoring Rubric for pertinent teacher and student behaviors as they relate to inquiry.
Student Performance Objectives: What, more specifically, are the students expected to know and be able to do at the end of the lesson? Including content knowledge, intellectual skills, and dispositions as appropriate. Your objectives should have readily observable behaviors or performance tasks. Students must be made aware of day-to-day objectives.
Alignment: The content, objectives, and goals of this lesson must align with Illinois Learning Standards, including "Applications of Learning." In a concise statement, explain how the lesson complies with the ILS directives.With which of the Illinois Learning Standards do your student performance objectives align, including Applications of Learning? Please cite similar to the following: 13A1c for ILS objectives and "Working in Groups" for Applications of Learning.
Anticipatory Set: You will want to link the current lesson with any previous lesson that is somehow related. (Recall that you are required to produce a series of two (2) lesson plans that flow one into the next.) The anticipatory set is included to ensure that the students are ready for this lesson as the next lesson in a series of lessons. These introductory activities focus student attention, provide for very brief practice on previous objectives, and develop readiness for the current lesson. Anticipatory set should be included among list of instructional activities.
Instructional Activities: List instructional activities that are planned that help students accomplish the stated objectives. Include estimated times for each activity. Activities could include any of the following:
| Rudimentary Skills | Basic Skills | Integrated Skills | Advanced Skills |
| Observing Collecting and recording data Drawing conclusions Communicating Classifying results Measuring metrically Estimating Decision making 1 Explaining Predicting |
Identifying variables Constructing a table of data Constructing a graph Describing relationships between variables Acquiring and processing data Analyzing investigations Defining variables operationally Designing investigations Experimenting Hypothesizing Decision making 2 Developing models Controlling variables |
Identifying problems to investigate Designing and conducting scientific investigations Using technology and math during investigations Generating principles through the process of induction Communicating and defending a scientific argument |
Solving complex real-world problems Synthesizing complex hypothetical explanations Establishing empirical laws on the basis of evidence and logic Analyzing and evaluating scientific arguments Constructing logical proofs Generating predictions through the process of deduction Hypothetical inquiry |
Nature of Science: Explain what and how you will teach explicitly about the nature of science during your lesson.
Additional Themes for PHY 312: One of your two inquiry lessons in PHY 312 must include some consideration for the unifying concepts and processes of science and the other lesson must include some consideration for the technological applications of science (see Hands-on Physics Activities with Real-Life Applications by Cunningham and Herr).
Assessment: How will you as teacher determine whether or not the objectives for the day's lesson has been achieved? How will you assess the objectives in an informal though meaningful manner? Never end a lesson without checking whether or not your students have achieved the objectives.
Closure: There has to be a logical means for drawing conclusions from the lesson. How will this be done? How does your subject matter connect to the real-world? Indicate the way the content of the lesson is pertinent to real-word phenomena.
Materials: What materials will you need to teach your lesson? Because science teaching can be so materials intense, it's a good idea to make a list of everything that you'll need so that nothing is forgotten. Be sure to do so.