This week, Mark talks with Phil Root about the differences he sees between teaching using modeling methodology at the high school level and the college level. They talk about Phil's experience helping to adapt modeling materials for physical science to the Next Generation Science Standards, and how much he enjoyed building a storyline for those units. They talk about the advanced modeling workshops, including the new materials Phil helped to develop for them, and the various topics covered. They finish with Phil's advice for folks just starting out on a modeling instruction journey.

Guests

Phil Root taught high school chemistry and physics at Chandler High School from 2004-2013, and has been teaching chemistry at Scottsdale Community College since 2013. Phil teaches using modeling methods at the college level, and also leads modeling workshops. He helped to develop the physical science curriculum for Next Generation Science Standards and worked with Levi Torrison to develop a thermodynamics modeling workshop and extend the Chem 2 workshop to a full three week course.

Website

 

Highlights

[11:05] Phil Root: "AMTA was actively engaging students before it was cool."

[17:08] Phil Root, on advanced modeling workshops: "you will have activities, labs, facilitation experience that you can take with you directly back to your classroom the next year and put it to place right away to build your storyline in your classroom and make it stronger."

[19:13] Phil Root: "My goal now isn't to get my students to solve a problem a certain way or to get an answer. It's to probe their thinking about the relationships that they're using or how are they making sense of the mathematical relationships they're using or the conceptual frameworks that they're building."

Resources

Ep 62 Transcript