Moment of Powerful Teaching:
Question of the unit: How do waves relate to our day to day lives?
For one of my units, we begun looking at waves such as longitudinal waves and transverse waves. As the unit progressed, we looked at the electromagnetic spectrum as a whole and how our day-to-day devices use it (such as Bluetooth or cellphones).
As a way to create collaborative learning within the classroom, students researched their own choice for a device project, and then had the chance of sharing it with the rest of the class. The students choose many different forms as to how they wanted to present it. From Google slides, posters, or even just on a plain sheet of paper.
As the students finished, some came up and presented their projects as seen below:
Finally, we moved to focusing specifically on the visible light aspect of the electromagnetic spectrum. Designing a lab all on my own, getting to use lab equipment which the other physics teachers hadn’t gotten a chance to use, I had my students see what happens when you mixed colored light together, and making observations about the world around us. I had us do two steps; the first one involved them looking through diffraction glasses. My main focus was for them to learn through phenomena-based learning, taking their observations, and then using that to make a statement. With this, I actually gave the students limited amount of information so they could form their own thoughts and opinions such as an actual physicist discovering the world, would learn about the world.
As I walked around, the conversations that were happening were so powerful, that I was left amazed to see how so many students were deciphering the phenomenon, to then make a statement about the world that better aligns with the reality that we live in. I then had them do some follow up questions. The main question I was interested in seeing their responsive was the ones where I asked them, “to make a statement”, here is the answers of two students who require vastly different levels of support and scaffoldings.
One student is connecting a lot of different themes together, stating that there is refraction happening through the water breaker which then creates a reflected image! But then the student went further, and reached the conclusion that all of the color we see around us is actually just a combination of different colors or light! While the other student, after looking through a pair of diffraction glasses, started to reach the conclusion about color, how white is light itself, while black is the absence of light.
All of these conclusions, the students reached it themselves with little prompting, and I am proud to see how they reached some fundamental parts of what light is, on their own.