Today’s the 17^th of June, I’m here with Dan MacIsaac. Do I have your permission to interview you?

Yes.

OK. GREAT. So my first question is: What is the most important advice you have for the first year physics teacher?

I think the most important thing is to take some time and reflect. First year teachers aren’t yet efficient in what they do and the profession itself is extremely time intensive. It’s very difficult to plan your time. It’s very difficult to have enough time to do your job. It’s a very demanding job. It’s not necessarily one that leads to reflection. But you have to take time out to reflect. You need to talk to other people about your teaching. Sometimes people go into a room and close the door and then we don’t see anyone else all year and you can feel very isolated. You should talk to other teachers, you should make a big effort, if it’s possible, to see other teachers, I know that’s not a problem at your school (Julie). You definitely should try some of the online community of teachers and take a little time each day to read what they say. You should definitely join the AAPT, get up to the local AAPT conferences. Read the AAPT journal. You really want to maximize your contact with other people in the profession, particularly in physics teaching it’s very easy to get isolated. You want to maximize your time thinking about what it is you are doing. No matter how bad you are if you can sit back and reflect on what you are doing, you will improve and get better at it and it will be much better for your mental health too.

Next question is related: What is your advice for the professional development of the first year physics teacher?

It’s really hard to get good professional development. There are a lot of one or two day workshops introducing some curriculum or other, the flash in the pan kind of workshops. If you were here in Arizona, I could steer you to a few that would be worthwhile. I would definitely try to get out to it if there is a regional NSTA meeting in Chicago, and I bet there is every couple of years, if not this year. You definitely want to get out to that. You definitely want to go to the AAPT meetings if you can. The one this summer is in Guelph. The one after that is in California in January. After that I can’t remember. I think it’s going to Rochester or something like that the near future. Anyway, you want to get out to the national AAPT and certainly to your local AAPT. There’s a huge Chicago physics alliance. First class people there. Really there’s some nationally known people. And you definitely want to get out to that and talk to them and get their advice on what’s happening locally that’s worthwhile. It’s very easy to get into a lot of courses that are kind of paper-cutting courses or little flash in the pan kind of things and it makes you very jaded as to what you can learn from your peers, but if you can get in on the physics education professional development, particularly the Chicago alliance stuff and get their advice, I think that’s where I would start, were I you.

What professional organizations do you recommend and also resources?

AAPT would be number one. I don’t know the organization for environmental science, but I think you already discovered that environmental science is a very vague sport. You might want to skip sideways in environmental engineering if you want some, well I’m very biased, I’m a physics professor and I think that to really understand things you also need numerical representations. They are not to be confused with the science, but they are part of the science and they still have import. That’s one of the big lapses I’ve seen in environmental science. It’s a way of avoiding tough chemistry and being a little tougher numerically than biology, but not as hard as molecular, so a lot of people seem to use this as a crack to fall into. So there’s got to be some associations, and I would suspect that you’re better tied into those, you know what you are doing there. Certainly there’s a wealth of information on the web, it won’t replace the human contact. There’s a lot of stuff out there. Being able to use the web well will help you a lot, especially for asynchronous dialogues, there’s a number of listservs where you can speak asynchronously or just read in the digest mode and read about other physics teachers. There’s an article I gave you that’s got a lot of that stuff in there. You also need to find out a lot about the Illinois Standards and the Illinois political situation. The Chicago physics alliance people should be able to push you in the right direction there. On resources, use organizations, certainly the AAPT maintains an extensive list of resources and other organizations including reviews of materials. I’ve written some reviews for the AAPT web site. If you go fishing around there, you’ll see that that’s not a bad place to look. One thing that you probably want to be aware of is that the U.S. government and other government labs run opportunities for teachers in the summers. If you wanted to, you could go to two to three months of events in a summer and get the government to pay for most of it. You could go work at Fermilab if you wanted to in the summer and the government would pay for it and you would work in, say, a curriculum area. If fact, yeah, they would be probably very happy to get you. But these opportunities are run by all the national labs and many researchers nationwide, because in order to get a big NSF grant or a DOE grant, you have to explain where you are going to disseminate your results to the public. So this has to be built in. For instance, I prepare grants with USGS. They’ve got people there that are trying to analyze data from Mars and from the moon. And you do what’s called an educational public outreach component. There’s an entire database of these things online. I think if you look in my article, there’s a picture of the search engine being used. You type in something like "summer opportunities" and the Phys-L search engine, it will come up with a number of web addresses run by NSF, for instance. You can punch in "physics teacher summer" and it will bring up thirty or forty different things. Another good way is to just hear about them on the listservs. There are lots of opportunities. There’s way more opportunities than perhaps than qualified people. For resources, you know about PRISMS, you probably want to get the PRISMS catalogue.

There’s the modeling, PRISMS, is there anything else similar (curricula, workshops)?

Oh yes, there are. Modeling in probably the most prescriptive set of materials, but it’s on a disk so you can modify it. It’s nice if you get the curriculum on disk. Another workshop and curriculum you need to know about it called Workshop Physics, it’s run out of Dickenson by a lovely woman named Pricilla Laws, well worth going. I’ve been there about one or two summers. I think it’s a month work long workshop. Well worth going, it’s not as pedagogically focused, it’s more that it’s a really terrific curriculum. It’s one that gets rid of lecturing totally. It’s entirely a workshop where you do things and you work your way through this workbook. It’s really marvelous. Really pretty much, they’ve cut lecturing to about 5%. It was the first on that really kicked off a lot of this stuff and Pricilla just did it because she was trying to do something different. She’s not an educational researcher. We’ve got lots of reasons for knowing why it works know, but she just kind of went out a limb and did it and it’s been terrifically successful. Another curriculum that you need to know about is CPU, Conceptual Physics Understanding using Computers, something like that. It’s run at San Diego State University by Fred Goldberg. It’s also really well done. It’s really conceptually focused and I think it’s probably targeted directly to teachers and high school students, but it’s very reliant on technology. They do a lot of working with computer technology. Fred also knows what’s going on in the educational research, so there’ll be lots of dialogue, lots of inquiry. It’ll be kind of computer-centric. Another one to look for is Lily and Chris MacDermot from the University of Washington. She does something called Physics by Inquiry. It is a course that’s been focused directly for pre-service elementary teachers, although it could also be used at the high school level. It has a lot of guided inquiry through a workbook. It doesn’t feature dialogue the way I’d like to have it, but it’s first class in terms of being thoroughly researched and addressing student misconceptions. There’s another group led by Rich O’Lennik at the University of Dallas, it’s a little Catholic University. I did a job interview there. He’s working with Casio, I think. His thing is called CP3, which is Conceptual Physics and then two other CP’s, I can’t remember what they are. You always have to have a nifty acronym. Anyway, CP3 is an inquiry based curriculum that comes on a CD and a lot of it is written as JAVA applets on the CD. I recommend looking at all of this and stealing ideas from all of it. On the harder-core side, Randall Knight has written a couple of good books that are probably going to be a commercial failure. He’s really good, in fact, I intend to lean heavily on his materials. He also has an instructor’s workbook in that series. An instructor’s guide is extremely helpful. There is a paper from the American Journal of Physics, it’s called "A Resource Letter." It’s just a huge listing of material, mostly for physics education researchers, but it really lists PER(Physics Education Research) inspired curricula, or curricula that inspired PER. There’s a conference in physics education research taking place at the end of AAPT in Guelph. It occurs at the end of the summer conference every year. And in fact, if you think about doing your doctorate someday, it’s a growing field. Physicists might not be able to get jobs at universities, but I’ve got people beating my door down. I could travel to a lot of different places and get a job. So you want to have a look at that resource letter. It’s called "PER-1." It’s a resource letter from AJP (American Journal of Physics.) You can actually go to the AAPT web site, click on publications, click on American Journal of Physics and you can type "PER-1" into the search engine and it will come up with the article. You can actually click on it and download the article as an Acrobat file. If you can’t find it, then just email me and I’ll send it to you as an attachment. It lists all these curriculums. I spend a lot of my time just looking at other people’s stuff that I know is good, stealing and modifying it and using it for my whiteboard and seat activities. I haven’t got time to reinvent the wheel.

Anything else?

I think you’ve run me dry on that for now!

What do recommend to prevent burnout?

Have something totally apart from physics. I have my motorcycle, and that’s what I do. Boy, is fixing my motorcycle ever overdue. I’ve got to get my motorcycle back on the road so I can go away and play hard and do other things, that’s really key for me. Contacting peers, not being alienated or isolated is another thing. Often physics teachers are the only ones at their school. You can read about other physics teachers every night, at home. You can talk to them every night on the listservs. There’s a wonderful support community that most people never hear about because they don’t know about the listservs, they don’t know about the organizations. Particularly in Chicago, your people are a hoot. You have some very amusing characters. They have a good time. We didn’t actually do a proper presentation, we didn’t do all the "physics of beer". We were just trying to do one trick for our presentation. We have like two hours of show on that, including overheads and equations and we have a good time. I’ve actually done that at one of the summer meetings there was beer all over the stage when we were done. We had a good time. There’s lots of that going on up there. Microwave physics and the little rockets. I mean, physics teachers literally get together and play. It’s not usually dangerous, but it’s very off-beat. It’s a good time. It really will make a difference to know that you are part of a community. See they can’t tell when you are doing well, or you often get administration that just say "good job" because the door remained closed and all the kids were inside for the full length of the class and they were pretty happy about that. Any support they give you emotionally can be very gratuitous. It’s nice to talk to people who are doing well at it and who are experts in the field and it’s really nice if you can find award-winning people. I think Anne Franklin is the name of the lady.

Who do you recommend that I interview in Chicago?

An excellent person is Greg Swakhammer at Glenbrook, he’s well known. He’s coming here for a year of sabbatical. ASU got a NSF grant to work on modeling and Swakhammer was one of the original modeling people, so he’s being brought down here. There’s another guy, Larry Dukeratch, he’s another character. He will be in Chicago this summer for sure. He may be there now. These guys jet around the country helping one another in the modeling workshops. Thompson’s on the periphery on that circuit. He’s been paid by ASU to help set up things here for the academic year working with me. Those are good people to talk to. I think it’s Anne Franklin. But there’s a lady, she’s really the heart of the Chicago alliance. I can find her name and email it to you. She just won a distinguished service award last year. You can get a list of award winners from the web. Go to the AAPT web site, look for distinguished service winner and it gives you the name of the city they are from. She’ll come up right under Chicago. She’s also into all sorts of interesting stuff. She was really impressed with the physics of beer. I have no doubt she’s been out breaking bottles.

What’s the most important advice you have for the first year physics teacher who is a woman? Anything different?

There’s a group at AAPT called the Committee on Women, in fact Kathleen {Kathleen Falconer, is an ASU completing her doctorate in education. Dan is her husband] is a member of that committee. I’ve been invited to speak to them and I go to their meetings. So there is specifically a committee on women’s issues as part of the AAPT and part of the APS, American Physical Society for Physicists and at the AIP level, which is the next organization up. So there are specific groups devoted to this, they meet regularly and they present to one another on these issues. They also have a dedicated support network. At the university level there is immense demands on women that don’t exist for male teachers, because women are expected to raise a family and get faculty positions and there’s this two body problem and in fact there’s more of a demand for women in universities because universities are trying to raise the number of women they have. You will find that the majority of physics teachers are male, but there’s been a history of world class female physics teachers at the high school levels. But you can still have all the things you saw in your undergrad degree. You’ll have to face all that. There are lots of people that think women can’t do physics. You see it all over and over again. You do have one of the very best ladies in Chicago, I’m pretty sure it’s Anne Richards. She started the Highs School Physics Video Contest nationwide, which is now pretty much a standard part of the curriculum. In fact, I’m thinking about for my Physics 111 students, to have them take some physics pictures. For one of their projects, they must bring in a physics picture, some physical phenomenon and write a short report explaining it. They run that every summer and publish the pictures nationally. I wish actually teachers could play in it. I wish there was a category for teachers or university professors. There are good people and groups that address the issues and they are much better up on the issues than I am. I’ve been peripherally communicating with them because I’m trying to raise the number of women on the listservs. Some of the listservs are kind of "old-boys networks" and they can be very in you face, I try to eliminate of sharply reduce that behavior with some success. I got rid of the worst people. So we try to make listservs a more inviting place for women.

You have those two articles in your binders, that list all the listservs. There’s four of them listed for physics, but there’s also a separate one-pager from the Science Teacher that lists five or six others that are used in other disciplines in science ed, like ChemEd-L and stuff like that. Plus which, just getting to the right organizations, like getting to the NSTA, getting to the NABT for the biology teachers, the JChem-ed, it’s part of the chemistry educators community. Their journal is online, so is the AJP and The Physics Teacher. There’s lots of stuff for all the science organizations. Just knowing where the online organizations, together with their listserv resources is a huge resource in itself. There’s a couple of organizations for earth science educators, which is a big deal out here in Arizona because mining is a huge industry here. It’s probably not so big back east. There’s lots of online information. The web has done real wonders for making the information readily accessible and updatable and teachers in particular have been taking advantage of it, not always in the most organized way, but certainly it’s well worth a look.

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