教授教师AP物理

Professor of Physics and Astronomy Pat 波莉 demonstrates an experiment that high school teachers with limited time and resources can use to teach AP physics.

Visions of tricky experiments and whiteboards cluttered with cryptic equations abound.

It doesn’t seem coincidental that some of the greatest minds in recent history—Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein—made their names as physicists. 但是，天才水平的智商是研究这门学科所必需的吗?

物理学教授帕特·波利说, 好的教学决定学生的理解力, 不仅仅是天赋异禀.

波莉, 谁在这所大学呆了20多年, 对教年轻人物理略知一二. 事实上, he wrote the very first laboratory manual for Advanced Placement (AP) Physics, the college-level physics course offered to high school students across North America.

通过与大学理事会的联系, 波莉 has also spent the past 22 years training AP physics teachers, 主要分布在中西部和美国南部. 在那段时间里, he has constructed some 60 labs for instructors to run in their classrooms, 所有这些都强调可负担性.

“我在美联社工作初期听到的一个抱怨是, “我想做实验, 但是设备太贵了,’”波利说.

但练习物理并不一定很昂贵. Proof can be found on 波莉’s desk in his Center for the Sciences office: It is crowded with boxes of household items—batteries, 铜导线, 还有小木棍. 只要波利放了几块磁铁进去, these miscellaneous objects make up all the necessary components of a lab experiment on magnetic fields. According to him, the total cost of the equipment is no 更多的 than a few dollars per student.

Keeping the cost of physics experiments down is critical for school districts squeezed by budget cuts. 波莉 believes that success in physics is predicated on working with physical materials, 而不是依靠教科书来解释概念.

他说:“没有人会因为做家庭作业而得到报酬。. “人们是为了理解事物而获得报酬的, and their lives are made better and easier when they understand how things work.”

Comprehension is 波莉’s ultimate goal—he isn’t necessarily trying to inspire a lifelong love of physics in high school students.

“我的目标并不是培养更多的物理学家，”他承认. 而, he wants students to develop an understanding of the physical mechanisms at play in their world, from the workings of a light switch to the intricacies of a combustion engine.

However, several obstacles stand in the way of learning in the AP classroom.

When a lack of school district resources is combined with an insufficient level of teacher preparedness, 学生的知识肯定会受到影响. Through his work with the College Board, 波莉 seeks to mitigate both issues.

经常, the teachers assigned to teach physics at the high school level have not studied the subject intensively themselves. “People with degrees in physics can usually make 更多的 money doing something else,” 波莉 explains. He describes an all-too-common scenario: a biology teacher is called into an administrator’s office and told that he or she will be teaching physics the next academic year.

“[Teachers] are barely a chapter ahead of the students as they’re going through the term,波利说。.

据波利说, only about a quarter of high school physics teachers have earned a degree in physics, and another 25 to 30 percent have taken just a single year of physics classes at the college level. 剩下的人对这个主题的经验甚至更少.

“我认为物理很难. It need not be, but in order to teach it easily, people need 更多的 training in it,他说.

即使在最好的时候，物理学也是具有挑战性的. The first step in fostering student interest and engagement is ensuring that teachers can explain challenging concepts in an accessible way. 这就是波利的优势所在:教老师.

His favorite place to do so is the Advanced Placement Summer Institute, a series of intensive weeklong professional development courses designed to prepare instructors for the rigors of AP Physics. 在这里, he helps teachers hone in on their strengths and develop an individualized approach to their material.

“教学是非常个人化的，”波利说. “The same things that one person does in the classroom might not work for someone else.”

然而，没有一种策略可以促进学生的理解, 波利知道物理的关键是数字素养.

“Teachers have to be engaged with the students and be sensitive to where the students get lost in the math,他说. “Getting them to become familiar and comfortable with the math is the most important thing.”

怎样做一个有效的AP物理实验?

1. It should be possible to set it up, do the experiment, and tear it down in 45 minutes. (波利说，大多数AP物理老师每天有70名AP学生, 除了其他课程:时间是至关重要的.)
2. Experiments should allow students to apply and expand their knowledge of physics rather than repeat rote steps in a process.
3. Comprehension improves when students are actively engaged in taking data as opposed to watching it fill up a laptop screen.
4. When students build and modify and design the experiments they undertake, they enjoy them 更多的.
5. Experiments should emphasize simplicity and elegance in design and cleverness in analyzing the data obtained.