By Carmela Jones, MNS
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” -Buckminster Fuller
Last week we saw how Modeling students addressed a local poverty issue. Next question...Can a Modeling teacher or a group of Modeling teachers impact a school? How about a region? It really did happen in one of the west suburbs of Chicago at Wheaton Warrenville South High School. This series of blog entries is about how James Stankevitz (AMTA Past-President) influenced his school to become not just MI-friendly, but to become MI-promoters in the Midwest.
Jim Stankevitz is a pillar at Wheaton Warrenville South High School in Illinois, having taught physics there for 24 years. Before that, he educated students for 18 years in physics at Marist High School, a private school in Chicago. In Jim’s last year at Marist, he was awarded the nationally prestigious, Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching (PAEMST). He was proud of his career up to that point, as well he should be. He prepared multitudes of students who were ready to tackle physics content after high school and who would do well academically at the college level.
Then, one fateful day, he discovered the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), a test springing from the Modeling Instruction pedagogy out of Arizona State University. He decided to administer this assessment to his current physics students; he was confident they would ace the FCI. Much to his chagrin, he saw his brightest students with scores around the 50% range; those were the highest of the class scores. That shook him to his core. How could this be? How could he improve his teaching so that his students really understood high school physics?
His normal modus operandi was to lecture, show students how to do example problems by demonstrating the solutions on the board, having them solve problems for homework, and do prescriptive, verification labs to reinforce their knowledge base. That was the way he had learned; that was the way he taught; that was the way his students learned from him. Oh, what a vicious cycle!
He had to figure out how to break though. Thus, his quest, began with the source of the FCI, Modeling Instruction. He attended his first Modeling Workshop conducted by Greg Swackhamer at the University of Illinois Chicago the summer after that 18th year at Marist. As he was becoming exposed and trained in the pedagogy, he thought to himself: “There is no way my students would be able to figure out all of this. I will have to show them how to do it like I always have.”
Nonetheless, later teaching in Wheaton, he approached his administrators there seeking permission to implement MI. He received the green light and away he went. Greg, his MI facilitator would joke that if a principal came to observe a Modeling teacher's class, he/she would say: “Oh, I’ll come back when you’re teaching.” Jim’s classroom looked and sounded so different from everyone else’s; others thought he wasn’t teaching; they didn’t understand. He also got pushback from both students and parents. One of his smartest students demanded: “When are you going to just answer our questions outright and stop turning it on us by asking: ‘So, what do YOU think?’” To which Jim replied with a bright twinkle in his eye: “So, what do YOU think?”
He found that if he practiced metacognition with them, that is, told them WHY he was doing what he was doing while he was doing it, that students more readily accepted the transition. That first year his students pleasantly surprised him. From the many whiteboarding sessions, they realized they were able to address many of their misconceptions around physics and shift their thinking paradigms.
Coming up...read the story of Jim approaching his administrator and school leadership after successfully implementing MI, to support MI workshops at their school.
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If you are a Modeling teacher, share your story by sending it to the email listed. If you know a great Modeling teacher, encourage them to send their story to the email listed. cjones.stemprofessionals@gmail.com.
If you are Modeling teacher and want to interact with other Modeling teachers with a question, an issue, a classroom experience, an announcement, or anything other MI teachers might be interested in, post it on the M2M (Modeler to Modeler) blog on the AMTA site. https://modelinginstruction.org/submit-a-blog-entry-to-m2m/
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