participating in the workshop during its implementation and
several years later. The data consist of the following ele-
ments:
共1兲 Documentation of the meetings: observations and
transcriptions of audiotapes of all the whole class meetings
and the discussions among the teachers during the group
work as well as the materials developed by the teachers dur-
ing the workshop
共e.g., teachers’ concept maps regarding the
topic “from electrostatics to currents,” diagnostic question-
naires, versions of the minimodules
兲.
共2兲 Students’ work brought by teachers to the work-
shop.
共3兲 Informal conversations with teachers.
共4兲 The journal of the course-leaders: it included plans
of the meetings and remarks reflecting on the implementa-
tion.
共5兲 Questionnaires about teachers’ views of the contri-
bution of the course, immediately after the course and six
years later.
Because of lack of space, in this paper we describe in detail
a case study of six physics teachers who worked as a group
on the topic “From electrostatics to currents” and substanti-
ate the findings with data emerging from the other groups.
We shall not report in detail the results of the questionnaires,
but will mention the major findings.
D. The topics of the minimodules
The selection of appropriate topics to be offered to teach-
ers is essential for the success of the model. There are several
considerations in choosing the topics of the minimodules:
relevance to the teachers’ ongoing practice, topics identified
as problematic in the educational research literature, topics
requiring abstract reasoning that requires concretization, top-
ics dealing with powerful ideas, etc. In the present study the
teachers were offered, in the beginning of the workshop, the
following four topics for choice:
共1兲 The relationship be-
tween Newton’s first and second laws.
共2兲 Introduction to
waves.
35
共3兲 From electrostatics to currents.
36
共4兲 Electro-
magnetic induction.
37
Each teacher chose a topic, and four
groups were formed accordingly.
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