Episode 70 – Dr. Emma Mitchell – “How Modeling Works in My Classroom”
This month, Mark talks with Emma Mitchell, the chair of the science department at the Ethel Walker School in Connecticut. They talk about her background working in labs, often as the only female. They talk about Emma’s experience teaching at an all-girls’ school, and then about how she came across modeling instruction when trying to figure out how to teach physics in a pandemic. She completely changed how she teaches by bringing modeling to her ninth graders and to her advanced physics students. They talk about the way students become the ones doing the heavy lifting during class, as opposed to sitting back and receiving the information through lecture.
They talk about Peter Liljedahl’s book, Building Thinking Classrooms, and how similar the author’s ideas for math instruction are to the ideas of modeling. They spend time talking about the benefits of vertical whiteboarding for students’ thinking.
Emma finishes with her best tips for starting a new school year well.
Guest
Dr. Emma Mitchell
Emma Mitchell teaches introductory- and advanced-level physics and is the Science Department Chair at The Ethel Walker School, an independent boarding and day school for girls in Simsbury, Connecticut. She holds a BA in Physics from Vassar College and a Ph.D. in Engineering Physics from University of Virginia. Emma participated in her first workshop in Modeling Instruction in 2020 and has been involved in the AMTA ever since. She is currently the Vice President of the AMTA Executive Board. She is excited about the transformative change that Modeling has brought to her classroom and loves any opportunity to discuss pedagogy with other science teachers.
Highlights
[4:18] Emma Mitchell “And so introducing modeling just brought this joy and this, it just made me love teaching even more. And that was scarce in 2020. So I felt really appreciative that I found this new way of teaching at a time when teaching was so hard because it made it easier actually.”
[5:26] Emma Mitchell “Science is built off of iterative mistakes, right? And science is built off of collaboration.”
[20:54] Emma Mitchell “So students have a tendency if you go straight from lab to equation, at least for my ninth graders, they would think about it really algorithmically. And so they would just sort of revert to this kind of plug-and-chug way of solving problems. And by making them go through the step with the diagrams, it’s actually harder in a lot of ways because they have to wrap their minds around what’s really going on. And they have to apply, new situations and applying that to the graphs and that to these diagrams, is asking them to do a lot more thinking.”
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