Two strategies from today that worked great. Today was the second large problem set of traditional word problems that students have been asked to solve this year, and the first time students saw and used all of the kinematic equations. Today’s warm up was to work with a partner to categorize small excerpts from word problems as one of the variables listed in the kinematic equations (xi, xf, vi, vf, a, or t). Then, after sorting these cards, compare their sort with another set of partners and resolve differences. The best discussions were around “starts from rest,” “comes to a stop” and “10 mi/hr/sec.”
The main cooperative strategy that we used in the lesson was a variation of Rally Coach (thanks for the idea Tony Cacciola!). Students worked through the problem set on a big whiteboard with a partner. For each problem, partner A made a list of variables, partner B chose the equation(s), partner A substituted variables in, and partner B solved the equation. We modeled this with 2 students at the front of the class and then let students work on the problem set this way for 25 minutes. Students were really engaged and followed the process. Whatever they did together, they took pictures of, and did the rest for homework.
Randall Physics 