The Physics Education Component of PeTeL – Personalized teaching and learning center

Leading team

Project members

Summary

In 2016, a large-scale research, development and implementation program began in PeTeL Physics. In the first phase, a leading group of expert teachers, technology experts and researchers from the Department of Science Teaching at the Weizmann Institute was formed. They developed a preliminary repository of interactive content that formed the basis for the version made available to the teachers who would join. In the second phase the leading group mentored a teachers’ professional learning community of early adapters who used the initial version of the environment in their classrooms and collected data in order to improve the environment and content. In the third phase, the environment was opened up to physics teachers across the country.

Presently (March 2021) 460 teachers are active in PeTeL Physics, about 20,000 students are registered from over 600 different classrooms. From August 2020 to October 2020, over 250 teachers participated in workshops, many of them continue professional development activities in physics PeTeL communities.

Development and Implementation

The unique architecture of the PeTeL environment integrates shared content repositories, a Learning Management System (LMS) and a variety of sharing mechanisms between teachers including elements taken from the world of social networks that encourage convenient and fast connectivity between teachers.

The repositories include:

  • A Shared Repository of items, shared by professional content developers and selected teachers, which are tagged and cataloged according to the syllabus. Teachers can share items to the repository, search for content of their need, transfer items to their personal teaching space and critique them for the benefit of other teachers. Presently, there are about 630 interactive physics activities spanning the full syllabus.
  • A Peer Environment, catalogued according to the teachers who shared the content, which enables teachers to share, view and copy teaching sequences from courses developed by their peers. The sequences are tagged according to their developers.  Presently there are in PeTeL over 150 teaching sequences (courses) that teachers shared and provide inspiration for teachers in PeTeL.

In the last five years, implementation aiming at personalized teaching, accompanied by the PeTeL environment, was carried out among about 500 physics teachers: some from the physics teachers’ professional learning communities and some from other frameworks (e.g., the Physics Mentors, the Rothschild Weizmann program, Hemda, Mashar).  The teachers implemented personalized teaching sequences from PeTeL customized to their classes, used data about students’ knowledge provided by PeTeL, and used shared lesson plans of peers accompanied with considerations.  In parallel, professional development of 15 “mentor teachers” who accompanied these teachers techno-pedagogically was carried out.

Since the beginning of the Pandemic the implementation expanded and provided service to the physics national teacher center. Teachers have participated actively in many activities conducted by the physics PeTeL team and the teachers made extensive use of PeTeL’s resources among their students.

Research

The PhD thesis of Dr. Asaf Bar-Yosef, supervised by Prof. Bat-Sheva Eylon, focused on about 195 physics teachers who used the environment to accompany their teaching for two years.  The research dealt with the question how digital environments promote personalized teaching and learning in three contexts: interactive content design in PeTeL, the relationship between PeTeL’s architecture and how  teachers function when in using it, and the practices of teachers who used the environment in their classrooms.  The research involved the development of the DPI (Data-based teaching, Personal customization and Interactivity of the participants) model which enables to characterize in digital environments the processes of content-development and teachers’ usage.  The DPI serves as a research tool to examine the degree of personalization of teaching and learning accompanied by the environment.

The findings show the importance of collaboration between teachers using the environment to create multifaceted functioning: Teachers’ use of the sharing mechanisms created mutual fertilization between teachers’ functioning as consumers and producers. As designers – teachers have integrated in their teaching spaces items from PeTeL’s repositories with items that they created themselves in diverse ways tailored to their teaching needs. It was also found that the activities in PeTeL and its unique architecture were key factors in promoting personalized teaching and learning by teachers.

During the same period, a study was conducted by Michal Walter, supervised by Prof. Bat-Sheva Eylon, Dr. Esther Bagno and Dr. Hana Berger, examining how to cultivate the considerations of physics teachers to promote “learning-centered” teaching and how to integrate diagnostic-based data into these considerations. The study was conducted in the communities of physics teachers and indicated changes in teachers’ learning knowledge, perceptions and attitudes and teaching practices.

The group is currently conducting research for an MSc degree by Mr. Eliran Chen who is supervised by Prof. Edit Yerushalmi and Dr. Giora Alexandron. The research involves the building of automatic diagnostic tools for the teacher.  These tools provide information on performances of subgroups in the class that have difficulties characterized by common content categories and skills. The research integrates development of item assemblies on the basis of orderly task-analysis, identification of factors that underlie difficulties common to broad groups of students, and a comparative study on products anchored in the knowledge of teachers and experts.

Our thanks to Gideon and Hana Hamburger, to the Eddie and Jules Trump Family Foundation and the Ministry of Education for their support of the project.

Administration

Rina Kimchi

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