Whiteboarding: A Tool for Moving Classroom Discourse from Answer-Making to Sense-Making

In 1998 I had been teaching science for 13 years. I was a good teacher: I had the plaques and certificates to prove it. But often I felt like an impostor (which I have since learned is not unusual—70% of all people feel like a fake at one time or another). While my students could solve problems and ace tests, every June when I sat down to look at their Force Concept Inventory (FCI) results, I was confronted by how little they had actually learned in my physics classes. It was this annual reality check that drove me to pursue my first Modeling Workshop in summer of 1998. For four weeks I was a physics student again—every day, for six to eight hours a day. I (re)learned to think aloud, to “speak physics” and to listen to how I and others (students) spoke physics. That summer changed everything. When I returned to my high school physics classroom equipped with a new way of teaching in September of 1998, I was excited. I felt like I had the key to the perfect year—I wouldn't be an impostor anymore.