Brown Bag-Dr. Nick Cabot
Please join us for our next Brown Bag seminar on Wednesday, March 18, 2009. It will be held at the Friday Institute on NC State's Centennial Campus in the Collaboratory Commons. Refreshments will be available at 8:30AM and the seminar will begin at 9:00AM. Our presenter will be Dr. Nick Cabot, Clinical Assistant Professor in the School of Education at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His presentation is entitled "Transforming Teacher Knowledge: Modeling Instruction in Physics".
Many participants at the Modeling Method of High School Physics Instruction Workshops report a dramatic and often permanent transformation in their conceptions of physics teaching and learning and, consequently, in their classroom pedagogy away from a traditional lecture/demonstration delivery style toward a discourse-oriented, inquiry-based presentation. Most important in this transformation is the extent to which a teacher experienced a change regarding his or her conceptualization of physics instruction and accepts the underlying premise of the Modeling pedagogy, namely, that learning and teaching in physics are fundamentally concerned with constructing scientifically aligned conceptual models of physical phenomena. Moreover, contrary to the findings of some researchers, teachers’ views about the nature of science do not seem to influence whether they adopt this distinctive pedagogy, but do affect the success with which they implement it.
Dr. Cabot is an experienced electrical engineer with a Master’s in physics and has also taught high school physics, chemistry, astronomy, meteorology, integrated science, and mathematics. His teaching goals are to promote discourse-oriented, model-building science education at all levels. His high school students have designed Martian habitats, built a full-scale model of the Lunar Prospector satellite, trebuchets, cosmic ray telescopes, and 130 lb robots. They’ve competed in science Olympiads and science bowls. He also worked for a year at the National Science Foundation, in the Division of Undergraduate Education, and recently completed his Ph.D. in Science Education (University of Washington), on the impact of the Modeling Instruction in High School Physics workshops on teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge and classroom practice. His research interests are in investigating modeling instruction, especially its ramifications for underrepresented populations in science, and the design of programs of professional development for teachers of science.
As always, please feel free to bring your colleagues and students with when you come to the seminar.