Physics Content Guides

1/13/2018

Last year was my first year teaching IB Physics SL and I never fully recognized the huge amount of content that we crammed into the year until it was time to start reviewing for the test and I was watching students flipping through nearly 2,000 slides worth of notes!! Obviously, this is a terrible way to study so I wanted to approach this year a little more strategically.

As we start each unit this year, I am putting together a "Content Guide" packet to help guide students through creating a study guide that outlines the key ideas of the unit. It is my hope that this helps organize their thinking as we go unit by unit and can serve as the ultimate guide when they are reviewing for the IB Physics test in May. This is still a work in progress so I will be updating this list with future unit guides as we get to them. It has been a huge undertaking but I have really high hopes that it will really help my students this year and in the years to come.

Anatomy of a "Content Guide"

I stole this idea from an amazing group of IB Physics teachers that are a part of the Knowles Teacher Initiative so I had a really great structure to build off of. I knew that I wanted my content guides to have consistency throughout the year so I started out by outlining a list of rules to keep me following the same set of guidelines.

Big Ideas

Essential Questions
Cross-cutting concepts
Recurring ideas that apply to many different standards

Content Objectives

Student friendly language of the IB Guide that is unpacked to highlight details
Actionable language ("I can" statements)
Mapped to daily notes so that students can assess their understanding after each lesson and know where to find the information if there is something they need to review.

Shelving Guide
The purpose of the shelving guide is to provide structures where students can summarize their knowledge (like books on a bookshelf). The look of these guides varies depending on the content but there are some recurring structures in most of the packets:

Variable Vocab - there are lots of crazy variables that show up in their equation packet, it's important they know what's what. This always includes a table with the name, variable symbol, and unit for each variable.
Problem Solving Structure - whenever a table or workflow structure is use to help organize problem solving method it will be included here.
Equations - sure that every equation that is in their IB Physics Data Booklet shows up here so there isn't a huge disconnect when it comes to test day.
No Sample Problems - this is not a place for sample problems so no numbers allowed unless it is a referring to a constant or physical value that they should know. It is ok to outline common problem scenarios but no values should be given.

Example Guide

Here is an example of what this all looks like in practice. I have a binder of all the KEYs in my classroom that they can check during work time but aside from that, they are just given the blank Content Guide as a packet at the beginning of the unit.