As a physics teacher, I’m grappling with how to reform my own teaching to match both the demands of educating students for the twenty-first century as well as the challenge to make my classes relevant. Students can watch videos of physics lessons and can look up information online which are much more interactive than their static text. I hoping to find a new outlook on how to negotiate the content, pedagogy and technology of our course such that the inclusion of these pieces results in a uniquely engaging classroom experience.

I’m going to try to track these thoughts (and probably some random ones along the way) with this blog, Forces Cause Changes. I hoped this name would both bring connotations to the importance of reforming education while also giving a “shout out” to one of my favorite ideas in physics: inertia. My students often come in with a preconception that motion requires a force, so we spend a lot of time working to build a new intuition that unbalanced forces cause changes in motion and in the absence of an unbalanced force, motion stays constant.

I’m hoping that this class will help “push” me and cause me to change my course of motion too!