Crafting Curiosity: a Pedagogical Approach to Questions in IB Diploma Physics

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”

Benjamin Franklin may not, despite his many hats, have taught pre-university natural philosophy, but I believe there is something in his words that rings true in physics classrooms today. In subjects that are rich in both content and application, our role as teachers is to take full responsibility for providing opportunities to learn - not just transmitting information but fostering and checking our students’ understanding.

Where does this understanding come from? To me, it emerges through interrogating ideas, considering examples, testing assumptions and trying new strategies: in other words, when our students communicate with physics concepts. The sustained motivation to learn in this way comes from assessment; without it, we would have no sense of our progress or goals. And the purest form of assessment is questioning.

Teacher-led questions come in many forms in the physics classroom

• Check-ins while lecturing or demonstrating (“What do you think?”)
• Invitations to clarify understanding (“What questions do you have so far?”)
• Quick content checks (“State Newton’s laws.”) and application checks (“What is the minimum resultant force that can be obtained from forces of 3 N, 4 N and 5 N? Which of the forces in this diagram are Newton’s third law pairs?”), perhaps organised as mini-whiteboard or online quizzes
• Exercises to support the development of routines in how solutions are presented (such as drawing a diagram, listing variables, and selecting and rearranging equations of uniformly accelerated motion before substituting, calculating and presenting the final answer)
• Practice lab reports and exam-style questions to promote readiness for high-stakes internal and external assessments.

Having been ‘raised’ in my early career on Randall D. Knight’s Five Easy Lessons and Lewis Carroll Epstein’s Thinking Physics, I see qualitative questioning as essential in the pursuit of accuracy and precision in the use of words. I try to balance this with the allocation of lesson time for mathematical training too (it is, after all, one of the three tools of a physicist - according to our Subject Guide).

When planning a typical unit, a teacher should start by reading the Subject Guide’s Guiding Questions. Combined with the Guiding Questions for the Theme as a whole and wider course, these provide students with a cohesive story for what would otherwise be a physics jigsaw - the ‘big picture’ that they piece together. You can then answer these Guiding Questions to conclude the topic. Through making Linking Questions explicit in the Subject Guide, the IB asks implicitly that students forge links between ideas as well as understand them independently. It would be time well spent (both for course understanding and Paper 2 preparation) to have students suggest the topic to which the questions ‘link’ and perhaps even links of their own.

Students of all competence levels can be supported through worked examples after encountering new equations so that they can learn from high-quality model solutions. Practice can then be obtained through a combination of equation-specific exercises, quizzes that include key terms and typical diagrams, and more challenging questions (where needed to emphasise a tricky Subject Guide point).

When writing or selecting practice questions of exam standard it is important to consider both variety (for comprehensiveness) and quantity (for consolidation). These could include:

• Qualitative checks for understanding
• Multiple-choice questions (to support Paper 1a)
• Extended-response questions (to support Paper 2)

This thinking is reflected in the way we built the sequencing in the textbook because, as well as being challenging to teach, physics is challenging to learn. There are over 1,000 distinct terms for students to recall - and we know from experience that recall alone does not facilitate the organisation of ideas or solving of problems.

Saying this, IB Diploma Programme classrooms also have students eager to be stretched. This is where Olympiad questions come in, offering an extra level to unlock for high-achieving students. These, by nature, stretch students beyond DP Physics examination requirements, acting as aspirational targets for some and university stepping stones for others. Contexts include an airborne motorbike, pulley buckets, neutron collisions, conductivity in composite rods, earthquake waves in Indonesia and Kenya, beat frequencies in echoes, estimating the number of stars in the Milky Way, Millikan’s oil drop experiment, deriving the Compton scattering equations, and exponential increases in page numbers of The Physical Review journal.

All of this builds to why Chris and I wrote or selected and sequenced questions in the way that you find them in our textbook; we wanted the textbook to contain every question that we could need for day-to-day teaching and learning.

And now almost two years into teaching with the latest Subject Guide, it’s safe to say that I’m finding the textbook invaluable in my own classroom.

I hope very much that you (and your students, of course) find it accessible, comprehensive and challenging in just the right proportions - and I wish all DP physicists a lifetime of thrill and wonder.