The Physics Teaching Podcast

We are delighted to be joined once more by Friend of the Podcast and Physics Teacher Support Polymath Carole Kenrick (@HelpfulScience) to talk about Literacy for Physics.

We are so privileged this week to be joined by Christina Astin. She wears so many hats she would keep a division of milliners employed, but she kindly talks us through some of her most recent and most important work.

Will introduces us to Nearpod which is a beautifully designed teaching aid that has lots of excellent features to help you with AFL during lockdown.

Thomas and Robin chew the fat over how they are progressing in the new lockdown.

Thomas and Robin return to talk survival as we lock down again. With many teachers now doing hybrid teaching, we discuss strategies for keeping sane.

We talk through the dear listener's favourite holiday season activities; things that make you smile then think.

Thomas and Robin have a couple of goes at sharing the ideas our dear listener has given us about teaching about magnetic fields and magnetism. We were particularly thinking about non-specialists who are likely to be covering this with the younger kids.

What are ranking questions and why do they matter? James de Winter pops by to tell us. What do we do about resource curation? Could you be the answer?

How great to reach out across the pond and catch up again with Patrick Kaplo (an early hero of the podcast who teaches in Windham, NH). He has been hunkering down and adapting to new paradigms, and it is refreshing to hear that the problems we are all dealing with are pretty similar, no matter where you are in the world.

Thomas and Robin meet outside, at an appropriate social distance, to remember Tim Hardingham and introduce an interview with the PhET Head of Development Ariel Paul (@DrArielPaul). Surely all physics teachers have heard of this outstanding free source of simulations and demos provided by the University of Colorado Boulder.

Robin and Thomas are joined by Rajani Nair (@NairPhysics), (who before answering our tweet had not heard of the podcast) and who shares her ideas about teaching Specific Heat Capacity at A-Level. She also has a wonderful memorable practical which involves throwing eggs. We are then joined by James de Winter in a (hopefully) regular slot "Dispatches with de Winter" where he talks about the book 5 E...

The Nobel Prize is still the ultimate accolade and viewed with envy by the fields that don't have a Nobel Prize (in your face, maths!). This week we start by congratulating the three winners of the 2020 physics prize: Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, and Andrea Ghez, before talking to FoTP, Carole Kenrick about Domains and Zines.

Thank you so much for making such a great job of teaching with the Covid restrictions! Given the circumstances, schools have done an extraordinary job, and this episode shows how teachers will always find a silver lining. We get a raft of ideas from folk turning the situation to their advantage; for example using visualisers to zero in on the crucial points of practicals, using OneNote to 'write'...

Way back at the beginning of series one we were thrilled to hear from an international school teacher named Matt who had just landed in Lima. Fast forward two years and we have finally managed to organise a chat with the fabulous Matt Bowman.

Season 3 continues to deliver physics royalty as James de Winter joins us. James is the physics tutor on the Cambridge PGCE course and has seen generations of physics teachers through their training. Having met a fair sample I can say that all of them hold James in the sort of reverence that Luke reserved for Obi Wan.

Robin and Thomas reflect on a first week back under the new covid guidelines and find time to talk through a simple required practical - timing a trolley rolling down a ramp.

Thomas and Robin look forward to a new - albeit different - school year with some reflections on "the new normal" and an interview with physics-teaching Royalty.

Thomas doesn't know which week it is; thinking there is one more week of term he drags Robin to his garage to test some vacuum cannon upgrades. Thomas and Robin also look backwards and forwards though the podcast's second season. A Tight Collar Thomas has been experimenting with the collars that are used to join vacuum cannon spec pipes. After initial excitement (described in the podcast) Thomas d...

What will the well-dressed physics lab be wearing this year? Jonathan Shaw secured £53,000 of funding to kit out his physics department and asked Thomas and Robin to throw this over to the physics-teaching hive mind, and you did not disappoint! We had some fantastic suggestions, and some surprises.

Peter is one of those special people who is a finisher. Dissatisfied with the resources available to him in his trainee year, Peter set about creating his own resources. Not only that, he shared them through his web site, sciencedoctor.school.blog. His one problem with all this #sharingiscaring? The endless requests for the answers. If you use the resources and there are no answers, then please se...

Rachel tells us what she's learned about getting yourself online. Empowering stuff and some great advice from Rachel about how to make a resource that will be of lasting value in your classroom.

Jo is a career-changer from a medical background who kindly agreed to join us to chat about her experience of teaching physics.

Friend of the podcast Dave Farmer returns to talk about a subject to strike fear into any physics teacher's heart: uncertainty! We peel away some layers of complexity to reveal... more layers of complexity! Having worked with a lot of exam boards' A-level specs over the last few years, Dave recommends reading the mark schemes and looking for examples of what your particular exam board recommends....

Wall-to-wall gimmicky demos on this week's podcast as we welcome John Hudson. Although we call them gimmicky, nothing could be farther from the truth: John introduces us to some great experiments and demos that are crammed full of physics to inspire and talk about.

What can we usefully get students doing at home to explore their physics and what (cheap) kit might we be able to provide them with come September?