Author: Enrica Maragliano

A distance teaching experience in Physics with an experimental and peer learning approach

Because of Coronavirus, we suddenly had to stop our school routine and we had to stay at home rethinking our teaching and learning process.

In our region, the lessons were suddenly stopped on February 24th. In the beginning, it seemed the suspension will only last one week, but then, after few extensions, we understood that we will not be returning to class for this school year.

From 2nd March I started meeting my students in virtual classroom, providing video lessons. After less than a week I had understood which tools to use (Classroom, Meet, whiteboard, Geogebra and Phet) and we started a new routine.

In fact, for me and my students, it was natural enough to organize distance lessons because with many of them we had experienced with extended and virtual classes thanks to the eTwinning projects we took part in. We were also used to flipped-classroom teaching approach.

I teach Mathematics and Physics in a humanistic high school where I have a few weekly lessons of my subjects and they are often underestimated by the colleagues of other subjects.

To involve students in Physics during this period I used different approaches and I think that two of them are quite relevant to be shared as they could be reused by other teachers: conducting a virtual experiment and peer-to-peer teaching regarding some specific topics.