What physics teachers need now
As a Siegel Fellow at STEMteachersNYC this summer, I was tasked with answering the question, “What do physics teachers need now?” The high level answer to this question must be “a lot of things,” because our nation needs 75% more physics teachers than we currently have. I don’t blame all the physics and engineering majors who don’t become teachers: out of all the professions you can pursue with a degree in physics and a master’s level education, teaching is the lowest paid and least appreciated.
So when someone does choose to become a physics teacher, it must be deliberate. It must be that they really love it. I certainly do. I am married to my job (ask my husband). Any marriage needs constant attention and care, or it will wither. I spoke with dozens of physics teachers this summer during workshops, conferences, and social events. Everything I heard can be summed up in one word: community. What I mean by community tends to match what I hear other teachers saying, so the following is an amalgam of many voices on this important topic. Here are the needs of physics teachers now:
1. We need to get to know each other. Teaching physics can look very different in two schools that are 4 blocks apart (speaking from personal experience here), let alone when you move to a new school that’s multiple states away (again, personal experience). We need to be able to talk about these differences for two reasons. First, recognizing that different school communities have different needs will enable us to feel seen and validated in broader conversations. When I was new to teaching, I once tried out a pedagogical technique I’d read in a book. I asked a trusted colleague from another school why she thought it wasn’t working for me, and her answer was that I probably wasn’t implementing it correctly. Years later, I implemented the same technique in a different school and it worked perfectly. I did everything the same; the only difference was that I was in a different school. Different school communities need different things, and teachers need to be validated when their struggles are not the same as the struggles of their colleagues who teach elsewhere. Second, learning about how different schools operate (and even visiting them!) gives us new ideas to bring back to our classrooms, enabling us to continuously improve. (Note: these connections can take place in a variety of settings: in person conferences, open social media platforms like Bluesky, login-based platforms like the STEP UP online community, etc.)
2. We need these conversations to be informal and in person. I love a structured physics teacher workshop as much as the next person, because how else would I have learned about modeling? But you can’t beat the conversations that happen over pizza or drinks after a good workshop. Professional development gives us a space to talk about curriculum; social settings give us the freedom to talk about everything that surrounds it — the complicated dynamics of student emotional needs, parent engagement, etc. Teaching physics is only a tiny part of teaching physics: most of the work is in getting to know our students and helping them be good to each other and to themselves. In formal settings like a professional workshop, it’s hard to be honest about the real barriers to student learning, which have nothing to do with the physics itself. But when physics teachers connect in informal ways, the real conversations can happen. For example, after a talk at the AAPT Summer Meeting in July, I told a speaker that I appreciated her talk. She mentioned that in the classroom she researched, not a single high school student had arrived in class before the late bell, and only half the students made it to class at some point during the period. She said she was not able to say this explicitly during her talk because it’s too anathema to discuss in a polite presentation (and she’s right). Only in smaller groups could we talk about it and agree that this is an extremely common occurrence in many public school classrooms across the country.
3. We need experiences that benefit both new and experienced teachers. We’ve all been the one person in the room who doesn’t get the lingo and feels left out, and we’ve all also been the person who used lingo that someone newer didn’t understand. It’s hard to break into the physics teacher scene. Most of us (myself included) attended a science teacher master’s program with few (if any) professors who focused on physics, and so we didn’t really learn much physics-specific pedagogy in school. And only 40% of physics classes are taught by someone with a physics degree at all. So we need to make sure our workshops and conferences are newbie-friendly. At the same time, those of us who have been attending physics professional development for years are looking for new content that builds on the standard pedagogies, and we don’t want to sit through the same old things. The answer to this is differentiation: we need to keep finding ways to give teachers a learning experience with a low floor and a high ceiling, with lots of room to play and develop ideas at the level they need. Often the best way to do this is to leave space for teachers to self-organize, such as at the High School Physics Teacher Camp.
4. We need our local networks. As much as I value national AAPT meetings, there’s something special about a local gathering of New York City physics teachers. When teachers all have the same bureaucratic headaches in their districts and the same local challenges affecting student morale, it fosters bonding. When you teach in the same city, you can collaborate on local phenomena for your NGSS lessons. At national conferences, other teachers never understood why New Yorkers like me couldn’t use cars in physics examples; it always had to be a subway or bus. And only New York has the Regents exam, which compels teachers to approach the content a certain way. For years, STEMteachersNYC has been an incredible source of support and camaraderie for me over. This summer, I moved from New York to Virginia. The culture and systems here in Virginia are different, and I look forward to attending my first meeting of the AAPT Chesapeake Section because it will necessarily be a different conversation than the one we had in New York. (As an aside, science course sequencing has been on my mind lately, and I am learning about how it works in the DC area. In New York City, for example, a public school principal can decide unilaterally to make their school a Physics First school; in the DC area the decision resides at the level of the county or state.)
5. We need money. An obvious way to get more physics teachers is to pay all teachers more money. For jobs requiring a master’s degree, teaching earns $20,000 less than median. Taxpayers are unlikely to fill this gap, and so we need philanthropic organizations to help out. I spend many hours engaged in teaching activities outside of my work day: writing curriculum for organizations, designing and facilitating workshops, conducting research and analysis. I greatly appreciate when that work can be compensated. I also appreciate when there is funding for me to attend a conference (especially one where I’m invited to speak). When I worked in the private sector, it was expected that my company would fund any materials or travel that would help me improve at my job. Public schools don’t have the money for this, so teachers are on their own. Applying for grants takes time and know-how, and most teachers do not have the training or the time to search for grants, to write grant applications, and to complete remuneration and reimbursement paperwork. I am grateful for the nonprofit and philanthropic organizations that play a key role in funding teachers’ endeavors. This is a key component to helping teachers stay in the field. We need organizations to continue to fund teachers, and also to help teachers make use of said funding.
6. We need to be trusted. One common complaint I hear from physics teachers is that administrators or parents don’t understand (and therefore don’t agree with) how they teach. It’s true, our classrooms these days don’t look like the physics classrooms we attended as high school students 5 to 40 years ago. Many of us no longer explicitly use textbooks. Many of us talk about how the physics we teach is Eurocentric, and we try to bring in new perspectives for how to model the physical world. Many of us emphasize collaboration and group discovery over individual achievement. Many of us use project-based assessments or other alternative assessments and have begun to move away from a testing culture. There’s an increasing body of research (including Building Thinking Classrooms) to support the techniques we’ve been using for years, but still our school communities question what we’re up to. When I connect with other physics teachers, we can share challenges and support each other in new ideas and techniques. But ultimately, we’re accountable to our schools and our students’ families, and if we don’t feel trusted then we won’t stick around.
All of us are in it for the students. Our students are the ones we spend our time with. Our students are the ones who give the most incisive, useful feedback on our lessons. Our students are the ones who grow up right under our noses, who discover in our classrooms that they really can, in fact, do physics. But physics teachers need more than students in order to thrive. We need peer experts to challenge us, to develop ideas with us, and to support us. We need communities that encourage us, value us, pay us.
And if we get what we need, then we’ll have the energy and enthusiasm to keep coming to work every day, turning today’s teenagers into tomorrow’s changemakers. We love the work, and also love alone isn’t enough.