As a 28-year veteran teacher at Champaign Centennial High School, Jill McLean has seen many of her physics students, including Advanced Placement (AP) Physics students, go on to study physics at UIUC, about four miles to the east of her high school campus.
“I was interested in sharing actual materials from UIUC with my AP students, because so many attend Illinois,” says McLean, herself an Illinois Physics alumnus. “They get to have the same experiences as in a first-semester class at Illinois. They can earn AP credit and measure themselves at the college level.”
McLean, who teaches Physics, AP Prep Physics, AP Physics, and Mechanics, joined the first cohort of teachers in the Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools (IPaSS) program in 2020, after receiving an email inviting her to participate. She is the only full-time physics teacher at Centennial, which has a student population of about 1,400. And often teachers helping her in the classroom do not have a physics background.
During the pandemic, McLean was able to keep her students engaged by giving them the handheld wireless laboratory devices called iOLabs. The iOLabs allowed her students to design their own experiments at a time when getting together as a class was impossible. IPaSS also introduced McLean to high school physics teachers across Illinois, who regularly share ideas and offer support.
“The most useful thing has been meeting and collaborating with so many other physics teachers throughout the state,” she says. “I really learn a lot from others, but also from helping others. As a veteran teacher, it’s nice to share what I’ve done successfully to help other teachers.”
According to McLean, introducing her students to the iOLab has transformed physics lab work for her students. They can design their own experiments and have more control of their classroom experiences.
“Learning to use this technology and learning how to set up and conduct experiments has probably had the biggest impact on my students,” she says. “They come up with the experiments. They look at the data. It’s real science, and they are doing it.”
Diversity in science is important, notes McLean, and tackling that problem means giving students from under-resourced high schools the chance to get a high-quality physics education. The tools and resources provided through the IPaSS program give students across Illinois the opportunity to experience a hands-on physics curriculum similar to a college curriculum, she adds.
Like so many other IPaSS teachers, McLean values the chance to collaborate with her peers, share ideas and experiences, and use her own expertise to help other teachers solve problems, cope with challenges, and develop into better teachers.
“The collaboration in general has been so useful,” McLean concludes. “Physics and science teachers are really good at stealing ideas from each other.”