IPaSS builds community, provides resources to enrich high school physics education
Karen Greene
for Illinois Physics Condensate
It’s well documented that early physics exposure plays a crucial role in routing students onto the pathway to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers. But physics is often viewed as intimidating and elitist by high school students.
Maggie Mahmood believes the key to undoing those stereotypes—and ultimately to encouraging students’ pursuit of further STEM education—is improving high school students’ access to high-quality physics curricula, delivered by inspiring, innovative teachers.
“This project is about helping students, but a byproduct is what happens when you get teachers together in the same room. We see teachers connecting on a level we didn’t expect.”
Maggie Mahmood
Illinois Physics Coordinator of Secondary Education Partnerships
Creating these opportunities means equipping teachers with the tools to make physics tangible, culturally relevant, and accessible to the communities they serve, she asserts.
Now the coordinator of secondary education partnerships for Illinois Physics, Mahmood spent years as a high school physics teacher in Boston and Baltimore. She understands that the quality of physics education varies widely in real-world high schools. A shortage of teachers having physics backgrounds combined with a lack of resources for teachers means access to high-quality physics education is not equal.
Often, schools in low-income areas have the fewest resources for teaching the foundations of physics. In Illinois, the most pronounced inequities in access exist at two extremes: small rural-community schools and densely populated urban districts. This trend disproportionately affects Black and Latine students.
“Some schools have such a shortage of physics teachers, they offer physics on a rotating schedule or not at all,” notes Mahmood. “If students don’t graduate high school with a quality physics education, it can hamper their ability to get any kind of engineering degree.”
Disparity in physics education is a complex problem that impacts students, teachers, and the universities that educate physicists and engineers. Many high school students lack opportunities to build a strong physics foundation, teachers face isolation and burnout, and universities—including UIUC—are hindered in their efforts to grow a diverse community of physics and engineering professionals. Mahmood and her Illinois Physics colleagues are taking action to address this multifaceted problem through a program called the Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools Partnership (IPaSS).
IPaSS brings together Illinois high school physics teachers—the IPaSS teaching fellows—for professional development, giving them access to research-based, university-level instructional materials and helping them adapt these materials for use in high school physics courses. A team of Illinois Physics faculty and staff members, led by Mahmood, recruits and works with IPaSS teaching fellows to adapt university resources for high school use, to introduce new resources into the classroom, and to build a community of teachers who collaborate and support each other.
As the IPaSS teaching-fellow community of practice grows, it’s building pathways for high school students to high-quality college-level physics and engineering programs, including those offered by The Grainger College of Engineering and Illinois Physics.
“Everyone in physics is aware of the problem and the need to address it, but it’s a time-intensive and people-intensive issue,” says Illinois Physics Professor Tim Stelzer, who initially came up with the idea for the IPaSS program. “The big question is: can we address this as a university-level department of physics?”
Building a community of practice, from the ground up
Stelzer and Mahmood, along with Morten Lundsgaard, the coordinator of physics teacher development at Illinois Physics, put their heads together to develop a program that would provide teachers with new resources for physics education as well as professional development. They realized their goal and launched IPaSS in summer 2020, at a time when schools, teachers, and students were struggling to deal with the unprecedented problem of a worldwide pandemic. In many ways, it was the perfect time to begin sowing the seeds for a statewide community of physics teachers, as feelings of isolation and teacher burnout had reached new heights.
“We told Maggie about our ideas for a partnership program when she came here in 2019,” recalls Stelzer. “She was game. We wrote a grant and got it funded. All the pieces came together.”
The program started with a cohort of four teaching fellows, all veteran high school physics and science teachers. Since then, IPaSS has expanded to include 24 teaching fellows from across the State of Illinois—some of them veterans and some new to teaching. They come from urban,
suburban, and rural school districts.
The nearly 1,000 students they collectively teach each year represent the diverse socioeconomic, ethnic, and racial
backgrounds of communities across the state. The IPaSS organizers plan to bring more teaching fellows into the program, representing more school districts, to futher build a statewide community of practice that will serve as a support system for high school physics teachers.
“Our teaching fellows are a community of practice from different areas who have different lived experiences in the classroom,” says Lundsgaard. “They get together in the summer, and their sharing with each other is as important as what they learn from us. When it comes to teaching their students, we know they are the experts, and they take the lead.”
IPaSS is funded by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DRL 20-10188. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the study authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Top image photo credit: Physics as a School Subject by Preply.com Images, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
