Science Teacher Attends Physics Seminar in Germany
One of our Science teachers, Richard Meagher, recently attended the seminar, 'General Relativity as a Challenge for Physics education', at the Physikzentrum Bad Honnef (Germany), 10 – 15 February.
He was invited to attend by Ute Kraus and Corvin Zahn, German Physics education researchers associated with the Einsteinian Physics Education Research (EPER) international collaboration, of which Mt Lawley Senior High School is a partner researcher. Ute and Corvin, along with Magdelana Kersling from Norway and David Blair from UWA presented materials to our year 11 Physics classes during November last year. The ABC program CATALYST filmed some of these sessions, for inclusion in the episode that airs nationally tomorrow, 26 February, and will remain available on ABC iView. Based on the work that Richard was doing with our students he was asked to attend the seminar to share ideas and resources with 50 other researchers of Physics education from 12 different countries.
Richard described he 5 day gathering as "… one of the best professional developments that I have ever participated in. The organisers put together a schedule of presentations and discussions that were cutting edge, engaging, productive and relevant. I have already, in the week that I have been back in my year 12 Physics classroom, used ideas and resources that I gained during my participation.
The week in Bad Honnef was professionally rewarding in so many ways and also provided me with invitations to attend similar gatherings at LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory at Caltech) and CERN (the 'Large Hadron Collider') that I will be following up on.
