Improving the Effectiveness of Physics Teaching

Physics teachers need to understand subject matter knowledge tailored specifically to teaching. It can be reached by extending the teachers’ background with in-service training activities and professional development. We report the results of a recent experience involving some Physics teachers engaged in a deep revision of their Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK). This allowed investigation of the standard features in their instructional to identify their specialised Content Knowledge for Teaching (CKT). Two representative stories are reported here, selecting a young teacher and an experienced one. They revised their specific way of Physics teaching, adopting the ISLE (Investigative Science Learning Environment) approach and encouraging the students’ development of reasoning skills.