Next year

I would love to teaching the Modeling Physics curriculum, but I've not been able to convince my district to spring for training. I enjoyed Stephen Murray's efforts, but they don't fit me. (I will definitely continue to use them and await all updates for his labs which are great inquiry.) I need to do something that meets my students needs for stimulation and my need for structure so that I can adjust and build appropriately. 

AH-HA MOMENT #1
If students are to be generally college ready, they need general college skills 

At the end of the year, my kids behaved (very) poorly during while I was out for training. As a result, the project they were assigned was scrapped for an outlining assignment. An exceptionally large portion of the students did not know how to do this. Additionally, given a short informational essay, about half got it returned  for copying. They did not understand (or professed to not understand) that listing a web site did not give them license to copy whatever they wanted from that website without any citation other than the works cited page.

Implemenation: 

• Regular text outlining
• Regular writing via abstracts and article summaries. (I would love an assist on this if you have any ideas.)

AH-HA MOMENT #2
Problem-solving mastery requires self-guidance
OK, this is less about a particular moment than general frustration at the amount of hand-holding a bunch of high-school juniors appear to require.

Implementation:

• Goal-less problems, a la Kelly O'Shea
• Projects vs. Labs

AH-HA MOMENT #3
It's OK to just jump into a project.
After testing this year, I did a summative project for circuits - building an electric house. It was a blast and I really think the students learned a lot. However, it reinforced the need for time. And let's face it, I am still learning how to bring my students along at a fast(er) pace. The death of CScope might help with this. :)

Implementation:

• Build projects around units not as end-caps to them. (Of course, this means finding good project fits.)