Fred Goldberg

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ORAL HISTORIES

Interviewed by

David Zierler

Interview date

July 26, 2021

Location

Video conference

See catalog record for this interview

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Interview of Fred Goldberg by David Zierler on July 26, 2021,
Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics,
College Park, MD USA,
www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/47469

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Okay, my parents. Well, my family—I'm Jewish—my family, both sets of grandparents came from Russia, actually from Ukraine. And I know a little bit more about exactly where my mother’s family came from in Ukraine, and a little less about exactly where my father’s family came from. But there’s a couple of interesting stories. My mother and father, they're both deceased now, but I had the opportunity of interviewing them, like you're doing with me, over the last 25, 30 years. S I have kind of an archival record where they talked about what they remember about their parents and their grandparents.

My family in Russia did not have a lot of formal education. Yet both my parents talked about how clever and smart and intelligent their parents were, even though they didn't have the formal education. My mother’s family came from a little village, it’s called a shtetl, just outside of Kiev in Ukraine, by the name of—I think it’s pronounced Bukee (Bukier). And my grandfather, my mother’s father, was one of the first from that village to come over to the United States in the early 1900s. And what he did—this may have been typical of people who came over, with great social responsibility—he settled in Philadelphia, and then immediately set up an association, which he called the Bukier Association, named after the village where he came from. And the initial purpose of this association was to raise money to bring over family members and other friends from that same village near Kiev to Philadelphia. And so over time, more and more people were brought over and settled in Philadelphia. I think my grandfather was for a time the president of this organization. And then what happened, as people settled in, got older and older, some of them began to die. And so the purpose, the main purpose of the association shifted, from raising funds to bring people over, to essentially buying burial plots in a cemetery. And of course, now they're all gone, but there is a cemetery just outside of Philadelphia, called Montefiore, where there’s a whole area that’s called the Bukier section, and all the gravestones have the names of the people who came from that particular village in that shtetl outside of Kiev. And what makes me proud is that my grandfather apparently served a major role in having that happen. So that’s something from my mother’s side of the family.

From my father’s side of the family, the one story I have is his mother, my grandmother, in Russia. Her mother died, and her father remarried, and my grandmother apparently intensely disliked her stepmother. And so that drove her, at the age of 12, with a little support from some family members, to make the trek from Ukraine to the United States by herself. She tells the story of going from town to town, city to city in Europe, and trying to get people to help her, and then eventually coming over through Ellis Island. There were some family members, I guess, in Philadelphia, and so she came to Philadelphia, and she was still 12 years old when she arrived. She met my grandfather, and then she got married at 16. So that’s how some of my grandparents came over. I don’t know if you want to hear more stories about my father and my mother.

Zierler:

Absolutely.

Goldberg:

Well, my father had two siblings. There were three boys in the family. My father was the oldest. He wanted to be a medical doctor. That was his goal. But—and not an uncommon tale at the time—there was not a lot of money in the family, so he had to work. There was money for him to go to pharmacy school [laughs], which cost a lot less money at the time than going to medical school. So he became a pharmacist. And actually, several members of my family later on—an uncle, my brother—they all became pharmacists. So we had a lot of pharmacists in our family. My father’s youngest brother, the third one who came along, eventually did go to medical school—there was eventually some money. My father and others contributed. He became a very famous academic doctor, a kidney specialist.

My father lived in Philadelphia. His father, my grandfather, was a tailor, a skill he had learned in Russia. Their home was on the street corner, and it was a tailor shop downstairs. And right across the street from the tailor shop was a candy store that was owned by my mother’s father, the one who was president of the Bukier Association. And one of his daughters became attracted to my father. At the time, the way she tells it, she would invite him over for a piece of candy or a snack or a piece of cake. You know the saying, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. And eventually, they fell in love and got married. This was in 1939.

I was interested at first in a small college, and I didn't—not that I was a mommy’s boy, but I didn't feel comfortable going very far away. So I applied to and went to Gettysburg College. It’s in central Pennsylvania, a couple hours’ drive from where I grew up, where we lived at the time, which was just outside of Philadelphia. And it was a choice based on the fact that it had a very good reputation as a liberal arts college. And because it was small (about 1800 students) I assumed the teachers gave lot of attention to students. I think that kind of attracted me. That, plus the fact that it was reasonably close to home.

Well, it was almost right away. I can’t remember exactly what project I started working on, as a junior. But at some point, my advisor was interested in doing experiments involving helium-helium collisions with energies in the few kiloelectron volt range. And there was some crude apparatus he was using, and he wanted to build a much larger experimental apparatus to explore these collisions. And so I started working on that, and that really became my dissertation topic. I was part of his group. Although I started as an undergraduate, I continued when I became a graduate student. It really was not a huge shift doing that. I just remember working, almost living, down in the sub-basement of the physics building, called Randall lab, and spending gads of time figuring out how to build and get the apparatus to work. Took a few years.

I remember the fellow graduate students—I remember it was such a wonderful collaboration and people just helped each other. Just down in the sub-basement with people doing different experiments, but everybody was there to sort of help everybody else. I don’t think I had a lot of natural talent in experimental physics, but I did learn, and eventually was successful in getting everything to work and to collect data.

Zierler:

To what extent was this work related to what your graduate advisor was doing at the time?

Goldberg:

Well, that was something he was interested in. He had other kinds of projects involving atomic physics, and had other students work on those. I believe funding for my experiment came through the Department of Defense, not the National Science Foundation. So, he wanted somebody to work on this, and asked me to do it—it’s not something I chose myself. It became my focus.

Zierler:

Now, to foreshadow a little bit—is pedagogy, is physics education, is this on your radar at all as a graduate student? Were you thinking at all about the ways in which physics were taught?

Goldberg:

Interesting. While I was a graduate student, I did not teach laboratories, or recitation sections like some of the other students, because I was funded—well, two things were happening at this time. I was funded by a research assistantship, and so I didn't have to teach. But also, at the same time, people were being drafted for the Vietnam war. And so I remember having a conversation with my advisor and some other faculty members about getting a student deferment, so I could continue my graduate work at the time. And there was a recommendation that what I could do is take on a new responsibility as a graduate student, that is work on a new kind of a job, which the department would recognize as being critically important, and they would be able to attest to that in any letters that they would have to write to draft boards and what have you.

And so I became what was called the department’s lecture demonstrator. At the time, the physics department was in two buildings. One was mainly research labs, where I worked on my experiment, and the other had mainly offices for physics and astronomy faculty, and also had two big lecture halls, where all the students came for the introductory physics lectures. In between, there was a pathway down into a basement where there was this huge room with hundreds of pieces of physics apparatus, demonstration equipment that had been purchased and constructed, I don’t know, for over 30 years or so before me. And I was given the job of being in charge of all that equipment. So for about two years while I was a graduate student, while I was working in the lab across the street, for the rest of my time, I would be essentially setting up physics demonstrations in the two lecture halls for various professors. If I didn’t need to spend so much time doing that job, I may have finished my Ph.D. even earlier.

And there were some professors who didn’t want to show the demonstrations themselves. Perhaps they were concerned that the demonstration apparatus would not work, and they’d be embarrassed in front of hundreds of students. And so they would ask, “Fred, why don’t you run the demonstrations, and I'll talk about them?” So that was the closest I came to doing anything in front of the class. Most of the profs, however, did feel okay showing the demonstrations themselves, so they would just give me a list of what they wanted to do and I would set up the equipment for them, and put everything away after class. And so I became the department’s lecture demonstrator, usually in charge of just setting up the demonstration apparatus but sometimes also actually doing the demonstrations.

Okay, so I have to go back a little bit—my time at West Virginia University. I did try to set up my experimental apparatus and work on it for a time. I remember all kinds of practical and logistical problems with the apparatus. And over about a two-year period of time I lost some confidence in being able to actually get this thing to work. And I lost interest, to be honest.

At the same time, I became the department’s representative on a new kind of university-wide project where there was an interest in designing a brand-new interdisciplinary course across the whole campus looking at how different disciplines engage in gathering and using evidence. It was all about the nature of evidence and the various evidential strategies used by people in various disciplines. And I was a member from the Physics Department who became involved in that. So, for a couple of years I spent a lot of time interacting and collaborating with a bunch of creative people from different departments. We were under the direction of an engineering professor named Charles Wales who had invented a pedagogical approach called guided design, which was a strategy to guide students through the various stages of solving a real-life problem.

I think there were maybe 15 or 20 faculty members, from that many different fields, involved in developing this new course—and we each designed a module involving an imaginary scenario where students would be working with an expert to solve a problem that was some disciplinary in nature. And in working with this expert, while solving a problem, students would learn some content as well as the evidential strategies that are used in that discipline. So I designed a physics project. There was also a chemistry project. There were lawyers. There were English professors. There were psychologists. You name it. Students would choose a few such projects to work on during the semester course.

And it was such an exhilarating experience for me, and I think it introduced me to a whole new idea about what I could do-- be a designer of innovative ways of teaching, and innovative ways of helping students learn. I think that experience, which started during my first year at West Virginia University, got me really interested in that. Shortly after, I began thinking about writing wrote some proposals to design new courses in the Physics Department.

At the time, in the early and mid 1970s, the educational funding opportunities at the National Science Foundation was very limited. The only way to get money in science education was to do something related to either pre-service teachers or in-service teachers. That was it. There was certainly no money at the time for doing education research at NSF, and physics education research was, at best, in its infancy. And so I wrote some grants to NSF, had some success and got funding. The proposals were focused on designing some courses for prospective elementary teachers. And then a few years later, I became aware of people doing research in what was called physics education research and decided—and this would have been around 1980—I decided I wanted to get involved in that.

Part of that decision was dictated by my interest in helping students learning physics, but part of it was that there was something about doing research, doing something new, discovering something new that you can share with a community, that I only had a small sample of as an experimental physicist, but wanted to have that same experience in this new field that I loved, physics education. So physics education research seemed to fit the bill.

And at the time, in 1980, there were three universities that had active departments that were doing this work. One was at the University of Massachusetts. John Clement and his colleagues were there. There was the University of California Berkeley, where Fred Reif was doing some work. And there was the University of Washington, where Lillian McDermott had started a physics education group. Because this was my sixth year at West Virginia University, it was time to apply for a sabbatical. After doing some checking into these three places, I decided I wanted to ask Lillian McDermott if I could come spend a year at the University of Washington to kind of learn the trade. And she, as always, was very inviting, and said, “We’d be happy to have you come.”

Fred, I want to ask a very broad question that I think will inform our subsequent discussion on these issues, and that is, with regard to curriculum development and teacher professional development, where do you see these lines of inquiry as discrete, and in what ways are they interwoven, for physics education research?

Goldberg:

To answer that question, I want to first talk a little bit about a shift in my own thinking, and that is that my so-called training in PER at the University of Washington and my first few years even at San Diego State were directed towards working with individual students. I was interested in helping individual students learn physics. So I was looking for tools that individual students could work on. This in part, I think, was because I had this strong desire of explaining physics to students, and I wanted to use some of the technology to be helpful in doing that.

But after a couple of years at San Diego State University, I slowly shifted my interest and what I wanted to do, away from focusing explaining things to students and helping individual students learn, and to beginning to think about designing tasks that small groups of students would grapple with and try to figure things out, and to observe the groups engaged in that process. So, a shift from focusing on explaining or telling and helping individual students learn physics, to trying to understand how small groups of students can come to figure things out for themselves, for example when trying to figure out an experiment. And during this time we developed a lot of computer simulations where students could explore representations of phenomena. So that was a shift. And a lot of that took place while I was developing new curricula.

Again, when I say I was developing, it was always in collaboration with other people. But we developed a lot of curricula over, I don’t know, 15, 20 years. We worked on many projects. They all shared in common the development of curriculum materials that were very student-focused and provided opportunities for students to develop ideas themselves. And I saw technology as a vehicle to help that process. And from a research point of view, I became very interested in how students in the group develop deeper understanding themselves, how the group learns using the technology. And so I started videotaping groups as they were struggling, using these techniques, with actual apparatus and computer simulations that I had developed as part of the curriculum that we were using in the courses that I was teaching.

And so the shift—the research involving technology was always in the context of the curriculum that I had helped developed, and also in a lot of the professional development projects that I was involved in. We offered workshops for teachers using the curricula materials, the apparatus and the computer simulations we had developed and were using in the courses for prospective elementary teachers. And we were also interested in how the teachers were learning physics, and so we videotaped many of them working on tasks and trying to understand how they were learning. So I became very involved, and some people thought I had become known as the person who was very involved in using video as a technique to study the process of learning.

I'm going to back-track a little bit because it’s going to lead into that. In the early 2000s I was involved in a project that was called the Constructing Physics Understanding project, or the CPU project. And it was with major funding from NSF. It was to design materials, modules, to be used by elementary teachers during workshops, and middle school teachers, and high school teachers in their courses. As part of that project, we designed curriculum materials and simulation software. I was very proud of both of those parts. The curriculum materials were designed around a pedagogical strategy which focused on eliciting students’ ideas, and then providing them the tools to build on those ideas so that eventually they would evolve to be very close to the ones that were recognized by the scientific community. This took a majority of the time. And then there were activities where students applied these newly developed ideas to new scenarios, to new physical situations. So that was kind of the pedagogical structure, strategy of the materials.

Now, to help students in this middle stage of developing ideas, we not only had them do lots of hands-on experiments, but we developed what I consider to be a very powerful suite of physics simulation software which was pretty new at the time. Now, this predates the PhET software that was developed at the University of Colorado, which was an outstanding set of computer simulation programs to help students explore their ideas in various domains of physical science. This predates that. We developed software in different topical areas of physics, all which had in common students’ ability to set up simulations of various physical situations and then to make use of various representational techniques to help them—this goes back to what I did with the videodisc, but a much more sophisticated version of it—to give them the opportunity of making connections between the conceptual ideas and the real-world phenomena. So this was really important, because I'm getting to what occurred later.

To give you an example of what I'm talking about, in electric circuits, we designed a program where students could set up circuits with light bulbs and other devices, close the circuit with a switch and see what happens. That’s not so original. But one of the more complicated ideas in electric circuits is the idea of potential difference across various components. And so what we designed was the ability for the program to color code the wires [laughs], different colors, where the highest potential in the circuit, near the positive side of the battery, would be red, and the lowest potential, near the negative side of the battery, would be blue. I think we got the idea of coloring the wires from some work that either Mel Steinberg or Bob Morse had done, I can’t remember exactly who. And then we would have an image of the color spectrum from 400 to 700 nanometers on the screen to serve as a visual guide for the students. And around the circuit, as the wires went into and out of different circuit components, the color of the wires would change, representing the relative potential energy drop across that component. The program did this automatically. So as the students would change things in the circuit, let’s say causing the electric current to change, they would see light bulbs get brighter or dimmer, or meters have higher or lower readings, and they were also able to see the colors of the wires change in different parts of the circuit. And this helped them associate the difference in colors across circuit elements with potential drops, so the bigger the potential drop, the more far apart in the spectrum the two colors. So this was a visual way of helping students make a connection, I think—we think—between changes in potential and the resultant changes in current, for example, in the circuit, which they could also measure with meters. So that’s one of 20-some programs, one example, where we had done that.

In the static electricity programs, when students would rub different insulators together on the screen, the surfaces in contact would change color. They would become red or blue, depending on whether the surfaces became positive or negative. And the thickness of the coloring was related to the amount of excess surface charge. So the computer program calculated all this, but the way the students saw it is they would see they would see the surfaces become colored when they rubbed the materials together, and the more they rubbed the thicker the coloring, up to a point. And we saw that as a way of helping students make connections between rubbing surfaces and the resulting surface phenomena in static electricity, which is difficult for them. We also had both metallic and insulating elements, and they could be polarized, and students were able to experiment with all that. So that was another simulation.

We had a whole bunch of different simulations, and for each one, we had different strategies, all of which were designed to help students make connections between visual representations and the physics phenomena themselves. And the students were able to play around with the visuals of apparatus that were on the computer screen and see what happens. My first doctoral students did their dissertations on investigating groups of students working with these materials and these simulations, and figuring out how the students were thinking and how they came to change their ideas. So that was the first really big project that I was involved in.

Unfortunately, the simulations were programmed by a group in Russia, because at the time that’s all we could afford. They were a lot less expensive than hiring local programmers, and they were very, very good, so we got really powerful simulations. But they were written in Java around some proprietary core, and over time, as versions of Java changed, they no longer worked. Operating systems changed, both with IBM and Apple, and we were never able to reconnect with the original group who did the programming. And because part of the programming was proprietary, we couldn’t hire others to do it. So you can get them to run today on a Mac using a special program, but it’s no longer usable by a lot of people. I had worked on that project for many years.

So those computer programs were designed to be used with individual modules in various topical areas. They were standalone modules; teachers could use any number of them and combine them in any order. And then the next big set of projects that we worked on, starting in the early 2000s and continued until a few years ago, was developing curricula for entire courses, especially for students who wanted to become elementary teachers. And the first curriculum became known as Physics & Everyday Thinking. I don’t know if you've heard about that.

Zierler:

I haven’t. And Fred, on that point, let me ask first about the name. What does the name signify as you were conceptualizing the program? Everyday thinking, physics—what’s the connection? What were you after there?

Goldberg:

It’s a nice story. The original name—I think I have the book on my book shelf—the original name was Physics for Elementary Teachers, which we called the PET project. P-E-T, PET for Physics for Elementary Teachers. So the name PET appeared everywhere in the curriculum. After about a year or so, a number of people said, “We’d like to use this in other situations, not just courses for prospective elementary teachers, but the name kind of puts students off, because they think it’s only for elementary teachers.” So we had to come up with a new name but still wanted to keep the P-E-T acronym—PET—but no longer had “elementary teachers” in it. So we came up with Physics & Everyday Thinking. That’s the story of how that title came about.

But of course, it makes a lot of sense, right? It wasn’t just done to remove ‘elementary teachers’ from the title. It was also done because our whole task here was to help students make connections between their everyday thinking and physics ideas, the physics ideas we wanted to help them learn. So that new name was used from then on. And then we developed a version called Physical Science & Everyday Thinking. Those two versions were intended for small groups of students learning in studio-style settings. And then later we developed a version for lecture courses using a very similar pedagogy, but where obviously students couldn't do experiments easily in a 200 or 300-seat lecture room. So we came up with little bags of materials that you could hand out and distribute, and have students do simple experiments on a desktop. And we incorporated other kinds of strategies and techniques that could be used by instructors to help students learn in that environment. So all that development took place over about 10 or 12 years.

Zierler:

And was it being adopted quickly? I mean, how fast were these courses gaining traction in the field?

Goldberg:

I think we had up to maybe 70 adoptions around the country. Now, at the same time, there was also another program that Lillian McDermott’s team had worked on, which was the Physics by Inquiry curriculum. When I was there on Sabbatical I helped work on one of the modules, so I was pretty familiar with it. [laughs] It’s a really powerful set of curriculum modules, but different, in several ways, from the materials that we were developing, one way of which was in our program, we were making use of these computer simulations, which we saw as a critical, integral part of the experience of students to go along with hands-on experiments.

But the other thing was that there was a lot of individual and small-group responsibility for learning in the Physics by Inquiry materials. I don’t know if you're familiar at all with that curriculum, but students work in small groups from printed materials, which give them lots of prompts, and they talk about it and write down their answers, and then the instructor or a teaching assistant comes around at specific times to check up on their understanding. And that’s kind of the modus operandi of that course, at least it was several years ago. I don’t know if there have been any recent changes in the pedagogical approach.

In our curriculum, which uses a social constructivist kind of pedagogy, students would work in groups, and instructors might walk around and answer questions, but at the end of every activity, there was a public sharing of ideas. Students had to present their ideas to everybody in the class, and they had to come to a consensus on the big ideas. So it was very much driven by small group development and discussion, and whole-class consensus, collaboration. And those were two of the big features that differentiated our style, I think, with what was done by Physics by Inquiry. It’s just a different approach. They were very successful and had high levels of adoption of that curriculum.

Zierler:

Fred, can you tell me a little bit about how these courses aligned with Next Generation Science Standards?

Goldberg:

Yes, I can, and it leads me to my last big curriculum development project. So we had Physics & Everyday Thinking, which is pure physics. We had Physical Science & Everyday Thinking, which was physics and chemistry. And we had Learning Physical Science, which was a lecture style version of Physical Science & Everyday Thinking. And those were all designed around the Project 2061 science education standards, which were a set of ideas that they thought was important for students to learn. So those curricula were built around those Standards. But around 2013 when the Next Generation Science Standards were being released, we decided that we were going to make a new version of the curriculum that was going to be designed around the content, the engineering and science practices, and the cross-cutting concepts of the Next Generation Science Standards.

And so we developed a new set of materials that became known as—no surprise—Next Generation Physical Science & Everyday Thinking, or Next Gen PET. And that was a big effort. We developed the student materials, and then lots of supporting materials for faculty. During the early years of the curriculum implementation, among the small group of us who taught those first versions, we videotaped lots of our classrooms. So we made an instructor resource that included lots of video clips of students actually working through different parts of the curriculum. As we had done previously our idea was to focus on a small group and videotaping them as they talked about and came to some agreement on some ideas guided by prompts from the curriculum. And then we videotaped the whole-class discussions that happened at the end of each activity, where the whole class is supposed to come to consensus.

And because this was such a different kind of pedagogy for a lot of instructors, we thought having video clips showing many examples the curriculum in operation, as well as other supporting materials, would be helpful. And so we designed a website with the publisher to do that. That was all geared towards helping students develop those content ideas, practices and crosscutting concepts that are associated with the Next Generation Science Standards. And then, there was some research on how to help faculty adopt or adapt and continue to use these new research-based instructional strategies. Our curriculum would be one example, but there were others. A the research showed that faculty who adapt or begin to adapt some of these, especially ones that require real shifts in their roles as teachers, that it was challenging for a lot of faculty, for lots of reasons that could be both personal as well as institutional, and consequently why a lot of these faculty gave up continuing to use the new strategies.

And I think what was recognized is that for these adaptions of research-based instructional strategies to be successful and long-lived, one of the things that faculty needed was significant, ongoing support. And so with that in mind, a team of us wrote a proposal to the NSF. It got funded in 2016. The project was to establish a faculty online learning community that we call Next Gen PET FOLC. It currently has about 50 members in it and has been going on for over four years. And all the faculty joined the FOLC with a commitment to use this curriculum in their courses.

The faculty meet in smaller groups of ten to twelve. All the meetings are videotaped, and we've archived them all. As part of the research effort, our project research team looks at some of these videos, trying to understand how the faculty members’ thinking about teaching and learning changes over many years of implementation of the curriculum and involvement in the community. We don’t have access to what they do in the classroom. We only have access to what they talk about in these meetings that occur generally every few weeks, and over several years. So, we've been able to monitor those meetings, and some of our research efforts have been to try to understand and document how faculty change.

In the last couple years, a graduate student and I have been focusing on the facilitators of these meetings. These are university faculty who lead these meetings. Now, they come in with hardly any experience leading university faculty groups who are trying to enhance their skills in teaching and learning. They have almost no prior experience, so they learn on the job. What they do have, and how they were chosen, is they had implemented earlier versions of the curriculum with success. So they had some pedagogical expertise, and they knew some of the struggles that faculty who were starting to use it might have. So that’s how they began. But because this community has been going on for four years, all its members are going to eventually develop expertise in implementing the curriculum. And so the issues that the faculty discuss and talk about will change over time, and therefore, the facilitators, the people who run these meetings, you would assume, their facilitation goals and the strategies they use to implement their goals, will also change.

And so, my graduate student and I have been studying this process for a while. We have spent two years [laughs] looking at a case study of one really interesting faculty member facilitator who, over two years has significantly changed how he thinks about his role. Now, the project staff did provide occasional professional development opportunities for facilitators, which it so happens really affected this faculty member. It had a big impact on how he thought about his work. And so we studied him in great detail, and that’s one of the papers that we're writing now and will submit it shortly to a journal. We're also working on just looking at the whole community, what happens to faculty who have four years to work in this community, how do they change in their thinking about teaching and learning?

What has happened now is that the NSF funding is ending this year, and so we, the project leadership team, are backgrounding ourselves. A number of other faculty in the FOLC are taking over leadership roles, and they're going to run the show. And this is going to continue, hopefully, for the next several years. Of course, we have a vested interest in seeing what happens, but we know that we are letting go, just like the parents whose children go off to school, and your influence is finished. So that’s happening right now, as we speak.

Zierler:

Fred, I appreciate the obvious bureaucratic and administrative value in aligning Next Gen PET with Next Generation Science Standards. But more substantively, how are those standards useful in developing the curriculum?

Goldberg:

Mostly as a filter. So, in two ways. One, you can’t teach everything. You can’t expect to include material on everything. And so we looked at what’s included in these Standards, and we cut out a lot of stuff from earlier versions of the curricula that no longer are included in the Standards. So for example, when I was talking earlier about this other project, the CPU project, I talked with great pride about the current electricity unit and the simulation, that wonderful simulation with all the colored wires. However, electric circuits play almost no role in the new standards, and so we essentially cut that subject out. What used to be an entire unit in the Physics & Everyday Thinking curriculum no longer exists in this new curriculum, replaced with part of just a single activity. And so that’s one example, but there are lots of others.

Plus we had to introduce engineering design activities. We hired a consultant who had previously designed a lot of engineering design activities, and was involved in developing the Standards, the engineering standards for NGSS. We had him help us design engineering activities to include in Next Gen PET. And so we introduced new things that did not exist in previous versions of the curriculum.

One other thing that I should mention, which is unique about our curriculum, is we had an entire set of materials that’s supplemental to the student materials, that focuses on issues of teaching and learning: how students learn and how teachers teach science. And those materials are complementary to the content-focused materials. They're available on the website. And for those instructors who teach a class for prospective elementary teachers, or who teach a workshop for in-service teachers, while the curriculum materials themselves help the students or teachers learn science, there’s also a set of materials that can be used to help the future or current teachers think about how their students can learn science and how they should teach science. So that’s kind of a unique feature, and it’s a huge set of materials that align with all the content units and it’s available on the instructor resources website. So the NGSS did have a strong influence, both in what content we included, and what we excluded from previous versions, as we adapted this new curriculum.

Zierler:

Fred, just to bring our conversation right up to the present, as you say, these issues are at a moment of transition right now. So that begs the question, why now? What has developed that suggests new directions for the field?

Goldberg:

Goldberg:

Let me tell you a personal story and then a story about the talk that I gave then. My first wife, Dianne, was very supportive of what I was doing, and she knew I was a hard worker. I worked on what I did many hours and weekends. And I think she tried to respect that, and was very supportive. Unfortunately, she got sick and she passed away just two months before I received the telephone call that I was going to be offered the medal. That was with extreme sadness [laughs] because the person that I would have identified as most supportive of my work and my personal life was not going to be there. So my two daughters came to the meeting, and they were in the audience, which was very important to me.

Well, I appreciate the effort.