“Whiteboard Speed-Dating” With Goalless Problems: A Comfort-Building Facilitation Technique for Collaborative Problem Solving in Physics Teacher Professional Development

Enrollment in high school physics in the United States has grown significantly over the past two decades, yet the production of new physics teachers has lagged. Currently, about half of U.S. physics courses are taught by teachers who did not undergo formal preparation in the discipline. This article is situated in a physics teaching community of practice that brings together high school physics teachers with a wide range of experience to participate in sustained, responsive professional development (PD). Nearly half of these teachers are out-of-field and can be prone to experience socioemotional risks when engaging in PD activities such as collaborative problem solving. In this scenario, facilitators must consider what types of group activities would foster a safe and comfortable space for new or out-of-field teachers to strengthen their content knowledge for teaching physics, simultaneously allowing more experienced physics teachers the creative space to grow. This ar introduces whiteboard speed dating with goalless problems as a science teacher PD facilitation technique. In the focal activity, 16 physics teachers approached an open-ended physics word-problem while frequently rotating to new partners and whiteboards. The analysis considers 14 post-activity teacher surveys, six post-activity teacher interviews, and video analysis of six teachers’ participation—including two focal out-of-field teacher cases for closer interaction analysis. The data suggests that this facilitation technique can be valuable and rewarding for its exposure of teachers to a new pedagogy and for its ability to engage heterogeneous groups of teachers in comfortable and safe physics content reasoning conversations.