8 - German Models, American Ways: The “New Movement” among American Physics Teachers, 1905-1909

Summary

The “new movement” among American physics teachers, which began at a midwestern regional science teachers' meeting in 1905 and ended with a national symposium in early 1909, marked a major turning point in American high school physics education. Before the new movement, American physics teachers had adopted a style of physics instruction that had its origins in the university community. They remained, however, poorly trained in the discipline that they taught. Moreover, they had not yet taken the direction and content of the high school physics curriculum into their own hands, and they had no national organization in which their interests could be represented. After the new movement, physics teachers had not only seized curricular control over school physics, but had also forced a reconsideration of teacher training and founded two fledgling national organizations.

German models of school physics instruction and teacher training played crucial roles in the new movement. American high school physics teachers, under the guiding hand of university physicists, had adopted by the late 1880s a physics curriculum based on laboratory exercises, especially precision measurement, that had proven so successful in Germany and that had its origins in the system of German science seminars, the institutional predecessors of the large-scale German science laboratories of the late nineteenth century. But lacking the training and especially the exposure to research of their German counterparts, American teachers soon found such practical exercises sterile. In the late nineteenth century, the introduction of exact experimentation into the classroom was sustained only by ideologically interpreting measurement in ways different than had been done in Germany.