Meet the Ogden Senior Teacher Fellows placed at PhET
PhET Interactive Simulations is pleased to collaborate with the Ogden Trust through the placement of three of their Senior Teacher Fellows within PhET Global Initiatives. The Ogden Trust’s mission is to advance physics education, primarily within England. To elevate the role of teachers in this mission, the trust’s Senior Teacher Fellowship program provides support to government-funded schools, allowing select physics teachers release time (typically 0.5–1 day per week) to carry out special interest projects. This year, three teachers elected to work with PhET to develop PhET sim-centered curriculum and professional development resources and events for the teachers of England. Learn more about each of these teachers below.
Isabelle Parkes (2024–2025) | Physics | United Kingdom
Isabelle is a physics teacher in a comprehensive school and sixth form located on the border of Hampshire and Dorset. She has a degree in Physics and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics, and worked in satellite remote sensing before her teaching career. She enjoys sharing her experience and knowledge through teacher networks and workshops locally, regionally, and nationally. She makes frequent and regular use of PhET simulations in the classroom, seeing them as an invaluable way for students to develop mental models of abstract ideas. Isabelle is particularly interested in how metacognitive strategies can help develop conceptual understanding. She will be using her Ogden Senior Teacher Fellowship placement to develop and share ways for teachers to best scaffold their students’ learning when using PhET simulations.
Callum Farnsworth (2023–2025) | Physics | United Kingdom: Callum is a secondary physics teacher from Cambridge with 7 years of experience. He holds a Bachelors degree in Physics and a Masters degree in Education which involved investigating inquiry-based learning, including best practise for the use of digital simulations. Working in a school where students all have their own tablet, Callum regularly uses PhET simulations in his classroom and is interested in using technology to make physics engaging for students. Through the Ogden Senior Teacher Fellowship at PhET he is working to share his expertise with other teachers.
David Morfee (2023–2024) | Physics | United Kingdom: David has been teaching physics for 12 years. Committed to promoting a love for all things physics, he independently found that PhET simulations are a powerful learner-led way of discovering and rationalising physics concepts. The Ogden Senior Teacher Fellowship placement at PhET is a huge opportunity to develop materials and share good practice with other teachers and teacher training institutions. His goal with the fellowship is to increase the use of PhET in his own practise and school, developing resources relevant to the UK GCSE and A-level Curriculums, and also to share these with local schools and teacher training institutions in the North West of the UK.
Jed Marshall (2023–2024)| Physics | United Kingdom: Jed is a physics teacher in North London at a comprehensive school. He spends three days a week teaching and two days a week coaching teachers to improve the quality of their physics provision. He is interested in the role of technology in education and previously developed a project using virtual reality to teach projectile motion as part of his Masters in Education. Jed regularly uses PhET in the classroom and to help coach non-specialists deepen their physics subject knowledge.
