A New Vision for Teaching Chemistry Laboratory

Many moons ago, during one of our in-person workshops in a time before COVID, a group of POGIL-PCL members discussed the idea of developing a special issue of the The Journal of Chemical Education around inquiry-based laboratory experiments. In the intervening time, a lot has happened, but the idea has lived on....... changed a bit......changed some more…….. and then broadened to include all disciplines of chemistry. The idea has finally come to fruition and you can find a Call for Papers in the November issue of JCE..

I want to encourage you, the reader, to consider either writing up that manuscript you've been planning on or expediting work on something that is ongoing. I want to also encourage you to reach out to other friends and colleagues who may have something to contribute to this issue.

In this special issue we seek manuscripts from the chemistry education communities that explore inquiry-based methods of teaching in the laboratory setting. For the purposes of this issue, we are defining inquiry-based laboratory teaching with the following criteria:

  • Experiments will have outcomes that are not fully known to the students. Such experiments should go well beyond the verification of published values.

  • Students are involved at some level with the experimental design, or students will make decisions about the experimental protocol in the course of the experimentation process.

We are looking for authors to share their work surrounding innovations in inquiry-based teaching in the chemistry laboratory and to describe the effects of these innovations on students’ behavior towards learning chemistry, perceptions of laboratory work, or new conceptual understanding.
More description, suggestions and details are in the call for papers, with a deadline of April 12, 2022.

I look forward to seeing your manuscripts submitted to the Journal in the coming months.

Alex Grushow

It takes a village.....

I have been meaning to write the inaugural blog post for POGIL-PCL for a while now. I planned the first topic to be on the benefits of working with a community to write good POGIL experiments and activities. But I’d been struggling with a start until I attended the MAALACT meeting (http://www.maalact.org) this weekend.  During a workshop someone asked me why it was so difficult to write POGIL experiments and have students get the key concepts you want them to get out it. The answer is that it is a difficult task to translate our learning goals for students into a series of questions that will directly lead them those goals. It’s even more so when one is doing an experiment rather than a classroom activity. Invariable, as one writes an activity, the nuances of the learn goals also change as we think more deeply on the subject.

 The fact is that no one I know in the POGIL community writes a great activity on their own, right from the start. Some people are really good at it. Many of us have good ideas for a sequence of questions, a particular model, even an experiment cycle. But what we the faculty think is obvious, is often not so for our students and sometimes not even for other faculty colleagues. So, the activity needs to be revised and refined to make sure the students are well-guided, yet challenged to think at the same time. Oh, and there are some process goals you might want to address as well.

 To develop a line of questioning for either a classroom or laboratory activity requires testing. You need to see what the students are going to do with any new activity. Then, you need revise the materials based on how the students respond. And then you need to do it again (and again and again). Then you need to give the activity along with a handbook containing process and content goals and some guiding stretegies to a colleague, preferably at a different institution. Have them try it out in their setting to see if they can facilitate your activity and get students to the goal(s) that you set out at the beginning.

 Spoiler alert: It rarely goes exactly as planned.

 Then you need to get feedback on how the experiment ran. What could students do? What did they struggle with? And what directions in the Instructor Handbook either confused your colleague or were missing? And you revise again.

 Oh boy, is this a long process.

 And that’s why the POGIL-PCL community is such a blessing. Among the many people on our mailing list are faculty who are really interested in trying new and interesting experiments in physical chemistry. And also willing to provide feedback to improve an experiment.

 If you have an experiment your working on, feel free to share.  Communicate with us on the team, particularly through this website (Want to get connected?) or email me directly and I will try to find others willing to try or at least review your experiment.

 After all, it takes a village to write a good POGIL experiment.

 

 

POGIL-PCL Website

If you are reading this post, chances are you already know that the POGIL-PCL group has finally developed its own Internet presence. And it’s been a long time coming!

In our early days we shared documents on Google Docs and when new people came to workshops it was a simple matter to add them to our list. And then other people started to hear about us and wanted to know more about the project…… And all we could do was add them to Google Docs list. We needed a better billboard.

So here it is. And trust us, there is much more on the way……