Student-Centered Learning Two.

Being an educator has it's ups and downs. I was hired 2/3 of the way through the school year last Spring to complete both a Chemistry course and an AP Chemistry course. With standards-based education, this meant I had a predetermined number of topics to cover and complete successfully for each class. In retrospect, it was probably the most intense few months of my teaching career. The students survived the challenge, I survived (with a few bumps and bruises along the way) and we all made it successfully through the course content. Glad I've been teaching for a while!

Most of us that are passionate about being teachers think about teaching over the summer even though we are "off". I'm no different. Perhaps it's my career as a former scientist but I've always been motivated to change my classes to make them "better". For me, this means creating a class where kids learn science the way science in the real world happens. Not so easy in chemistry. I mean, you can't just let kids randomly mix chemicals together...

The biggest shift for me is changing our classroom environment from being teacher-centered to student-centered. This means reducing the amount of lecture time to a minimum. For a relatively seasoned veteran, it can be difficult to relinquish this control! With a lecture based environment, I talk and present, students take notes and ask questions. As educators, we tend to be blind to the fact that well over 90% of our students become disengaged by this process and/or are so busy taking notes, they are unable to absorb the information being presented. It's something that has bothered me for years.

Shifing this paradigm takes lots of time, thinking and energy; something not readily available during the school year. Lab activities most usually are designed to demonstrate one concept. "See? This is what I'm talking about!" It takes a while to create activities that introduce concepts, guide thinking, foster independence and allow conclusions to be drawn all while following the scientific process.

So, for me anyway, challenge number one becomes turning yourself into a resource. In hand with this challenge is finding or creating activity-based projects that allow students to work both independently and together to develop understanding of major concepts. Ideally, we are creating a system where students are learning how to learn and the instructor serves to guide the process of exploration of the content.

Very few textbooks have been created to approach knowledge this way. Most Chemistry textbooks follow a set path and read more like well, textbooks. "This is what we know!" (No explanation of how or why given.) The American Chemical Society (ACS) created the first chemistry-based, contextual text with Chemistry in the Community (ChemCom) (as far as I am aware). It started with a scenario where all the fish in the lake of a community died. It took students into chemistry from an environmental approach most could relate to and did it by using small-group activities. In it's most recent incarnation, I was sad to see that it seems to have deviated from this approach. In all honesty though, I haven't had the opportunity to really look at the changes that have been made to see if this new approach might work better. And, as a disclaimer, I've never used this text as written. I have used many of the lab activities because they are well  thought out and easy to build on.

I stumbled onto my latest favorite as a sample text left by my predecessor in one of my bookshelves. I received a pre-print of this book over 8 years ago and thought it was garbage. This text is called Active Chemistry and it was authored by Arthur Eisencraft and co-developed with the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. It is project-based and has students working in small groups on activities. I can't praise this book enough for it's approach! Of course I'm just beginning to use it and am experimenting by using the first chapter with my students this fall. It creates exactly the environment I want in my classroom from day one!

Students work as individuals, with a partner and with small groups. In this book, "activities" can be anything like labs or projects. It reminds me of what I remember as "Project-based Learning". I like the fact that, within a week, students are doing their first lab with chemicals and thinking about the results they observe. This guided-inquiry approach has been touted for years but, until recently, educators have had to create their own activities.

Recently published this year by the POGIL Project (Project Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning) and Flinn Scientific are a series of books written/edited by a friend and former colleague Laura Trout. Students are organized into small groups, each student with a different role in the group, and guided through activities geared toward understanding major concepts. The teacher acts as a facilitator, stopping the groups at certain key points, to reinforce learning. The POGIL website is wonderful and has guidelines and sample videos so you can see how this might "look" in your classroom. These activities are thought and discussion-based and address the more challenging concept in science.

Also worthy of note, both AP Biology and Chemistry have (or are about to) transitioned to laboratory-based courses. The hope is to shift away from a knowledge-based approach to science to more of an application-based approach. Most of us that teach AP Bio or Chem are already trying to figure out how to shift our introductory classes in this direction (we'd be silly not to!).

I'll try to update how this is all working when I have some down time; most likely the holiday season.