A lot of time is spent assessing students but how much time is spent assessing ourselves and our peers? Some faculty take departmental evaluations seriously and professionally while others prefer not to for a variety of reasons. What happens when a faculty member introduces evaluation guidelines into a department that had none previously? Read and find out.
Have you heard that TERC, a nonprofit, has launched a STEM Teacher Leadership Network funded by the National Science Foundation? The online community is for aspiring or current teacher leaders, researchers and administration to improve STEM education, effect policy and discuss the changes to the future of STEM education in a collaborative online collegial network.
Chemistry and lasers can be used to create a demonstration that includes several colors and flashing lights. This demonstration connects to topics in quantum chemistry and phase changes.
This experiment in chemical kinetics can be conducted using materials as simple as a smartphone, hydrogen peroxide, sodium carbonate solution, and blue food dye! The experiment is useful when discussing the order of rate laws with respect to reactants.
The flipped classroom of today looks vastly different from its initial form. Originally, class time was primarily used to complete homework assignments; however, more effective active learning practices tend to dominate class time in modern applications of the model. Although the flipped classroom has improved over the years, several challenges persist.
Want to heat up a department meeting? Just propose that all courses have an on-line option and watch as some colleagues have strong opinions about it- be it on one side or the other. What overlooked component can be distilled from a normal in-person course into an online that could have a significant impact? Perhaps the face-to-face “live” interaction.
Once one knows about Critical Pedagogy (with respect to Critical Thinking, as was covered in the previous blog), how is that knowledge used? Can strategies be implemented that embrace Critical Pedagogy while not sacrificing content coverage? What are some ways to build criticality in students while maintaining expected requirements for classroom rigor?
Simple chemical tests are described that can indicate the presence of certain metals in coins. A wide variety of chemical concepts are involved. The experiments described are a natural fit for the 2019 National Chemistry Week theme of "Marvelous Metals!"
I recently participated in a conference known as the Digital Pedagogy Lab as a fellow, which required leading a workshop (or an equivalent). I chose to structure my workshop around the ideas of critical pedagogy and STEM, and particularly how we use these ideas in a practical way in the classroom (both F2F (face-to-face) and DL (distance learning)). This blog will be one of a two-part series on these topics.
Chemists tend to think of the Table as an old friend– reliable and static, but that is not the whole story. Piqued your interest? Click on the title to sate your curiosity.
