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Solving Mysteries Through Chemistry for National Chemistry Week

Join me, along with co-presenter Rachel Murillo, on Thursday, September 15, 2016, 6:30 p.m. Eastern. Rachel brings her background in forensic anthropology to the webinar, along with her current work teaching high school forensic science. We’ll share forensics resources useful for National Chemistry Week, for integrating into classroom curriculum, and for informal science sharing. Anyone who wants to connect science to this high-interest, real world topic will find ready-to-use demonstrations, lab investigations, videos, background information, and more.

Equilibrium Lab

Lowell Thomson | Mon, 08/22/2016 - 16:23

Just this week I'm reviewing equilibrium with my IB Chemistry seniors after they finished some summer study on the topic. One of our classes was spent manipulating a classic equilibrium involving copper ions and a copper-chloride complex ion.

Establishing a Class Motto

Linda Ford | Mon, 08/08/2016 - 14:13

I display and live a class motto in order to give a framework to the scientific intent of my community of learners. My particular motto is a quote from Freeman Dyson: "Science is an objective struggle between the precision of tools and the ambiguities of nature." 

Visible Learning for Teachers by John Hattie

Chad Husting | Mon, 08/08/2016 - 09:14

John Hattie is a guy who spent twenty five years doing over 50000 meta analysis studies on about 80 million students and wrote a book called “Visible Learning”. He has also done a number of TED talks. Essentially, he asks the question, “What affects students learning?” and clearly as well as simply defines what an “effect” is. He told the story of a researcher who spent years recording classroom interactions from the perspective of the student and the teacher. The researcher was surprised to learn that about seventy percent of learning was not visible to the teacher. So..even the best teachers with the best data only get about thirty percent of the picture. Next came the book, Visible Learning for Teachers and the website “Visible Learning Plus”.

Balancing Equations with Molecular Models

Michael Morgan | Mon, 07/25/2016 - 21:39

I am a very firm believer that the world of physical science can be visualized and is an excellent medium for teaching students to model and to picture what happens at the molecular level. The first topic we decided to explore was balancing chemical equations. This seems like such a simple topic to chemistry teachers but I have found that it can be quite challenging for many of my inner city students. The first thing they ask me for is a list of rules that they can follow. We can discuss the problems of algorithmic teaching in a later post! For the time being let’s talk about how to get students to understand why they need to balance equations and discuss what we can call “Conservation of Atoms”.