Strategic Shifts: Small Moves Leading to Meaningful Change

Welcome to the second installment of our (Re)Bootcamp series! In this post, three teachers share entry points into their larger pedagogical frameworks.  If you have wanted to try new approaches to teaching your content but feel overwhelmed by the idea of overhauling your entire curriculum, check out these "sample-size" activities! 

Chemistry Foldables and Lapbooks - Nora Walsh

You may have seen my interactive notebooking materials on ChemEd X, but if you don't want to commit fully to notebooking, there are still components you can use to support your students' learning. My notebooking journey started with the use of foldables. I started using them to help students with vocabulary, equations, and relationships. Foldables are a great way to transform a traditional lecture into something that's a bit more interactive, or to have students collect knowledge from a gallery walk or lab. 

Some of my favorite foldables for stand-alone use:

1. Areas of Chemistry from Scientific Reasoning INB  (This makes a great week 1 activity)!
2. Isotopic Notation from Atomic Structure INB
3. Describing Electrons Error Analysis from Periodic Table INB
4. Types of Bonds (Ionic, Metallic, Covalent) from Bonding INB
5. 5 Types of Reactions from Reactions INB
6. pH and pOH from Acids and Bases INB
7. Types of Radioactive Decay from Nuclear INB

Lapbooks

If there are a couple of units of interactive notebooks that you like, but you don't want to do a full-year notebook, you could consider doing lapbooks. Lapbooks utilize file folders as their "pages," and students paste the components into these folders (see Figure 1). This is a great way for students to complete a whole unit of interactive materials without having to maintain a full-year notebook.

Figure 1

Example of student lapbooks

How to Incorporate Claim Evidence Reasoning Activities in the Chemistry Classroom - Ashley Green

One of the big fads that has been promoted over the years is CER, Claim, Evidence, Reasoning. This strategy is used to encourage students to enhance their communication skills through the Science and Engineering Practices for Engaging in Argument from Evidence¹. 

Not everyone has adopted the NGSS; however, the framework remains useful even if you cannot implement all of its components.  CER activities can be incorporated into lessons you already teach in your classes. 

In order to do a CER, students must be given a prompt or guiding question. Students then begin by making a list of Evidence that can include a data table, graph, observations made, or an illustrated model. The Reasoning portion applies the evidence collected to explain how or why it can be used as supporting documentation to the claim. At the beginning of the school year, I immediately begin training students to become familiar with this process.

In the first week of the school year, I wanted to train my students to use the SEPs and CCCs (Science, Engineering Practices, and Cross-Cutting Concepts). As an introduction to how to use the SEP for Developing and Using Models, I had students write a CER to answer the Guiding Question, “What are the important components that should be included when drawing a model?” I then prompted students to draw a model of a bicycle in the evidence section, asking them to use as much detail as possible (see Figure 2). After a few minutes, the students were asked to do a gallery walk around the classroom to observe what other students included in their models. I noticed that students began to add labels and measurements that they observed in other students’ models. We discussed the importance of magnification bubbles and the distinction between the system and its surroundings. 

Figure 2

Student example of bicycle CER

Another way to incorporate CER in your classroom is to frame your lab work conclusions in this format.  As students become more familiar with communicating using CER to guide their writing, their scientific conclusions have better structure and incorporate data and logical justifications.  I have found providing a template to the students can be helpful.  The template seen in Figure 3 is linked in the supporting information. 

Figure 3

CER Argument Template

Here are some additional resources on CER from ChemEd X: 

1. What is Claim, Evidence, Reasoning? by Stephanie O'Brien
2. Arguing Density By Stephanie O'Brien
3.  Implementing the Claim, Evidence, Reasoning Framework in the Chemistry Classroom, by Ben Meacham
4. What is Reasoning? by Dustin Williams
5. A Science Reasoning Rubric to Support Argumentative Writing by Dustin Williams 

Energy Bar Charts by Erica Posthuma

As a long-time Modeler, I’m often asked how a teacher can implement Modeling Instruction (MI) if they can’t attend a training or if their school has other roadblocks to curricular changes. I generally tell teachers that there are components of MI that can be incorporated into traditional classrooms. Whiteboarding, proportional reasoning, particle diagrams, and Before, Change, After (BCA) tables are all integral to the Modeling classroom but can be used to improve student outcomes in any chemistry course. Another tool we use in MI is the energy bar chart (EBC), which is a graphical representation students can use to illustrate understanding of energy storage and transfer in and out of systems.  

Energy storage and transfer are tough topics for students to conceptualize.  They come to class with misconceptions about what energy is.  Many students believe that the energy discussed in Biology is fundamentally different from the energy we discuss in Chemistry.  These misconceptions are reinforced by the language we use to describe energy transfers.  Phrases like “energy is transformed” or “types of energy” oversimplify what is happening as energy is exchanged in and out of a system. Energy bar charts aim to show students that energy is energy; there are no different forms of energy, but there are different ways in which energy is stored. 

In Modeling, we define energy as substance-like. We use metaphors to help clarify what is meant by this description. One of the metaphors we use is information. Information is not a substance, just as energy is not a substance. However, information can behave like a substance.  Information can be stored in books, on CDs, on computers – it can also be transferred from one place to another via Bluetooth, the Internet, or through cables.

Most importantly, for our discussion, when information is transferred from one place to another, the information itself remains unchanged.  This is an important parallel to draw between energy and the information metaphor.  When energy is transferred from one place to another, it remains energy.  Nothing about the energy itself has changed. 

Once we have provided context for what it means to be substance-like, we establish different types of “accounts” to help students keep track of energy as it is transferred.  The Chemistry curriculum is concerned with three accounts: Thermal (E_th), Phase (E_ph), and Chemical (E_ch). You can read about the accounts in greater detail in my previous blog post, A Modeling Approach to Energy Storage and Transfer. 

Figure four shows a complete EBC, where water is the system, starting as a liquid near room temperature and eventually evaporating at that temperature, becoming a gas.  The students can clearly communicate energy entering the system for this to happen.  The fact that gaseous water particles store more energy than liquid particles is also apparent from the chart. Evaporation does not involve a chemical change; therefore, chemical energy is not considered in this diagram. 

Figure 4

If you are interested in learning more about EBCs or any of the other tools mentioned above, check out these related posts on Modeling Instruction:

1. Addressing Student Misconceptions Using Modeling Instruction by Michele Okroy 
2. Whiteboarding Strategies by Erica Posthuma
3. Using Visual BCA Tables to Teach Limiting Reactants by Melissa Hemling
4. Simplifying Stoichiometry with BCA Tables (YouTube Video) by Larry Dukerich and Erica Posthuma (for AMTA) 

1. Appendix F Science and Engineering Practices in the NGSS, NGSS Lead States Revised 2023. https://www.nextgenscience.org/sites