Blogs

This meeting focused on reflection, collaboration, and the sharing of instructional practices from the past academic year. Participants discussed classroom strategies, laboratory activities, and review techniques that were particularly successful in supporting student engagement and conceptual understanding in chemistry courses.

The April 2026 AP Teach meeting, titled “Revving Up for Review,” focused on creative and effective strategies for helping chemistry students prepare for end-of-course and AP exams through active, student-centered review activities. Presenters shared a variety of approaches designed to move beyond traditional worksheets and repetitive problem sets by incorporating collaborative games, stations, inquiry activities, and concept-focused review exercises.

The March 2026 AP Teach meeting focused on VisChem and the use of dynamic particle-level animations to improve student understanding of chemistry concepts that are often difficult to visualize. Presenters demonstrated how VisChem animations can help students connect macroscopic observations and symbolic equations to molecular-level interactions, allowing them to build stronger conceptual models of chemical processes.

This meeting focused on instructional strategies and classroom resources designed to strengthen student understanding of chemistry concepts through modeling, discussion, and hands-on learning. Presenters shared activities and lesson structures that encourage students to analyze data, construct explanations, and make connections between symbolic chemistry, particle-level models, and real-world phenomena.

The January 2026 meeting centered on strategies for making chemistry instruction more engaging and conceptually focused through interactive activities, modeling, and student-centered learning.

In the December 2025 APTeach meeting, we focused on ways chemistry teachers can use Chemix.org and other visual tools to make laboratory instructions more accessible, organized, and student-friendly.

Our engaging September AP Teach meeting, “What’s the Attraction with Coulomb’s Law?”, focused on the many ways Coulomb’s Law appears throughout the AP Chemistry curriculum and strategies for helping students craft stronger explanations using it.

A simple analogy for heterogeneous catalysis.

This experiment started with a deer skull discovered on a walk in the woods and turned into a fascinating journey through acid-base chemistry, stoichiometry, precipitation reactions, and the real composition of teeth. By dissolving a tooth and recovering its calcium as calcium carbonate, the experiment reveals that teeth are far more chemically complex than they appear.

A 2025 tour of Italy produced a number of connections to the field of chemistry and other STEM-related areas.