curriculum

Card Sort Hacks

Card sorts are a great way to bring powerful retrieval practice into your classroom. You will find several Card Sort Hacks you can use to step up your game! You can even share these digitally to students to cut and complete at home. 

Global Experiments

With millions of teachers and students facing remote-learning because of COVID-19, a global experiment may be a great way to engage students at home.

What is Gamification in Education?

The notion is to increase student engagement and persistence by embedding game design elements in a course or lesson. It seems to work in other industries, but can game elements be successfully applied in educational contexts?

Ungrading: What is it and why should we use it?

Ungrading has long been associated with the idea of purposefully eliminating or minimizing the use of points or letters to assess student work. The focus of ungrading is to provide extensive feedback to students and then jointly (students and instructors) come to a consensus as to what the grade should be. This post addresses what ungrading is and why do it.

NGSS Periodicity Lesson

 In this lesson, students are offered a variety of alternative versions of the periodic table. Students will identify trends that are consistent from one table to the next in order to understand why the tables they are working with and Mendeleev's version are organized in the manner that they are. This lesson was designed to fit the NGSS performance expectation HS-PS 1.1 but can be used for any first year chemistry course or modified at your discretion.

  Why is Chemistry so Difficult?

One reason so many students find chemistry difficult is the abstract nature of the concepts. Research based on the constructivist model of learning has shown that as an educator teaches, the learner makes meaning of the content by drawing from their background knowledge, attitude, abilities and everyday experience and this often results in a different construct than that of the teacher.

Flipped Classroom: A Framework for In-Class Activities

The flipped-classroom approach to education is undoubtedly popular, with consistent growth in the number of related books, conference sessions, and educator network memberships. Although active-learning may not be any more beneficial in a flipped classroom compared to a traditional classroom, it is clear that a flipped class can increase the frequency of active-learning opportunities.