I’m a first year AP chemistry teacher. My emotions swing from fear of inadequacy to confusion in pacing to acute awareness of the number of years since college chemistry to desperation in grading 55 lab notebooks to exhaustion with inexperience. Honest truth: I'm studying. I'm studying a lot.
Most chemistry teachers somehow teach Lewis dot structures. These structures are the foundation for VSEPR theory, three dimensional models and ultimately how the structure allows us to predict what happens on a large scale. Here is the crazy part...there are a number of different "rules" that really do not make a whole lot of sense. Do a quick search...everyone has there own rules.
This past summer our conversations turned to, “How can we improve our instruction to try and prevent the initial misunderstanding?” We had all read Dorothy Gabel’s article Improving Teaching and Learning Through Chemistry Education Research: A Look to the Future. We were intrigued by the author's description of the three fold system of representing concepts in chemistry.
I hate to sound like a broken record but I used two activities from Grand Valley State Target Inquiry Program that worked amazingly well and had a great "flow". Chad Bridle wrote two inquiry activities that dovetail together. The first is "Change You Can Believe In". Students are presented first with nine cards that are particulate drawings of changes that occur in matter.
Stoichiometry is arguably one of the most difficult concepts for students to grasp in a general chemistry class. Stoichiometry requires students to synthesize their knowledge of moles, balanced equations and proportional reasoning to describe a process that is too small to see. Many times teachers default to an algorithmic approach to solving stoichiometry problems, which may prevent students from gaining a full conceptual understanding of the reaction they are describing.
Have you ever wondered what is the theoretically largest possible value for the atomic number of an element? Using some introductory physics and algebra, you can get your students thinking about this idea.
An educational reform that has been gaining a large amount of popularity in the last decade is standards-based grading (SBG). The heart of the SBG movement is truly rooted in one very important question, “what do you want your grades mean?”
Chad Husting shares how he uses a "card sort" as a formative assessment covering bonding.
I run an after school STEM club that involves many projects and activities. Students build robots for FIRST Robotics, race RC cars, use 3D printers, and build underwater vehicles. They dissect specimens, and create biodiesel from vegetable oil. So why would I bring this up on the Chemed Xchange? Our science club does chemistry activities, we are an ACS Chem Clubs, but I think there are many other benefits to this kind of club.
Using a whiteboard or poster paper each group of students creates their interpretation of the model thus far based on a content unit they are given.
