What if note-taking didn’t mean sitting quietly while the teacher lectured? In this article, Anthony Stetzenmeyer shares a nontraditional approach to classroom notes that gets students moving, interacting, and thinking. Inspired by Just in Time Teaching (JiTT), his strategy separates the act of collecting information from the process of making meaning, using posted guided notes, targeted “Notes Checks,” and short, data-driven mini-lessons. The result is a classroom structure that increases engagement, supports diverse learners, and transforms notes from a passive task into an active learning experience.
After almost 40 years as a Chemistry teacher, I have noticed that the prescribed order of topics in high school chemistry is, according to the Province of Ontario’s Guidelines, anywhere from less-than-ideal to downright illogical.
I’m just old enough that I never kept a paper gradebook. When I was a student in school, my grades were on paper and arrived in the mail. As a teacher, my grades have always been entered into the computer and sent off to the world with a click of a button. Parents and students know the grade as soon as I share it.
The November 2024 APTeach presentation outlined instructional strategies to model net ionic equations and chemical reactions using particulate models, chemical symbols, and observations to support students’ understanding of how chemicals react and interact at the particle level.
The year 2024 has continued to be outstanding for even casual observers of astronomical phenomena. There are opportunities to connect these phenomena to chemical concepts.
The Chemistry Laboratory Curriculum (CLC) Innovators Program is now accepting applications for the 2025 cohort! This program offers institutional teams from across the U.S. the chance to participate in a week-long summer institute and ongoing virtual support meetings during the 2025-2026 academic year.
Teaching decontextualized chemistry has often made it difficult for teachers to connect chemistry to students' everyday lives. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the George Floyd protests and the implosion of the Crawford Power Plant in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood I realized that students should have a working knowledge of chemistry to understand what is happening in their communities by examining social justice science issues (SJSI) as relevant storylines. Teaching SJSI allows students to identify, describe, and dismantle socioeconomic, environmental, and health issues that cause harm in their communities. In this article, I will explain how I use SJSI as a pathway to teach the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the fourth dimension of Johnstone’s Triangle.
In my three decades of teaching, I have found that students understand chemistry much more easily when it is connected to real-world contexts—therefore, I try to drive home the relevance of chemistry by providing examples related to the environment, health and beauty, and the food industry, to name a few.
