Good day, gentle readers:
Let me start by telling a story that, at first blush, has nothing to do with chemistry teaching.
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Formative assessment questions provide a useful lens into students' minds regarding what they are thinking about chemistry.
Easy access to the internet has helped to enable many individuals to gather data to serve a collective purpose.
I have been teaching AP Chemistry for 13 years and every year I have multiple weeks of instruction following the AP Chemistry Exam. I have tried many different ideas for instruction during those weeks. In years past I have taught introduction to organic chemistry and/or nuclear chemistry.
Like a lot of folks (including students), I love brownies. My teaching style and objectives emphasize the applications of chemistry learned in lecture to everyday consumer products familiar to students.
Case studies have been a staple of undergraduate and graduate education programs like medicine, law, and business, for many years.
Students often are so confused that they cannot formulate a question. This is not bad, but is a good starting point in their learning. Getting such a student to talk through a problem, to the best of their abilities, typically causes them to stumble through their words. This is great.
The first time I taught an Honors chemistry class, I noticed there was one additional topic in our unit on gases that differed from our General chem and Concepts chem classes: ideal vs. real gas behavior.
Why I Started Flipping
As a flipped classroom teacher for almost a decade, I have gone through many major shifts in my teaching philosophies and it has changes the way I have delivered my videos.
Good day, gentle readers:
Back in the day, and I’m talking, like, over 40 years ago, I had the good fortune to be invited, in spite of my lackluster performance in Organic Chemistry, to work as a summer student in Professor Tom Tidwell’s lab at the University of Toronto.
As teachers, we are likely all trying to build a healthy learning community within our classrooms. And as teachers, we additionally encourage students to form chemistry study groups. I also want students to have a sense of belonging within the chemistry class and laboratory.
After teaching the concepts and calculations for acid and base strength, concentration, percent ionization, and pH I noticed many of my students were struggling to make meaningful connections between these calculations.