ChemEd X articles address topics in chemical education ranging across the entire spectrum of the chemical sciences.
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Session 2, a 3 hour session, extends the formative assessment experiences in session 1a and offers participants an opportunity to engage in an innovative lab formative assessment activity. Teachers will continue to build a collaborative professional learning community with a connecting activity, thinking like a student, and a chemical thinking discussion. The session requires a lab classroom for teachers to experience the Pringle design challenge. Time will be spent exploring the Formative Assessment Enactment model more deeply. Session 2 focuses on Chemical Control and touches on three of the six overarching ACCT objectives.
Political dilemmas will be associated with resistance from various stakeholders when school and organizational norms are questioned and routines of privilege and authority are disturbed.
Cultural dilemmas will emerge between teachers and students as classroom roles and expectations shift with an emphasis on chemical thinking.
Pedagogical dilemmas will arise as they address decisions about instructional materials and approaches and what to emphasize in learning experiences that a chemical thinking perspective demands.
Conceptual dilemmas will occur as teachers confront the philosophical, psychological, and epistemological assumptions that differ between a traditional conceptualization of chemistry learning and chemical thinking. Teachers are asked to organize instruction around the Chemical Thinking Framework instead of a topic based approach.
On January 26, 2021, Melissa Hemling presented a ChemEd X Talk about “whiteboarding” in a hybrid or virtual classroom. Students collaborate in small groups on classkick.com to digitally analyze data, create and modify models, and/or complete practice problems. Melissa shares how she uses the digital whiteboards to gauge student understanding and pinpoint misconceptions like she did pre-COVID. You can watch the edited recording of Melissa's Talk and access the document she shared during the presentation here.
Providing students with meaningful feedback greatly enhances their learning and achievement. With the move to online and hybrid formats, teachers have had to scramble to modify their usual process for communicating that feedback. On January 21, 2021, Ariel Serkin presented in a ChemEd X Talk about the process she is using and how she is providing feedback to her students remotely. You can watch the edited recording of Ariel's Talk and access the document she shared during the presentation here.
Providing students with meaningful feedback greatly enhances their learning and achievement. With the move to online and hybrid formats, teachers have had to scramble to modify their usual process for communicating that feedback. On January 21, 2021, Ariel Serkin presented in a ChemEd X Talk about the process she is using and how she is providing feedback to her students remotely. You can watch the edited recording here.
The January 2021 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is now available online to subscribers. Modern chemistry programs must include the skills and techniques that enable their graduates to perform experiments safely, and, in response to a call for papers, scientists and educators from around the world have contributed articles to a special issue on Chemical Safety Education: Methods, Culture, and Green Chemistry. The articles in the issue are broadly distributed among topics covering resources, green chemistry, safety culture, and pedagogy. This issue is a resource for ideas and discussion to encourage "a new way to look at safety", with a focus on assessing hazards, minimizing risk, and valuing a strong chemical safety culture.
Implementing constructivist pedagogy in the chemistry classroom (Chemical Thinking) has inherent challenges which hinder teachers. Teaching Dilemmas emerge due to the ambiguities, philosophies, and compromises that arise among stakeholders in the educational arena. These dilemmas commonly arise from tensions between teaching what we know in the way we were taught (Traditional) vs. teaching students how to think and know about chemistry by creating the knowledge (Chemical Thinking). Many teachers need to deal with these dilemmas in our everyday practice.