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Erica Jacobsen shares highlights from the October 2017 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education that are of special interest to high school chemistry teachers.
Celebrating the Value of Chemistry
The October 2017 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is now available online to subscribers. Topics featured in this issue include: geochemistry in action; research on effective teaching and study approaches; keeping education and chemistry relevant; communication and writing; spectroscopy; chromatography; synthesis; teaching resources; mining the archive: chemistry rocks!
Whenever I’m asked where I live and what I do, I answer with “I’m a teacher overseas.” The immediate response from people is “English? Peace Corps?” I am a high school science teacher at the American School of Dubai. There is a misconception that teaching somewhere else in the world is drastically different than teaching right in your backyard, and it really isn’t.
I took a tip from the elementary school teachers and created literacy stations to help increase the amount of reading and writing in my classroom. Literacy centers support students by arming them with the tools to utilize when examining text documents, charts, graphs, pictures etc. to take the content and make it comprehensible. Here I will provide examples of literacy centers I utilize in my classroom.
Does flipping the classroom actually enhance students’ learning, above and beyond just incorporating collaborative activities into classroom instruction? John Moore, one of the chemistry professors at my university, the University of Wisconsin - Madison approached me with this question. We ended up conducting a research study on one of his chemistry courses.
Erica Jacobsen shares highlights from the September 2017 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education that are of special interest to high school chemistry teachers.
Enhancing Student Success in Chemistry
The September 2017 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is now available online to subscribers. Topics featured in this issue include: student thinking and student success; computational thinking; using games to teach: developing and making tools for teaching; understanding catalysis; green chemistry; food chemistry in the laboratory; exploring edible fats and oils; NMR spectroscopy; laboratory cross-course collaboration; physical chemistry; distilling the archives: scents and smellability; announcing the search for the next Editor-in-Chief.
The Board of Publication of the ACS Division of Chemical Education announces the opening of a search for the ninth Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Chemical Education (JCE). A video and other documents are provided to outline the job posting, responsibilities of the position, the routine workings of JChemEd and characteristics of a well-suited candidate.
Teaching students the proportional reasoning skills needed for stoich doesn’t have to be that daunting. By adjusting how your students talk about stoich, you will adjust how they think about it; eventually, they’ll proportionally reason in a more effective manner.
This post was submitted for the 2017 ChemEd X Call for Contributions: Creating a Classroom Culture.
Because my teaching philosophy assumes that both quality and quantity of learning increases with interest in subject matter, I have spent years exploring ways to engage my students in chemistry (of course fire, explosions, and color changing reactions are certainly helpful). I have recently begun using an approach that I have found to be quite fruitful, albeit counterintuitive: I don’t try to get my students interested in chemistry. You read that right. I don’t try to interest my students in chemistry. Rather, I get to know the hobbies and interests of my students. Then I work to demonstrate how chemistry relates to those activities.
This post was submitted for the 2017 ChemEd X Call for Contributions: Creating a Classroom Culture.