Minutes of Sep. 11 ALaB Meeting

• How can we link to documents (such as class handouts, syllabi, etc.) on this blog? We will need to create a separate web site that serves as a repository for these materials and then we can include links to those materials in blog posts.
  
• Currently the blog can be read and commented on by anyone. It would be helpful if we could all receive email alerts when posts or comments are made.
  
• Would a discussion thread serve our purpose better than a blog?
  
• Brief discussion on Bloom's Taxonomy, which lists categories of cognitive learning: Knowledge, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation. Do some disciplines need to spend more time on, say, the Knowledge category in order to help students progress while other disciplines can jump straight to Application? This could explain why some disciplines have been resistant to active learning approaches.
  
• Update on EAF grant: over $8000 remaining, only one person has not used their travel money. We should have enough to fund two consultants. Ron will try to find someone involved with EAF to serve as a consultant.
  
• Ron Thornton's visit: we will ask him to sit in on a few classes, meet with the ALaB group, and also give a presentation that will be open to all faculty. Need to find best dates for his visit: probably a Monday/Tuesday in late October or Early November.
  
• Where should the ALaB group go from here? We have become increasingly interdisciplinary, which is good but presents some challenges. We can still get ideas from each other, even if we then have to apply those ideas in a new context/discipline. Much of what we discuss relates to strategies that are not discipline-specific (although they may be better suited to some disciplines than others). The group can still play an important role in supporting faculty who are just starting to experiment with active learning.
  
• We need to find a way to pool the resources of many disciplines and combine them. Currently there are several people using active learning strategies, but they are operating in separate "silos" and don't work with each other. There might be much to gain by getting these different groups (Ed Psych, Teacher Ed, Science, Humanities, Business, etc.) talking with each other. This is one important role that our group could take on.
  
• Different disciplines may have different standards for what is recognized as innovative or progressive teaching methods. In older disciplines like science where lecture has been the norm, anything that is not lecture may be seen as innovative. In other disciplines this is not the case. For example, case studies have almost always been used in Marketing so this approach is actually very "traditional" in that field.
  
• Grant Possibilities: the interdisciplinary nature of the group makes it hard to go for an NSF grant for the entire group, but it would still be feasible for the science faculty to pursue that option. There may be other granting agencies that would be happy to fund an interdisciplinary project (Keck, Lily, AT&T, etc.). The goal of a new grant would be to use our growing expertise to train others by holding workshops, developing web resources, etc. We would probably need outside help for this at first, and later we could do it on our own.
  

CHM 102: Introduction to Chemistry

Well, I'm new to blogging. (This is my first time making a post to a blog -- ever.) But I'm also new to teaching chemistry for non-science majors. I've taught General Chemistry ("GenChem") for ten years (15, if you count my years teaching while I was in grad school) and I've taught Physical Chemistry ("P-Chem") for the last eight since I'd joined the faculty at Berry. Needless to say (while I'm certainly no Mathematician -- much of what my friends talk about at lunchtime I simply have to tune out if it becomes "too mathematical"), I like the more mathematical and abstract studies of chemistry. So I was worried when the Chemistry Department decided (along with my consent, of course) that I'd be teaching CHM 102, which is Berry's General Education chemistry course for non-science majors. I didn't know if teaching mathematically-illiterate students (this is to say, students who have a hard time with high school algebra) would have much of an appeal to me. But so far, so good. In the first two weeks of the semester, I've been able (I believe) to teach my students some "real chemistry". And I've been having some fun doing so.

Over the last four years, I've been teaching GenChem (both semesters, the second of which is often referred to as "Baby P-Chem") using Process-Oriented Guided-Inquiry Learning (POGIL -- please, visit www.pogil.org to learn more). In such a classroom, I have my students learn the important concepts of chemistry while working in small, self-managed teams on a ChemActivity. (POGILers prefer "ChemActivity" to "worksheet". I've even heard of some POGILers who call them "funsheets" instead!) A ChemActivity has the students explore a "model" (perhaps real, perhaps virtual data that models a chemical or physical phenomenon), then answer critical thinking questions about the model to help them invent a concept or develop their understanding of the concept, and then they work out a number of exercises in which the concept is applied. At the end of each class, I ask my students to do some metacognition and assess their understanding of what they were supposed to have learned that day. Each student of a team has one or more roles: there's a Recorder (who fills out the Recorder's Report, which contains the team's official answers to the questions and exercises within the ChemActivity); there's a Strategy Analyst (who makes sure that the team is staying on task and using their classtime appropriately, and this individual is also assigned the task of filling out a form that helps him/her assess the team's learning that day); there's a Recorder (who is called upon to present his/her team's answer to questions and/or exercises on the whiteboard of the classroom for all the class to benefit from); and there's either a Spokesperson (who represents the team to the other teams and to me as the course instructor) or a Technologist (the one who is responsible for using his/her calculator when such a device is needed to complete exercises).

While the students are working on the ChemActivities in their groups, I monitor each team's conversations and help teams that are struggling on questions and exercises. While I'm not the best at holding my tongue, I do what I can to help lead the students to "the right answer" without just giving it to them. When a mini-lecture would benefit the class, I provide one.

So this semester, I'm not teaching GenChem. I'm teaching CHM 102, the "non-majors' class". But I wanted to teach it using POGIL. And, perhaps surprisingly, it seems to be working. Each day we start with a ~10-minute quiz which tests the students on (1) their understanding of one or more concepts that hopefully they learned during the previous class period and (2) their understanding of one or more really important topics that was in their reading assignment since the previous class period. And then I have the students assemble into teams (usually consisting of three people, due to the fact that I'm teaching the class in a room with "stadium seating" and I feel that sitting three-abreast allows for a well-functioning team) and they go to work on a ChemActivity. I've found that sometimes I can adapt my GenChem activities into a CHM 102 activity without too much effort. But I've already had to write two (out of five) "from scratch". So I know that I'll be investing a considerable amount of time during the semester. (But, to be fair, I was awarded a Berry summer course development grant and I didn't use my summertime to develop materials. Oops! So I'm paying for my "lazy" summer now.)

Because CHM 102 is offered during 75-minute timeslots for class periods, I've decided that I'll be providing a short lecture between the quiz and the first activity, and if during a day the students will be doing more than one ChemActivity I'll give them a mini-lecture between activities. Actually, I've already seen how lecturing every now-n-then is necessary in order to give the students a foundation in order to understand a concept that the activity they're about to work through will present to them. But I'm trying not to lecture any more than I have to.

I've adopted the American Chemical Society's Chemistry in Context: Applying Chemistry to Society as the textbook. In each chapter, the student reads to learn about real-life challenges that we as a society face (e.g., global warming) and how an understanding of chemistry might serve to give us some answers to the World's problems. I've found it to be very interesting so far. Just yesterday, I had my non-majors generating Lewis dot structures of molecules on the fourth day of class -- if I were teaching GenChem I, we wouldn't have gotten to that for several more weeks!

One of the General Education goals at Berry College is to help students be able to effectively communicate their understanding of scientific inquiry. So at the end of the semester, each student will be giving a ~15-minute PowerPoint presentation of an aspect of chemistry. They'll explain why an understanding of the issue is important to "the average Joe", and they'll explain how an understanding of chemistry could be used to help "make the World a better place". To get them ready for the end-of-semester presentation, they will have to get a research project prospectus approved by me and write up a formal report of their research. I am looking forward to the presentations, and I hope that the class as a whole will enjoy learning about what their classmates found intriguing and worth researching.

To sum up, I believe that my non-majors are learning some interesting chemistry so far and will continue to do so throughout the semester. And I'm having a bunch of fun teaching the non-majors' class -- I really didn't think that I would. I just hope that I can keep my energy levels up, because teaching the class without using lecture as my primary method of instruction does require a considerable time investment on my part. But I believe firmly that the non-majors are going to have a much more enjoyable time throughout the semester while learning about chemistry.

I'll keep you posted!

PHY 101: Introduction to the Physical World

This post describes my PHY 101 course, which is a General Education science course for non-science majors. I taught this course using a very traditional lecture approach (with PowerPoint!) for a few years, then started incorporating a few in-class group assignments. But I have become increasingly disenchanted with lecturing as a result of reading the Physics Education Research Literature and experimenting with active learning methods. So in the Summer of 2005 I redesigned my course from the ground up. Most of the active-learning materials available for a liberal arts physics course focus on practical aspects of physics, like electronics and optics. As a more philosophically-inclined physicist I wanted to teach my students about quantum mechanics and special relativity (as well as basic mechanics, etc.). So I created a series of 23 hands-on group activities to go along with 10 laboratory exercises. These activities use inexpensive materials and a variety of interactive computer simulations. The entire course is now activity-based. Students are given a worksheet that guides them through the activity or laboratory exercise, and they spend essentially all of their class time working in groups to complete the activity. I use online reading quizzes to ensure that students come to class having read the text, and I use homework from the textbook (Hobson's Physics: Concepts and Connections) to make sure they follow up on the ideas introduced in the activities. My tests are somewhat traditional, but heavily weighted toward conceptual questions (though still with some calculation required).

My first trial of this new method was in Spring 2006. Things went pretty well, but I was dissatisfied on two counts. First, my teaching evaluations were less than stellar (not bad, but not what I had come to expect). Second, and more important, I administered the EBAPS survey to my students at the beginning and end of the courses and saw no noticeable change. The EBAPS is designed to measure student attitudes about the nature of science and learning science. Although I am convinced that my activities did a reasonably good job of teaching my students physics concepts, these activities did little to change their perceptions of how science works.

For Spring 2007 I revamped several of the activities (cutting Special Relativity, sigh, but adding more on the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Quantum Mechanics). I also started the semester with two lectures (yes, lectures) on the Philosophy of Science and then incorporated questions in many of the activities that asked students to reflect on the experiments they had performed from a philosophical perspective. In addition, students were required to conduct an experiment of their own devising and report the results to the class as well as research a potentially pseudoscientific topic and present an evaluation of the topic to the class. The results were fantastic. Outstanding student evaluations and significant gains on the EBAPS in two categories (Nature of Scientific Knowledge and Evolving Knowledge) and no losses in the others. For Spring 2008 I plan to beef up the activities on the Second Law, but otherwise I will probably stay the course.

I recently gave a presentation on this class at a meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers. You can find out more about the class by visiting the web page I created to supplement that presentation. If you want to know more, please send me an email or just ask a question by leaving a comment.

Welcome to ALaB!

The Active Learning Group at Berry College is an interdisciplinary group of faculty who are exploring active learning strategies for teaching college courses. Most members of the group have been using some form of active learning (or inquiry-based learning, or problem-based learning, etc.) in the classroom for a few years. Some members of the group are just getting started in trying to incorporate active learning into their courses. Although the group was initially composed of faculty from the sciences (including Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, and Psychology) it has expanded to include faculty from a much wider range of disciplines (Philosophy, Education, Marketing, etc.). The goal of the Active Learning Group is to promote a culture of active learning at Berry College, so that instructors feel comfortable using active learning methods and students feel comfortable taking courses that are taught using these methods. We have seen first-hand how active learning strategies can improve student learning in our classes.

ALaB initially received funding from the Educational Advancement Foundation. This funding enabled the initial members of the group to travel to conferences and workshops to receive training in active learning strategies, as well as to build a library of print resources related to active learning. In addition, this funding provided the initial group of faculty the time to develop active learning components for their courses. The ALaB group meets periodically to discuss reading assignments selected from our active learning library, as well as to discuss our own experiences in the classroom. So far the results have been very positive. Our work has been presented at a variety of national conferences, including Legacy of R. L. Moore Conferences, the POGIL National Meeting, and meetings of the American Association of Physics Teachers.

The purpose of this blog is to provide a forum for ALaB participants to post information about the active learning strategies they have used in their courses. In addition, ALaB members will be encouraged to post discussions about the challenges and benefits of using active learning. It is our hope that this blog will serve as a resource not only for ALaB participants but also for other faculty who are considering or already using active learning methods in their courses. Please feel free to comment on the posts. We would be delighted to hear from others who are interested in using or promoting active learning!