Featured Scholar

Rick Moog, Professor of Chemistry at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is an inspiring example of a scholar who has taken Process Education principles and integrated them into his teaching techniques, curriculum design, scholarship in the advancement of education and faculty development activities. When Rick begin teaching,  he knew in general what he wanted to achieve as an instructor, but became frustrated that his attempts were yielding little success. In search of becoming a more effective instructor, Rick eventually attended a Pacific Crest workshop in 1994. Many of the ideas presented there prompted him to reframe some of the questions he was asking as he looked at his fundamental teaching goals and the methods for achieving them. He began to reframe his curriculum design process, beginning by identifying desired learning outcomes, and designing learning activities that would develop students’ process skills. He also met fellow colleagues who had similar stories, goals, and questions. Their collaboration and commitment to continuous assessment and improvement resulted in many successful innovations in chemistry education.

Rick is Project Coordinator for the Middle Atlantic Discovery Chemistry Project (MADCP), which is a forum for collaboration and dissemination of best practices in chemistry education. Rick is also Principal Investigator for the NSF-funded National Dissemination project in Process-Oriented Guided-Inquiry Learning (POGIL), which is currently based at Franklin & Marshall College.

What is POGIL?

Process-Oriented Guided-Inquiry Learning (POGIL) is an innovative instructional approach that is built on the premise that students learn better when they are actively engaged and thinking in class. Students work in small groups, much as they would in a real-world lab, to construct their knowledge of course content by working together through guided-discovery exercises. Activities are constructed to lead students through a learning cycle that closely resembles the scientific method. Students observe, gather data, and analyze what they find, looking for patterns. Based on what they find, they develop concepts, and apply them to new situations. A sequence of carefully constructed questions leads students to reach appropriate conclusions. The facilitator’s function is to assist students in the learning process, intervening when necessary, and steering groups toward working more effectively as teams.

The benefits of the POGIL pedagogy are many. It is especially powerful in promoting conceptual learning. Students must truly understand and apply what they learn, which helps them retain it better and appreciate its relevance. Guided-inquiry exercises give students practice working in the messy process of inquiry, which, in the real world, is creative, fluid, and less cut-and-dried than lecture-and-textbook methods might imply. Students build cognitive skills in making inferences, identifying misconceptions, resolving contradictions, generalizing, integrating new knowledge with what is already known or believed, and posing and solving problems. Because they work through the activities in teams, they also build effective group process, communication, management, and assessment skills.

Those who have implemented POGIL methods have found that more of their students successfully complete the courses, perhaps because gaps in understanding are more quickly identified and remedied in such an interactive learning process. Cooperative learning strategies have also had a particularly positive impact on learner groups who are typically underrepresented in the sciences.

POGIL Isn’t Just for Chemists

POGIL has been successfully implemented in a variety of settings and institutional environments. It can be applied in small or large classrooms, labs, and recitation sessions with or without the use of technology. It can be used in combination with other innovative pedagogic approaches. As an approach to learning, it is robust and flexible enough to work well in other physical sciences and other subjects that require critical thinking and problem solving.

POGIL’s design, development, and growth is inspiring to anyone who is interested in curriculum design and faculty development, whether or not they teach in the maths and sciences. Through a continued grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), POGIL practitioners have continued to develop new materials and to disseminate POGIL practices nationwide. There are now POGIL practitioners in every state in the U.S., and there are now enough qualified practitioners distributed throughout the country that the original senior personnel no longer need to be lead facilitators for workshops. Some of the best innovations presented at the most recent national meeting came from people who were not in the original group of practitioners. Its simplicity of design allows it to be adapted quickly, tried on a limited basis, or adopted in steps as facilitators become more comfortable with the methods. Visit POGIL’s website to see the range of workshop and consultancy options available. POGIL is also advancing our understanding of how students learn. Outcomes can be readily observed and measured, and POGIL lends itself well to in-depth qualitative investigations about how students undergo conceptual change.

 FGB Module: Designing Process-Oriented Guided-Inquiry Activities

To learn more, visit:

www.pogil.org POGIL Instructors’ Guide F&M Chemistry Department MADCP