Plenary (Main Session): A Scholarly Approach to Producing Meaning in the Classroom by Reducing Unnecessary Uncertainties

Shifting the focus in education from teaching to learning has received a great deal of scholarly attention. The evidence is very consistent: engaging students in the learning process enhances student learning and promotes deeper understanding of complex concepts. In this session we will consider one aspect of creating a meaningful learning environment for our students: unnecessary uncertainties. We will focus on aspects of teaching and learning that do no more than draw energy and attention away from the primary task of teaching and learning. In the attempt to do more with less, maybe the “less” should simply be the reduction of wasted effort. 

Follow-up session: Teaching Students How to Learn

Students have more responsibility for learning course content in the learning-centered classroom, but teachers still hold as a primary responsibility the task of helping students to learn. In addition to creating engaging classroom experiences for students, one significant advance that could be made in the educational area would come from teaching students the actual process of how best to learn. Students certainly do learn a great deal before they enter college or university, but few are taught effective strategies for encoding, storing, and retrieving

desired information. The overall focus of this session is about innovative ways to help students build the foundational tools to be successful at learning so they can then use those tools to create more meaningful learning for themselves.

Plenary (Main Session): Process Education in the Chemistry Classroom: The POGIL Project

Process Education in the Chemistry Classroom has had over a decade of implementation in the POGIL Project (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning). In this workshop participants will experience a chemistry POGIL activity by examining it for its key features and discussing the challenges of its implementation. Participants should take away insights about the requirements for the creation of a POGIL process education activity for learning quantitative material and ideas about their best use.

Follow-up session: Extending the POGIL Pedagogy

Process Education in the POGIL pedagogy (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning) has been implemented throughout the chemistry curriculum and into other disciplines. In this workshop participants will experience an extension of the POGIL pedagogy that has a focus on problem solving process skills by examining a POGIL-IC (POGIL in Context) activity. Participants will consider the structure of a contextually-rich problem-solving activity and the guided-inquiry components, and will discuss the challenges of implementation of these activities.

Book Chat
with Jim Morgan (Texas A&M) and Melissa Desjarlais (Valparaiso University)
Ever struggled with finding texts that connect learning research and teaching practice? The book How Learning Works forms a bridge between research and practice and between teaching and learning. Join us to explore some of these ideas and to discuss answers to the following questions: Do the guiding principles of Process Education align with How Learning Works? What ideas can immediately be implemented in our classrooms and course designs?