After a day of implementing a team activity from David Hanson’s Foundations of Chemistry (FOC) in place of my usual lecture, a student commented, “This is terrible, now I actually have to THINK when I’m in class.” Needless to say, my class was none too thrilled that I had replaced lecture with team learning. This was a particularly vocal and outspoken class, and comments like, “Aren’t teachers supposed to teach?” made my new role in the classroom quite uncomfortable.  

I had started off the semester with both a textbook and the David Hanson book, and up to the week that I experienced the Pacific Crest Teaching Institute, I had been trying to cover both approaches in class. I would lecture through the Power Point slides provided by the textbook publisher and then try to squeeze the team activities into 15 minutes at the end of class. We never quite got to closure of each activity but we were moving along in both the text and activity book. The main complaint from students was that it was hard to figure out what the key questions were asking of them; the questions were vague. They felt they were wasting their precious class time with uncertainty. Students  felt the FOC activities were not as important to the class as the lecture and notes, perceiving that the tests would focus on the lecture and notes. FOC made them frustrated and uncomfortable, and they wanted something sure and concrete.

So after the inspirational Dan Apple facilitation at the Pacific Crest Teaching Institute, I set out to be a more enlightened facilitator and jumped into teaching in the POGIL style with both feet. The following Monday morning, my General Chemistry II students were immersed in thermodynamics, David Hanson style. Teams were doing collaborative learning with no accompanying power point lecture. The teams were annoyed, frustrated and most likely hated my guts. I gave each team assessment reports on their work for each activity and I noticed some improvement in the team performance as students started working on problems as a group rather than individually. They needed to know what I expected of them, and when they received that SII feedback, they made the appropriate changes. Students still didn’t like the fact that they were “doing all the work” but I remained firm and continued with the POGIL approach for two chapters. I too, even had a peer assessment of my per-formance as a facilitator, which really helped me tremendously in my own growth.