Teaching

You’re reading the latest issue of Teaching, a weekly newsletter from a team of Chronicle journalists. Sign up here to get it in your inbox on Thursdays.

This week:

• I tell you about some unusual ways in which two professors teach chemistry.
• The chemistry professors point to resources on effective teaching.
• One reader shares her approach to talking to students caught cheating.

Imagine You’re an Atom

If you walk into one of Stacey Lowery Bretz’s chemistry classes, you might find dozens of students flapping their arms like a bird. Or they could be climbing across a long row of chairs, hoping to find a mate on the other side of the aisle.

No need to worry. They’re just imagining what it’s like to be an atom.

The particle life, it turns out, is quite dynamic. There’s a whole lot of spinning, vibrating, shape-shifting and match-making going on at the atomic level. But you wouldn’t know if you stuck to memorizing equations.

That’s why Bretz, along with her Miami University colleague Ellen Yezierski, are committed to something called embodied cognition — or more specifically, chemistry theater — in undergraduate education. To understand what chemistry is and how it works, you have to connect the macroscopic, like water, to the molecular level. Too many chemistry teachers and students do this by defaulting to the symbolic, say Bretz and Yezierski. Let’s just say that water is two hydrogen atoms linked to one oxygen atom, or H2O, and move on.

That’s like asking students to learn the rules of a foreign language without providing any understanding of what that language represents, the professors say. “When they only experience it at that level,” says Bretz, “they think, why would anybody study this?”

But you can make chemistry exciting if you dive into some of the deeper questions it raises. How do atoms behave? How do molecules form? Is that a static experience? What happens if you have too many, or two few, different elements bouncing around?

Those concepts are inherently fascinating, say the two professors. But they require students to imagine what the world of molecules, atoms, and ions looks and feels like.

To do so, the professors have incorporated embodied cognition into introductory college chemistry classes, which are primarily taken by STEM majors. (Yezierski, who heads Miami’s Center for Teaching Excellence, no longer teaches intro classes but still uses these techniques in her other courses.) Although they have never taught a class together, Bretz and Yezierski are deeply involved in chemistry-education research and frequently collaborate and share materials.

While it’s just a slice of a larger teaching strategy, everything they do is geared toward encouraging students’ curiosity. When they ask students to stand up and demonstrate how a molecule rotates or vibrates, students might start to giggle and think the whole thing is a bit silly. That prompts the professors to say, “See, you’re having fun here,” and talk to them about how hands-on learning helps students grasp abstract ideas.

In one exercise, students come to class wearing different colored shirts to represent different kinds of atoms. Then they are asked to create certain molecules by finding a mate or mates with different colored shirts. Students move back and forth across the room as they try to pair up with the right combination of colors.

“Someone might say: Well, I couldn’t get to people in black and white shirts because they were too far away,” says Bretz. That presents an opportunity to talk about how elements need to collide before turning into another kind of matter.

The professors use other techniques as well. One is to hand out whiteboards where students can draw particle-level pictures. You can learn pretty quickly whether students understand what you’re trying to describe.

Another is to ask the kind of question where students often disagree on the answer. Once the results are in, the professors tell the students that they need to convince each other their answer is right. “It gets so noisy,” says Bretz. But that’s OK. “We haven’t lost control of the classroom. We give control to the students.”

After students have persuaded each other, or not, they are eager to hear whether they were right. “It’s such a cool climate,” says Yezierski. “You have students almost begging you to lecture them.”

These strategies have led to some pretty good results, the professors say. In a common national exam created by the American Chemical Society for undergraduate curricula, their students have performed well above the national average. The mean score is around the 80th percentile. (The national average would be the 50th.)

“But,” says Yezierski, “it also leads to day-to-day wins. We have a blast working with our students.”

Do you have an unconventional way of teaching, like asking your students to move around during one of your classes? Drop me a note at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com and I might feature your story in a future newsletter.

Resources on Teaching Chemistry

I asked Bretz and Yezierski to point me to resources others could turn to for inspiration on teaching their chemistry classes. Here are their suggestions.

Both run research groups that focus on chemistry education. You can find their work at Bretz Research Group and Yezierski Research Group.

They recommend reading POGIL: An Introduction to Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning for Those Who Wish to Empower Learners, which is a pedagogy based on research on how people best learn.

Finally, they encourage instructors to regularly read the Journal of Chemical Education and Chemistry Education Research and Practice.

Talking to Students Accused of Cheating

A few weeks ago I asked readers what kinds of ethics policies students have been most responsive to, when trying to combat cheating. Shawn Maureen Powers, an associate dean in the School of Arts and Sciences at Southern New Hampshire University, shared her approach. Because she handles most of the academic-cheating cases in her unit, Powers writes, she delved into the research to come up with the following strategy:

First, she talks about how cheating devalues their education. “I ask them to consider a scenario where they find themselves in a job that demands skill sets they supposedly learned in college but haven’t because they cheated. I ask them whether they think they will retain their job.”

If all students cheat, she asks, how long would it be before employers would start thinking of a degree from their university as being essentially worthless?

Second, she asks what it means for them as individuals. “I share that people who cheat in college are more likely to cheat in their professional and personal lives. I ask them if they want to be the type of person who has conditioned themselves to take shortcuts on anything, including betraying their friends and cheating on their partners.”

Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.

—Beth