Hello and welcome to The POGIL Project's video. I've been using POGIL since 2009 in a variety of computer science (CS) courses, have helped to build the POGIL community in CS, and have led POGIL workshops across the US, in southern India, and elsewhere. POGIL is a great way to engage and support students, and a great community of instructors. 

Clif 

Welcome to our presentation: POGIL and The POGIL Project. POGIL pedagogy is being used in classrooms of all sizes and at both the secondary and post-secondary levels across the country and around the world. The POGIL Project welcomes the participation of interested STEM educators who want to support student-centered teaching and learning in their classrooms.

We are not able to provide everything that you might want to know about POGIL and The POGIL Project in this short, three-minute video, so please ask questions and/or visit our website (www.pogil.org) to learn more.

And please note that the references mentioned in the video are provided in the attached resource document.

I look forward to hearing your questions and comments!

Rick

Hi-

POGIL reminds me of the design cycle at the heart of successful engineering programs. Do you see POGIL as an approach to activity design, or course design? For example, I noticed AP Chemistry on the MS/HS list. Is your goal to bring POGIL to AP Chemistry classrooms via specific activities, or is the goal to re-imagine the entire course through a  POGIL framework?

Most teachers start their POGIL implementation by replacing some of their "lectures" or other class activities with POGIL activities. The learning cycle is therefore used on a day-to-day basis, rather than a full course framework. That being said, we find that as teachers use more POGIL in their classes, they start to question their course structure as a whole, and move in a more student centered, inquiry direction. 

The use of POGIL activities in AP Chemistry has been very successful. The implementation of POGIL in AP Chemistry varies from a handful of activities over the year, to nearly every day use of POGIL in the classroom. 

HI Patrick, thanks for your question. As Laura said, most teachers start with individual activities, which is the focus of most POGIL workshops. This tends to motivate course level changes. If I spend more time on POGIL activities, I "cover" less content, so I have to rethink course priorities. If I want students to develop skills in teamwork, critical thinking, problem solving, etc., how do I help them and how do I observe or evaluate such skills? We should probably think more about how to support teachers at the course design level.

Similar things happen when we redesign courses to emphasize engineering design or project based work. It often starts with assignment or project level changes, but leads to bigger changes.

Clif  

Thanks for your great video.  POGIL appears to be a great example of a project that started as an NSF research project, and has become sustained wonderfully.  This is hard to do.  Do you have advice for other projects that are seeking to become sustainable after NSF funding ends?  What is your "business model"?

Hi Marion.  Thank you for your kind words. I would be happy to share our journey from NSF-funded to self-sustaining organization with you. It might involve more than a website post though, so if you ever want to talk offline, let me know!  However, in a nutshell, it involved establishing our project as a non-profit entity, developing revenue streams from our deliverables and creating new ones as well, clearly communicating our plans to our network, and working hard to get input and buy-in at every phase of the process from our practitioners.   - Marcy

Hi Marion.  Feel free to send me an email (mdubroff@fandm.edu) so we can set up a time to chat. We are entering a very busy time of the year here at POGIL, but perhaps we can find a mutually agreeable time.  

Thank you for sharing the video. I agree that growth in process skills is definitely hard to measure. I am curious if you have done longitudinal studies on students that utilized the POGIL framework for learning (after graduation). Additionally, some of these are foundation skills that can be utilized in upper elementary. Have you considered upper elementary?

At this time we are not specifically training teachers or writing activities for grades 3-5. However, we have a few practitioners (myself included) who have written or used published POGIL activities with elementary children. Early in the third grade year they struggled a bit, but late in third grade seemed to be a great time to introduce the idea of working through an activity to learn a concept as a team. 

Hi Rick and POGIL team! I was first trained by Rick at a Knowles Teacher Initiative meeting and cannot imagine my high school science classroom without POGIL. It is the cornerstone of how my classroom operates, and it builds independent, flexible, connected learning spaces for both my students AND me!

At the training, Rick facilitated a POGIL on credit default swaps, a very timely issue at that time! I am wondering if the POGIL project has done work on creating similar experiences for learners to think about STEM-adjacent issues in the news -- or POGILs that are designed to be used in informal science ed spaces, like museum programs.

Kirstin -

Thanks for your message and your kind words about POGIL. It is always gratifying to learn that teachers find our materials to be useful! I also want to note that the Knowles Teacher Initiative does fantastic work supporting teacher-leaders in STEM (https://knowlesteachers.org ). 

I am not aware of any current efforts within The POGIL Project community for activities designed for informal spaces such as museums, but this is certainly an area that we would be interested in supporting. In terms of STEM-adjacent issues in the news, there was a project supported by NSF (DUE 1044344 and collaborators) that involved the development of general chemistry activities within a climate-change context and asked students to apply the chemistry concepts to socio-economic issues. If you are interested in seeing these activities, please let me know.

Rick

POGIL has done so much to pave the way for better chemistry curriculum! When we work with chemistry teachers, we love to hear they are using POGIL because they are already oriented to conceptual chemistry development rather than marching through a textbook. Thanks for your work!