Chemical Education Today
Editorial
What Did You Try Last Semester? How Did It Work? As I write this, the end of the semester is less than a week away. This is a good time to reflect on what I tried this time that I had not done before, how well it worked, and how that applies to the process of change and reform in chemical education. Nearly a year ago, a good friend gave me a copy of a brief note by the Executive Director of the National Science Teachers Association, Gerald Wheeler (1). Its title was “Why doesn’t change stick?” Quoting the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland, Wheeler suggested that it might be taking all the running we could do just to maintain the status quo. He asked readers to look systematically at “the failed reform efforts begun in the 1960s” and questioned whether those efforts had actually changed anything. Although the reform efforts Wheeler questioned were aimed at the pre-college level, his point is a good one for college as well as high school teachers to consider, especially at a time when new projects are aiming to reform science education systemically. (See pages 158-160 and page 163 for more information on these projects.) If reform efforts are typically meteoric, burning brightly for but a short time and then disappearing, what might we do to make them less so? I think that the power to make reform less meteoric lies within all of us. It involves incremental, rather than revolutionary, change. My model for reform is one in which each of us continually experiments with manageable changes in courses and pedagogy, evaluating their effectiveness, casting out the less than successful ones, retaining and refining those that help students learn more effectively, and keeping the rest of the community informed about what works and what does not. This model requires continual work and dedication from all of us, but not superhuman effort that is impossible to sustain over the long term. A meteor shower definitely gets our attention, but far more light is shed by the fixed stars, and they’ll still be there next week. The characteristics of incremental reform are much like those of science itself, and it is just as fascinating to explore. We identify or develop a new way of helping students to learn, we adapt or devise new pedagogy and materials to support our vision, we apply those to a course or other instructional unit, and we evaluate the outcomes objectively. The tools of educational research can be applied effectively and are beginning to become more familiar to many of us, providing objective means for evaluation. The exigencies of the academic calendar may require long times between experiments, but with good planning many experiments can be done and much useful information and insight obtained. The hallmark of the current college-level systemic projects is student-centered learning. This involves challenging students to construct their own knowledge, often through group work with other students. Barrow (page 158) suggests that this will develop students’ “social and management skills”, but not their individual understanding. Those associated with the systemic projects argue to the contrary, stating that stu-
dent-centered learning will achieve their goal of instilling deeper understanding of chemistry concepts. This is a very important question that is almost certainly amenable to experimental study. Given this country’s diversity of institutions of higher education and the diversity of students attending those institutions, it is a question that we all should be concerned about. And all of us could and should be contributing to the experimentation needed to resolve it. There are many questions of this kind that each of us could be studying every time we teach a class, laboratory, or course. The college-level NSF-sponsored systemic reform projects are developing pedagogy, materials, and assessment tools that will help us initiate such an experimental program, and other projects are being funded that are adapting and adopting their products and philosophies. It is time for all of us to start to use, and to evaluate, the many excellent ideas, materials, and pedagogical tools they have created. But we should not confine our experimentation to just the results of the systemic projects, nor should we let it lapse when their funding has ended. Every issue of this Journal contains new ideas, suggestions, and pedagogical tools that can be incorporated into our teaching and evaluated for effectiveness across a broad range of students and institutions. And these pages are open to those who want to report the results of such experimentation, particularly when clear, down-toearth suggestions are given for how to use the new tools. It is my intention that JCE can serve as a catalyst to increase the rate of experimentation and incremental change. All of us should add to our list of New Year’s resolutions one that involves applying the experimental approach to what happens in our classrooms and laboratories. If each of us would identify the one change that would be most effective in improving our students’ learning environment, figure out how that change can be implemented without undue burden on our time and energy, and try it out in the upcoming semester, we could garner a tremendous amount of information—and even perhaps some collective wisdom. If that process continued long term there would be very little need for special projects and systemic programs of reform. We would all be carrying out reform, slowly but surely, all the time. What did you try last semester? How did it work? What are you going to try this semester?
Literature Cited 1. NSTA Reports December 1997/January 1998, p. 2.
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 76 No. 2 February 1999 • Journal of Chemical Education
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