The POGIL Summer 2016 Newsletter is Now Ready for Download

Tuesday June 6th, 2016

Click below to see the latest issue!

Greetings Dear Friends,

I hope you are enjoying your summer and are having a chance to recharge for the upcoming school year. It’s been a busy season for The POGIL Project and our dedicated community. We’ve trained more than 300 teachers during five regional workshops and many other meetings around the country. We had an outstanding turnout at the POGIL National Meeting and made great progress toward our strategic plan goals. 

I also want to congratulate our colleagues Tom Higgins, Jim Spencer, and Ellen Yezierski for being named American Chemical Society (ACS) Fellows in 2016, for outstanding contributions to the science and profession, and service to the ACS community.

While you’re looking through the newsletter, make sure you take a few minutes to read about Stephen Prilliman’s Oklahoma State University Inorganic Chemistry class and its study of the water in Flint, MI; the update on The POGIL Project’s strategic plan; the list of recent POGIL published works; and of course, you won’t want to miss “Ask the Mole.”

It’s been wonderful to see so many of you this summer and great fun to see all of the interesting places you have traveled, evidenced by a team of very adventurous POGIL water bottles! And, don’t forget that POGIL Pledge Week is coming back Oct. 17-21. Thank you to our generous donors and to our entire POGIL community for all you do to support and further the important work of educational reform that we all do every day.

Warmly,

Rick Moog

vol 6 issue 3 summer 2016

Ask The Mole

Q: Does POGIL align with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)?

A: Why, yes they do!

The NGSS Science and Engineering Practices (SEPs) and the POGIL Process Skills overlap amazingly well. If you consistently facilitate as trained in a POGIL one day workshop or 3- Day Regional Workshop and you use POGIL-style activities that follow the learning cycle, your students will meet almost all of the NGSS SEP requirements. Note: The two portions of the SEPs that are not explicitly included in the POGIL strategies are the skills of planning investigations and developing models. To address these skills as well, you can intentionally add model development as an extension to many of the POGIL activities and, of course, add planning investigations into the lab component of your courses. There are documents available that show the alignment of activities published in the Flinn Scientific books, POGIL Activities for High School Biology and POGIL Activities for High School Chemistry. In addition to identifying each activity’s alignment with the NGSS Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs), Science and Engineering Practices (SEPs), and Crosscutting Concepts (CCs), the documents include alignments with the Common Core State Standards for Math and for English Language Arts. Here is the link for these documents: https://pogil.org/about/pogil-and-the-ngss If you have any questions regarding inquiry learning, POGIL materials, would like to set up an NGSS workshop, or any POGIL-related knowledge, email us at [email protected].