Kristin Plessel, NCAPP Chair, writes:

Get ready for the POGIL Project’s newest event, the National Conference for Advanced POGIL Practitioners or NCAPP.  NCAPP will be held June 26-28 on the awesome Muhlenberg College campus in Allentown, PA. You can find all the details here. NCAPP is designed for advanced users of POGIL to network, share and present their accomplishments.  It is a small conference designed for maximal discussion from and among participants where traditional talks have equal importance with roundtables and birds-of-a-feather sessions. The POGIL Project wants to learn about your POGIL classroom at NCAPP: Your experience can inform other classrooms.

Wayne Pearson previously shared why this event matters to him.

The theme for the inaugural NCAPP is to expand, engage and empower:

• Expand our knowledge, expand our capabilities, and expand the reach of POGIL in all classrooms.
• Engage participants with a conference that uses active learning strategies throughout to help us better engage students.
• Empower participants to try new ideas and new perspectives to improve student learning.

Our plenary speakers are exceptional.  You can read about them here, but that isn’t the purpose of this blog post.  I am more interested in YOU at the moment.

This event won’t be a success without your proposals.  There are many ways to participate in the conference—consider which one is right for you.

• Have you ever just wanted to get a group of people together and talk about group formation? Or how to deal with difficult students?  Or to discuss the coolest ways to get the attention of the class?  Then submit a topic for a roundtable
• If you don’t have a specific topic to discuss, but you want to get a group of people like you in the same room, put in a Birds-of-a-Feather For example, I could suggest a proposal for two-year college instructors, or women in science, or organic chemistry, or food chemistry, or rural communities, or…
• If you haven’t had the opportunity to teach a lesson during a fishbowl, I can’t recommend the experience enough! Twenty minutes of teaching a class just like you normally would, but you get feedback on your facilitation strategies from 20-30 supportive colleagues who understand your objectives.  This is my dream and a great way to get my administration’s support to attend.
• More traditional sessions, like poster sessions and talks (which we are calling forums) are also included in the schedule. Poster sessions are interactive by nature, but a standard talk is as close to a lecture as you can get. A POGIL conference shouldn’t have a bunch of lectures happening, should it? Nope, that isn’t the POGIL way. Our forums will have two presenters as part of one 45-minute session. The presenters will be introduced via email to each other prior the conference so that they can discuss how to integrate the audience best.  A third of the time allotment is reserved for moderated audience questions.
• Also included in the schedule will be some of the newest advanced POGIL workshops, present-a-model sessions, and author coaching.
• But don’t forget the fun: We have time built into the schedule for informal networking—time to work on spontaneous collaborative projects or fun activities with new colleagues.

We hope that all of the sessions will engage attendees: expanding participants’ teaching philosophies and empowering participants to become pioneers in their classrooms.  I know I am truly excited about what I am going to learn at this conference.  I hope you’ll be there!

In order to maximize your experience and discussion, the conference will cap at 100 participants.  Be sure to apply by November 1st for priority consideration.