Winter/Spring 2018/2019: Can I use POGIL in a large classroom?
Fall 2018: What is ELIPSS and how can I use ELIPSS resources in my classroom?
Summer 2018: What is the Learning Cycle?
Spring 2018: What is the difference between a group and a team and why is this important?
Winter 2017/2018: How do I ensure a safe environment in a POGIL classroom?
Spring 2017: What is OPTIC?
Winter 2016/2017: What is a fishbowl?
Fall 2016: What are process skills and why are they important?
Summer 2016: Does POGIL align with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)?
Spring 2016: Can I implement POGIL in my laboratory course?
Winter 2015/2016: Are you looking for formative feedback to improve an existing activity?
Fall 2015: How can I talk about POGIL activities with the POGIL community?
Winter 2014/Spring 2015: What is the science writing heuristic?
Fall 2014: How do POGIL and SoTL work together to achieve their goals?
Summer 2014: What are some things I can do to be a better facilitator?
Spring 2014: Can I get formative feedback on the POGIL activities I have written?
Summer 2013: Can POGIL be used in laboratory settings?
Winter 2013: What are Key Aspects of POGIL Activity Design?
Summer 2012: What is the Learning Cycle?
Spring 2012: What are Process Skill Goals?
Winter 2011: Mole Day!
A large classroom provides significant challenges to instructors who want to engage all of their students in an active learning environment. These challenges include limited contact with and access to individual students, spaces ill-equipped for group work, the sheer volume of grading assignments, and an inability to handle student requests. However, POGIL can create effective large classrooms that can help instructors overcome many of these challenges and that provide an effective learning environment.
POGIL practitioners routinely use POGIL in classrooms with up to 400 students. POGIL pedagogy provides an excellent framework for building a productive large classroom and gives students a sense of community, a structure in which to work, and accountability for their actions during class.
While we all would prefer to teach in a more intimate classroom setting, dividing students into groups with a role for each group member, using well-designed guided inquiry assignments, and developing systems to hold students accountable for their roles and participation are all important parts of an effective strategy in a larger setting.
Sally Hunnicutt (a professor at VCU who also teaches using POGIL with large classes) and Tim Herzog (from Weber State University) have built an interactive workshop that is part of the POGIL e-Series in which they will share many of our techniques and philosophy for facilitating POGIL in large classrooms. Register today at www.pogil.org.
The Enhancing Learning by Improving Process Skills in STEM (ELIPSS) Project emphasizes the need for students to develop process skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, communication, and teamwork alongside their content knowledge. Since students tend to focus their attention on the skills and knowledge that are assessed in a course, explicit assessment of process skills is important to obtain continuous student development.
The ELIPSS project creates and provides resources for instructors to define their expectations for and assess students’ process skill development, which supports the constructive alignment of desired learning outcomes, tasks, and assessment. (1)
The ELIPSS project has developed a set of rubrics to assess and provide feedback on process skills both in student written work and in group interactions. In addition, the project developed an implementation guide to help instructors find practical ways to use the rubrics in different classroom environments. These materials are being continually refined and enhanced as they are tested in STEM disciplines at various institutions. There are currently several workshop offerings at national and regional conferences, including POGIL Regional Meetings, to help guide and support instructors with the implementation of the developed set of rubrics. The free resources and information about the workshops are available on the ELIPSS website (www.elipss.com).
The basis for writing a POGIL activity is the Learning Cycle. The basic learning cycle model was initially proposed by Karplus and Thier (1967) as a teaching strategy for elementary school science and was based on Piaget’s ideas of learning. The learning cycle model provides the structure for activities in a POGIL classroom, is the guided inquiry learning portion (GIL) and usually is completed in one class period. Each activity contains one or more models followed by set of Critical Thinking Questions (CTQ).
First, direct questioning promotes the exploration of a model.
Second, questions guide students to invent concepts through their attention to patterns and relationships in the data as terms are introduced.
Third, questions prompt students to apply the concepts to new situations.
Structured group work is a centerpiece of the POGIL approach to teaching and learning. Small teams of students work together to construct and apply course-specific knowledge by completing guided inquiry activities.
Part of the structure of a POGIL team arises from the assignment of specific roles for each team member and the fat that teams are self managed and the instructor acts as a facilitator rather than as the source of information and approval of answers.
One key distinction is that POGIL practitioners refer to student groupings as “teams” instead of “groups.” This is because teams tend to be more formal and have a higher function than groups. Groups are collections of people who bring together their individual talents and efforts to accomplish a task. Teams, on the other hand, are collections of people who dedicate themselves to common goals, work together to achieve those goals, and remain committed to each other. Thus, teams have a higher level of internal accountability than groups.
In a POGIL classroom, students are often asked to publicly share their understanding of concepts, an experience that can often provoke anxiety. There are students who are ready to blurt out an answer at a moment's notice while others may need more processing time to consolidate their ideas before answering. By creating safe "thinking time" for students before they are asked to report out an answer, facilitators allow all students to be successful (Row, 1974; Dweck, 2006; Nielsen et al., 2012). It is imperative to create a safe environment where students are confident they will never be humiliated in front of their peers (Bain, 2004). In the process of reaching class consensus on an answer, the facilitator can honor each spokesperson's contribution even if it does not turn out to be the right answer. This also models the process of reaching consensus, a skill that will improve team success in future interactions. Facilitators can model positive social interactions by:
listening respectfully to every student's answers
thanking each student for sharing
affirming portions of answers that are correct
asking a simpler question for completely erroneous answers, so the student can answer successfully before moving on to another student
accepting a student's incorrect answer and following up by asking other teams' spokespersons if they agree or disagree
The Classroom Observation Working Group has been working on developing a classroom observation tool for use in a POGIL classroom. The instrument, which is modeled from TDOP (Hora, 2013), COPUS (Smith et al, 2013), and OPAL (Frey et al, 2016), is a behavior observation tool. OPTIC codes have been chosen to capture typical behavior of instructor and student behaviors in a POGIL classroom.
In OPTIC, both the instructor and student behaviors are marked in two minute intervals. One section of OPTIC describes the POGIL phase being used during that time interval, e.g., active reading, guided learning, or reporting out. The observation tool also focuses on the amount and type of interaction students have with each other and with the instructor; e.g., the instructor talking to the learning team, students interacting with each other within a learning team, or learning teams interacting with other learning teams.
The group is also developing a visual timeline modeled from the OPAL timeline (Frey et al, 2016). This timeline is in the form of a chronological timeline displaying all the codes marked during the observation in the interval in which they occurred. This timeline is a “big-picture” view of the type and position of activities or events are occurring in the classroom. This visual timeline gives the instructor a snapshot view of the entire class session and is an intuitive way of reflecting on one’s teaching. —Courtesy of Gina Frey
A fishbowl is a great way to get a look into how good facilitation of a POGIL activity can make for a more successful outcome. It is set up like a typical POGIL classroom with a few exceptions. Each table has four students (fish) that will be carrying out a POGIL activity. Those students will be assigned roles as usual. There is a table observer assigned to each table that is responsible to watch the interactions of the students. They are not to talk to the students, but watch how they interact and carry out their roles.
There are also several global observers who wander about the room and not only watch the interactions of the students, but also how the facilitator interacts with all of the tables. All of the observers should be made aware ahead of time as to what the facilitator's goals and objectives for the lessons are.
The facilitator should include as many "facilitator tricks" as possible, but may also want to do a few things that are not exemplary so that the observers can see what good and bad facilitation looks like.
After the lesson, there is a person who leads a discussion and does an SII (Strengths, Improvements, Insights) from the observer's perspective as well as the student's perspective. —Courtesy of Beff Mancini, Steering Committee
Process skills are an important part of any POGIL classroom. The PO in POGIL stands for “process oriented” which refers to the seven key process skills that are developed as students work through POGIL activities. The process skills identified by the POGIL project include: teamwork, communication (oral and written), information processing, critical thinking, problem solving, management, metacognition and assessment. These skills are also called soft skills, workplace skills or professional skills. Most employers cite the need for employees who are capable of communicating with others, solving problems that do not have an obvious solution and are able to think critically. In a typical lecture-based classroom, students gain little experience developing these important workplace skills.
The POGIL classroom however, focuses on the explicit development of these important process skills. POGIL activities are based on the learning cycle, completing activities in groups of 3-4 students assigning clear roles for each student, and helping students develop communication, teamwork and management skills. The exploratory (or directed) questions in the activities help students improve their information processing as they work to interpret the model. They also support problem solving and critical thinking skills. The questions that comprise the concept invention/development part of the activity ask students to engage in problem solving and critical thinking, although the focus varies from activity to activity. These questions also support the development of students’ communication skills, particularly questions that require students to explain concepts in complete sentences. The classroom facilitator also plays a large role in helping elicit the process skills during group interactions. Both in the classroom and on written assignments the instructor should be deliberate about having students work on process rich materials. —Courtesy of Suzanne Ruder, Virginia Commonwealth University.
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
The simple answer is, “Yes, of course!” The learning cycle framework used in POGIL activities can be applied to laboratory work in the same manner as it is in the classroom. In its simplest form, instead of giving the students a goal of completing an experiment or obtaining a result, you would start by asking them a question and provide an experimental framework that could provide data that can be used to answer that question. With guidance, students work together to develop the details of the experiment and decide what data they want to acquire to answer the question. In an advanced laboratory, the students can be asked to refine their experiment and repeat it to answer the question with more detail.
As with classroom activities, the laboratory activity is driven by carefully structured questions. The questions are designed either for pre- experiment work to get students thinking about the work ahead, and also for reflection about the data they have acquired and what it means.
To get a better sense of how POGIL can be used in the laboratory or how you might convert your favorite traditional experiment into a POGIL experiment, a Lab Track has been added to the Southeast and Northeast Regional Workshops this summer.
The activity feedback process is for authors who wish to receive formative feedback on one or more POGIL activities that they have written. Authors can receive formative feedback from experienced POGIL practitioners in order to revise and improve the quality of submitted activities. Using the Content Rubric Feedback Form, feedback about content learning objectives, the learning-cycle structure, and the clarity and flow of the activity will be given. In addition, using the Process Skills Feedback Form, feedback on the process-skills goals and the cooperative structure of the activity will be given. To receive feedback, authors should submit one activity at a time to Sarah Rathmell: sarah.rathmell@pogil.org. This submission should contain the student activity and any accompanying handouts, an answer key for the activity, a classroom implementation plan if appropriate, and the Activity Submission Form. Before submitting an activity for feedback, authors often find it very helpful to check their activity using the Elements of a Typical Classroom, Activity and Author Guidelines for Developing Activities. Our goal is to give authors and reviewers realistic deadlines, between submitting activities and receiving feedback. We aim for a turnaround rate of approximately 4-6 weeks - subject to change, depending on reviewer commitments and availability. Read more here: https://pogil.org/resources/writing-submitting-pogil-activities
Check out the newly formed POGIL Blog! Thanks to the efforts of Tammy Pirmann of Springfield Township HS and Sally Hunnicutt of Virginia Commonwealth University, we now have a blog located at https://thepogilproject.wordpress.com.
The blog is due to be updated weekly with new posts and a moderated forum. It is open to anyone who wishes to share their thoughts on the subject of the posts.
You can submit your comments by emailing your post to swilson1@pogil.org and it will be reviewed and shared the following week. Upcoming topics include:
1. What is the Activity Development Network, and how can you get involved?
2. How can we use social media to promote POGIL?
3. Using online conference tools for meetings
4. What is the POGIL endorsement process?
The Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) is an approach to setting up laboratory classes to make the process more engaging for students and more intuitive to writing laboratory reports. Through this set up, students come to the lab with a beginning question and have the opportunity to discuss it with other students in groups. Then, with a set of guiding questions from those groups, the teacher can create a framework for the experiment that allows students to come to the desired results but allows them an independence and ownership in the investigation. Because of this, students are more engaged and interested in the lab.
By making students more involved in finding solutions on their own, they learn the lesson and process better. This approach makes the lab process easier for students to repeat because they have discovered it on their own.
In Iowa, 3rd through 5th graders who were taught with the SWH approach tended to do better on the Science, Math, and Reading sections of the Iowa Assessments. Students also showed a lasting carry-over effect in later grades. The SWH approach impacts critical thinking growth rates and closes achievement gaps.
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is a growing movement in scholarly inquiry that advances the practice of teaching by making research findings public.
According to Megan Hoffman, professor of biology at Berea College, and one of the authors of POGIL’s SoTL workshop session, SoTL collects data from classrooms for analysis on how students are learning. One of the major questions SoTL asks is “Can we tell if and how students are learning?” Through its studies, SoTL provides feedback for teachers on how they can improve their students’ learning, as well as those seeking information on how people learn.
POGIL provides an ideal environment for these studies because of its process skills and inquiry-based approach to learning. POGIL’s working definition of SoTL is “investigations that begin with the purpose of understanding and improving teaching and learning within a classroom or institution, leading to results that can be shared beyond the classroom.” POGIL is also a gateway for many practitioners to discover SoTL and help them get started on a particular path of research.
Several specific skills help an instructor exhibit the behaviors of a quality facilitator. A comprehensive listing is available in Vicky Minderhout and Jenny Loertscher’s excellent article “Facilitation: The Role of the Instructor” (2008, American Chemical Society Symposium Series 994, pp 72-85). However, the most important skills are having the ability to listen and rephrase, asking critical questions, and recognizing emotions.
Listening and rephrasing are essential for the facilitator to discover and clarify major issues students are confronting, to assess progress of individuals and teams, to check consensus of a team, and to effectively intervene.
Asking critical questions helps students clarify and identify the relevant issues affecting learning. This skill is also important for students working within teams, giving the facilitator another opportunity to model an essential skill.
Recognizing emotions is a skill that is extremely useful, as learner-centered approaches can be difficult for some students. Facilitators need to monitor affective behaviors since significant negative emotions can impede learning. Learning to read body language is one way to effectively recognize emotions. If a problem is then identified, a facilitator can intervene before a negative situation goes too far.
Yes! The activity feedback process is for authors who wish to receive formative feedback on one or more POGIL activities that they have written. Authors will receive formative feedback from experienced POGIL practitioners in order to revise and improve the quality of submitted activities. Using the Content Rubric Feedback Form, feedback about content learning objectives, the learning-cycle structure, and the clarity and flow of the activity will be given. In addition, using the Process Skills Feedback Form, feedback on the process-skills goals and the cooperative structure of the activity will be given. To receive feedback, authors should submit one activity at a time to Sarah Rathmell: sarah.rathmell@pogil.org.
This submission should contain the student activity and any accompanying handouts, an answer key for the activity, a classroom implementation plan if appropriate, and the Activity Submission Form. Before submitting an activity for feedback, authors often find it very helpful to check their activity using the Elements of a Typical Classroom, Activity and Author Guidelines for Developing Activities. Visit https://pogil.org/resources/writingsubmitting-pogil-activities for more information.
Yes! A POGIL laboratory is one in which students, in advance of any classroom work on underlying principles, work in groups to conduct experiments, rather than exercises that verify previously taught principles.
Prior to the beginning of any laboratory work, the instructor poses a focus question (What factors affect the solubility of ions? When an alcohol reacts as a base, what role might substituents play?) and groups propose a set of tentative answers.
To test these hypotheses, students run reactions and collect data, which are pooled and then analyzed with the aid of post-experiment of post-laboratory guided-inquiry questions. This learning cycle approach not only guides students to construct their own understanding of important chemical concepts, but also helps them to develop valuable learning process skills.
There are two crucial aspects to the design of the POGIL activity. First, sufficient appropriate information must be provided for the initial "Exploration: so that students are able to develop the desired concepts. Second, the guiding questions must be sequenced in a carefully constructed manner so that not only do students reach the appropriate conclusion, but at the same time, various process and learning skills are implemented and developed.
Typically, the first few questions build on students' prior knowledge and direct attention to the information provided by the model. This is followed by questions designed to help promote the recognition of relationships and patterns in the data, leading toward some concept development.
The final questions may involve applying the concepts to new situations and generalizing students' new knowledge and understanding.
The learning cycle is an inquiry strategy for teaching and learning that is based on constructivist principles. A.E. Lawson describes a learning cycle consisting of three phases:
Exploration – a phase in which a pattern of regularity in the environment or data (collected by students, or presented to them directly) is sought. Students generate hypotheses and test them in an attempt to explain or understand this information.
Concept Invention – a "term introduction" phase in which a concept is developed from patterns in the data and a new term is introduced to refer to these newly identified trends or patterns. By having the "term introduction" phase follow the Exploration phase, new terms are introduced at a point when the student has already constructed their own understanding of the concept to which the term is then attached. This is in contrast to a typical lecture or textbook presentation in which terms are frequently presented or defined before examples of their use are given.
Application – a phase in which the just-developed concept is applied in new situations. This phase is intended to generalize the concept's meaning and applicability, frequently requiring deductive reasoning skills.
With this structure, a learning cycle experience guides students to develop concepts for themselves, promoting a sense of ownership and participation, and providing epistemological insight into the nature of scientific inquiry.
One of the principles that characterizes POGIL as a teaching strategy and philosophy is the explicit emphasis on the development of process skills as an important component of the student learning experience. The process skills for POGIL activities include both cognitive and affective processes that students use to acquire, interpret, and apply knowledge. At its outset, The POGIL Project identified seven process skills as those that would be the focus of development in a POGIL Classroom:
• Teamwork
• Oral & Written Communication
• Management
• Problem Solving
• Information Processing
• Assessment
• Critical Thinking
There are many other process skills that are important and valuable. For example the ability to make order of magnitude estimates is a valid and worthwhile process skill, even though it is not listed above. In an effective POGIL activity, the author has explicitly considered what process skill (or skills) is particularly well suited for development in that context, and has designed the activity to promote the development of the chosen process skill.
Happy Belated Mole Day! In honor of National Mole Day, celebrated on October 23, a new section has been added to The POGIL Inquirer — Ask the Mole! If you have any questions regarding inquiry learning, POGIL materials, or any POGIL-related knowledge, email us at mdubroff@pogil.org.