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Remaking Chemistry: A Redesign Journey (Part 3)

How I Teach It

This is the third piece in my series that considers this year’s work redesigning my Chemistry course. I’m putting them all here, if you are a bit of a completionism about this kind of thing. This one considers the choices that inform my day-to-day instruction, which are not a NEW feature of this course post-redesign, but definitely underpin a lot of the choices I make.

In my own student life, I was a mediocre chemistry student. The only reason I got a chemistry certification was because I had enough credits from my undergraduate degree in Biology to be able to take the content test that New York made teachers take at the time. I barely passed the thing. I am many things, but I am not, and never will be, a chemist.

I am a pretty good chemistry teacher. Part of this is because I’ve been doing it for a long time now. Outside of AP Biology, it’s the course that I have taught for more years than any other. If we’re counting total sections taught over that time, Chemistry wins, walking away. But aside from the expertise that comes from experience, the other major reason why I’m good at teaching chemistry is precisely because I was a middling chemistry student. I know how to be bad at chemistry in a way that I never really experienced in biology. And I know how to try to avoid teaching chemistry badly. Which was something that was a regular feature of my chemistry learning.

This is a bit uncharitable. I don’t mean to suggest that my chemistry teachers and professors were trying to teach poorly. I only mean that for me, and my way of thinking about a thing, their approaches did not work. If we’re apportioning blame, I get the lion’s share. Regardless, the experience of being taught in ways that didn’t really work for me has remained pretty upfront in my thinking about how I want to teach my chemistry courses. Which has been invaluable for informing the choices I make when I teach the thing.

An Earned Reputation

Science education has never been a subject with a reputation of being super-accessible to anyone who didn’t come to it with a very specific aptitude for learning about and within it’s very specific (and very white, western) culture. Chemistry might be the domain that has most famously demonstrated this tendency. I don’t think this is deliberate, but it does seem to be a subject that has a real tendency to conflate a person’s ability to work within the constraints of its culture, with their ability to learn the subject at hand. This shows up all over the place in historic (and contemporary) approaches to teaching chemistry. I’m not going to get into all of that here, except to note that in my experience, it’s a very real thing, and something that I try my damnedest to avoid.

Sure…but how?

It’s not particularly hard. Here’s what I do: I position student sense-making at the center of my class. I hope this sounds as simple as it is. Instead of providing my expertise and knowledge from my expertise as I might dictate in ways that make the most sense to me, I always put my students’ expertise as humans in the world first. Which is by no means a novel concept. This idea is famously considered by Moll under the nifty notion of *funds of knowledge*.

If I was still as arrogant as a younger me was, I would probably say that I work against a so-called *traditionalist* mode of education. I no longer subscribe to that view, mostly because I think centering students as the main contributors and drivers of their education is an ancient practice. It certainly shows up all over the place throughout the history of people thinking about teaching. One might point here to Socrates, or Dewey, or — my personal favorite — Postman & Weingartner. If anything, teaching that adopts more teacher-centered approaches to pursue deterministic outcomes has not claim to a deeper history. Taylorism is only 150ish years old. For me, and for my approach to teaching, putting student sense-making in the front of my work is the one simple trick. More than anything else, it’s the thing that drives my day-to-day instructional decisions.

Sure…but HOW?

There are as many ways to seat student sense-making in the center of instruction as there are teachers who are interested in pursuing that goal. Some of them are more resonant for me than others. But a few years ago, I realized that they all have the same unifying practice at their heart: They seek to generate constructive discourse between teacher and students about the subject of study. This is the central approach. It’s also why there are so many different ways of approaching the goal. Discourse is a complex system that is inherently unpredictable. There will be common features of discourse around a topic like atomic structure that emerge almost every time a conversation is had on the matter. And there will also be unique aspects of that discourse that emerge every time, a product of the current moment, context, and participants in that conversation. That complexity is at the root of why there are so many different ways that teachers might work to structure a learning environment, a lesson, or a particular moment to generate discourse. I certainly have my favorites:

1. Adaptive, intentional, conversation. Ask a question, give some time to think, solicit answers, write things on the board as might be helpful, repeat with variations. There’s a lot of work in discourse-forward educational practices around questions, and an approach like the one I’m explaining here is very much why. A more prescriptivist approach to questioning views questions as magic keys to unlock understanding, if only they can be asked and executed in some hypothetically perfect way. In a student-centered classroom, questions serve a more direct purpose, they are one of the main things that teachers use to keep discourse alive. Of course, you want to ask good ones. But don’t worry too much about it, as what a good question is will very much depend upon any specific conversation. If the question keeps the conversation going, or requires students to give things a thought, it’s good enough.
2. Protocols and structures as needed. I like a discussion protocol when they are useful. In my own experience, they are very useful early in the life cycle of a class, while culture is being built. They’re particularly necessary to ensure equity in participation and contributions. But I’ll also note that after paying a lot of attention to such things for the first quarter(ish) of the school year, I find they are a bit less required, if only because the norms around equitable discourse are pretty well laid-in to my classroom culture at that point.
3. Many forms of provocation. I spend a lot of time provoking my students to further thinking through discourse. But it’s by no means the only thing I use. I also provoke with projects, and labs, and all sorts of other structures. Sometimes I have them consider a phenomenon. Sometimes I do other things. It doesn’t always have to be discussion-first (though for me, it very often is). Again, there’s a difference here between how a student-centered classroom thinks about structures as compared to a class grounded in more teacher-centered practices. I haven’t ceded my expertise, or my facilitation. I’m absolutely making choices about the learning structures that I’ll be working through with my students. But I’m not trying to achieve a pre-set result. I’m looking to give them as many contexts as I can to advance their understanding, and provide them various ways in which to demonstrate the meaning they are making.
4. It’s not all discourse (except it actually really is). Discourse-first does not mean discourse-only. There are all sorts of other things that I will have students do over the course of our time together. My chemistry class has application problems, and assessments, and all the rest of the things that typify a high school chemistry classroom. That noted, I don’t view a structure where a small group works through an activity or application set as discourse-free. Nor do I view assessment as the end of an ongoing conversation with my students. So in that way, maybe it actually is discourse-only…

It would be a mistake to think that any of the things that I’ve described above are somehow the best or only ways to run a student-centered class. They are the main things that work for me, in the context of my classes. It would actually be silly to think that what works for me will work for you, too, unchanged. I suspect that’s obvious, but I still want to say it here. But given how much of a caricature notions like student-centering, and discourse-focus come in for in some education circles, I still figure there’s some value in explaining the kinds of things I’m doing when I teach at the day-to-day level, and the reasons for why I do them. If not, no worries. There are as many ways to do this work as there are people doing it. This one’s mine.

What informs your day-to-day pedagogy? What do you think I’m missing in my own? Let me know! Drop a line in the various places, or leave a comment on the post. Thanks for reading! If you come here often, consider subscribing. Your support helps me keep the digital lights on, and provides you with access to all sorts of Medium goodness.