Are there new, improved ways to teach chemistry?

I love that.

I, for me as an educator, I think the summer is a really important time to rest and sort of recharge, because it can be so draining to teach, but also to get this opportunity to be innovative.

So, like, one of the things I'm really excited about BCCE this year is going to workshops, going to these community conversations, and getting ideas to bring back to my teaching while I still have a little bit of time or capacity to incorporate it before I get, you know, into the weeds [laughs] of the semester, where you're like, "I don't, I can't do anything right now." [laughs] So I'm really excited about that, and I like the way that you framed it that way, of like getting ideas.

Something else that you said I kind of want to pull out is you said you want us to make evidence-guided decisions as scholarly teachers.

So that to me is really important.

I think like, oh, we're teaching science, so let's also be scientific about our approach to teaching.

Let's base our teaching and research the same way we base our content and research.

Let's be scientists about our teaching and our science, you know? That's important to me, for sure.

Exactly.

Exactly, and I think what happens is, is to do that, we might need to explore, um, things like cognitive science and educational research and social psychology, right? And so, um, like in chemistry education research, we rely on, um, frameworks that come from other disciplines besides chemistry.

So it's an opportunity to start to read in those areas and get to know that, um, and then apply that to, to the classroom.

What, um, what's interesting there is that a lot of that kind of domain general background on human learning and teaching is typically part of the education of a secondary teacher.

Um, but it's not typically part of the education of, of a college instructor.

And so, um, it's, it's great because at BCCE, we've got people who are teaching chemistry at all levels, and the community conversations format is perfect because now you have people cross-talking and, and sharing.

And so we think that this topic is gonna be hot stuff because it'll make the most of all the expertise that will be in the room.

Yeah, I often think about that, that high school educators have a leg up on university educators [laughs] a lot of whom, I mean, not all of them, I think if you're at BCCE, you're probably excited about teaching, and probably if you're listening to this podcast.

But some, some professors don't even wanna be teaching.

They would just rather be doing research.

And so it's so interesting that we have this huge emphasis on learning all about how to teach well for the high school level, but not for the university level.

So when I do go to conferences like that, I try as much as possible to talk to high school educators so that, because they have so much to teach me.

So yeah, I really love that idea.

I also think about, like, as someone who wants to be scholarly in my teaching, but also is now in the weeds of I don't have as much time as I want, and I think even high school teachers have less time than they want, you know, how do you balance this pursuit of scholarly education, scholarly teaching with my curriculum is full, the, my work hours are full, I'm exhausted, I don't have the time or energy to be innovative? What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, so whenever we talk about teaching and learning, and we talk about innovation, improvement, growth, time as a limitation always comes up.

And I think we have to remember that we are never going to be able to make more time.

But what we can do is choose how we spend it.