Creating and Sustaining Inquiry in Science and Mathematics Instruction
Co-sponsored by The Center for Teaching Excellence & Department of Chemistry
If inquiry instruction is such a good thing, why isn’t everyone doing it? How do we encourage the adoption of inquiry instructional practices? Dr. Bauer will help us explore these questions from several perspectives.
- Cognitive and social science theories can inform instructional decisions.
- Substantive change requires a critical mass of change agents.
- Now is the time to engage future faculty.
- Know your reasons for wanting to incorporate inquiry instruction. Our choice says something about the type of social and intellectual relationship we as instructors want to have with our students.
Dr. Bauer will share his experiences with the Process-Oriented Guided-Inquiry Learning (POGIL) project, which started as an innovation in college chemistry and is now a nonprofit organization supporting a network of practitioners in secondary and tertiary chemistry and biology. He also recently completed an NSF project that introduced inquirybased instruction to chemistry graduate students and postdocs at several researchintensive Institutions. He will share with us his findings to determine how prepared they are to become the next generation of inquiry-informed science instructors.
