Center for Teaching & Learning Stephen Cartier (Chemistry)

First, students will be asked to complete an introductory survey on Google Forms that will provide me with some personal information about them as well as insight into their academic experiences, motivations, and goals.  As a complement to this, pairs of students will then record brief video interviews with each other. I will provide some general guidelines and open-ended prompts for students to refer to. These students know each other from last semester so I will ask them to pair up with someone of their choosing and interview them. Perhaps the prompt will be based on the “artifact-sharing” exercise we complete today, or perhaps more specifically to an “artifact” related to their CHEM 151 experience. These recorded Zoom-video interviews will then be shared on Moodle so that others can view them. To model this, I will record a video with the class TA in which we briefly and informally interview each other (following the yet to be determined prompts) to introduce ourselves to the class that will then be posted to Moodle as example for class. 

The survey/video interviews will provide me enough information/familiarity to help establish a personal connection to the students as well as to understand some of the challenges they face as they enter the course. This information will allow me to introduce relevant connections to students’ past experiences or future academic/career goals as well as adapt to their learning styles with the goal of fostering a higher level of engagement.

We will all feel more personally connected to each other thereby fostering a greater sense of inclusion. By providing me some information about themselves, I will be able to connect with them in a more personal, informal way than can typically be achieved just through course content. Similarly, by sharing something personal about myself, I hope they will feel more comfortable with me regarding their vulnerabilities around chemistry. The more students feel personally connected to each other and to me will raise our level of comfort with and accountability to each other . The intention will be for me to then rely on these personal connections to create shared learning opportunities in which students will not only feel less inhibited to interact with me but also more readily embrace opportunities to  work collaboratively with their peers. 

Collaborative work will be the heart of the course this semester. We will be meeting synchronously 3x/week and these meetings will include open discussion time, preassigned breakout rooms for completing assignments intentionally designed to foster communication and collaborative learning, group sharing, “lab” time in which pairs of students will complete simulated experiments, and “free” time to work on more traditional homework assignments either individually or together. The class TA and I will be flexible and adaptive in meeting the needs of students as we interact with them in each of these different formats with the intention of not just delivering content, but delivering it in multiple ways to meet different learning styles.