Arts Education

I have just finished teaching equilibrium, so my near daily need for a double arrow is done. Where I can type two dashes and a greater than sign (-->) in a Google doc and get an arrow, a double arrow is harder to come by. To solve my problem I used the Web clipboard .  What is the Web clipboard? The Web clipboard is a place where you can store copied text or images for use in Google docs. It's like your computer's clipboard, where all your control+C or command+C text and images go, except it lives on the Web. Here are a couple of things I love about the Web clipboard compared to Cut, Copy, and Paste: You can copy between computers. Put something on the Web clipboard at work and then access it on your desktop computer at home. Because it's web-based. You can store many images on the Web clipboard at once. Your computer's clipboard can only store your most recent copied or cut text or image. The Web clipboard lets you store several and choose the one you need when you ...

This week I participated in some great professional development about text structures, led by my colleague, MaryAnn Tatarunas . She explained that student understanding of text will improve when they are directly taught five text structures. Each of the five text structures can be identified by key phrases that are included in the text and they can be better understood by considering certain key questions.  Here is a quick rundown of the five text structures: Causation: cause and effect relationships are explored, phrases like "as a result as" and "because of" are often used Comparison: things are compared or contrasted, phrases like "alike" and "different" and "as opposed to" are often used Description: information about a topic is presented, words like "characteristics" or "properties" or "qualities" are often used Problem/Solution: a problem and solution are explored, words like "answer" or ...

Kinetics is a topic that I love to teach, but my students find it very difficult to understand. There are probably a variety of reasons for this, but one that I think contributes is that students struggle to think at the particle level in chemistry. If it's difficult to think about a sample of matter as being made of indescribably small and invisible particles, it is probably even more difficult to consider or propose the order of collisions that must occur in a successful chemical reaction. That is one of the challenges of teaching reaction mechanisms. When the reaction     2 NO2 + F2 --> 2 NO2F    takes place, we know the reactants are  2 NO2 and  F2. We know the products are  2 NO2F. We don't know, from the balanced equation, which particles must smash into which particles in order to change the reactants into products. We do know, though, that it is statistically unlikely that all three particles must crash into each other at once and inst...

In my last post, I detailed my takeaways from a powerful workshop I attended on modeling instruction. Since attending that workshop, I find myself thinking more about incorporating the ideals of modeling into my instruction. For years I have created open-ended activities in which students explore and test hypotheses, but questions have remained. How can I make better use of my whiteboards? How can I facilitate more conversations about student experiments? One of the first topics I applied some of these modeling ideas to was kinetics. Kinetics is one of my favorite topics to teach, so it was a perfect starting point for this new inspiration. For years I have attempted a clock reaction lab in hopes that students could use data to write a rate law. Unfortunately, the results are usually a mix of inconsistent and confusing and rarely lead to even a better understanding of rate laws in general. I have led students through at least four iterations of rate law labs, each year junking that y...