OrganicERs Member Spotlight: Pete Golden - Sandhills Community College, Pinehurst, NC
I have been fortunate enough to attend two of the workshops offered by cCWCS. I participated in the Active Learning in Organic Chemistry in Charlotte, NC and the Guided Inquiry in Organic Chemistry Laboratory in Minneapolis, MN. I am also lucky in that I have institutional support (funding) and autonomy (I am the only one who teaches organic chemistry), so any changes I make are quick and easy. Some of the major changes I have made recently are integrating material I got from the two workshops. My organic chemistry is semi-flipped. I have not developed enough resources (videos, problem sets) to completely flip the course. I have been adding videos (some out of necessity as we have missed several classes due to inclement weather and some out of pedagogy) to my course. I have recently purchases a set of clickers in which I quiz the students over the material in the videos or as a review of the last class meeting then teach the lesson based upon the results. We then work problems in class. The students also have indicated they like the videos as they are able to go back and review the material as many times as they feel like they need to. This has been particularly useful when we were studying elimination reactions. They could go back and review some of the minor details of these reactions that we sometimes take for granted. Eventually, I would like to completely flip this class where all the lectures are given as homework and we work problems and do the online homework in class.
My labs are a hybrid of traditional and guided inquiry. I give the traditional labs but pose guided inquiry questions which we discuss as a group as part of our post lab report. I think it has added to the laboratory experience and has engaged more students than in the past. It is still a work in progress and I would like to improve the process even more.