The IDEA Institute

A different way to think about preparing future educators - faculty & teachers, alike

I co-founded and currently co-direct the UM Instructional Development and Educational Assessment (IDEA) Institute.

IDEA is a collaborative effort between the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and the School of Education. IDEA brings faculty members and students together to improve and advance, through research and practice, undergraduate teaching and learning; precollege teaching and learning; preparing future faculty; and new pathways for identifying and recruiting pre-college teachers.

The work of the IDEA Institute is built on the concept of forming interdisciplinary and intergenerational “teaching groups” in order to take on the large and complex problems in education, comparable to the way in which “research groups” have enabled people to take on the important problems in their various fields.

Please see the IDEA Institute's web site for more information about what we are doing.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A different way to think about Honors credit

Creating separate lecture sections of classes to serve as "Honors" sections creates both staffing problems and space/scheduling problems, and substantial parts of the instruction overlap.

In Chem 210 (Organic Chemistry), since 1994, students who are interested in taking the class more deeply, connected to literature, doing group work, etc., do so by signing up for an aditional 2-hr/week of Supplemental Instruction sessions we call Structured Study Groups (SSG).

These sessions are led by upper-level undergrads under my direct supervision. The work they do is week is termed 'generative', that is, they create individual work around a theme, and bring it to the weeklysession for peer review, discussion and critique.

Satisfactory completion of the work earns the "H" on the transcript. Rather than catering for Honors College students, per se, this is aimed at getting science-oriented students invovled in the science, through the literature. Not all Honors College students elect to do this, and the Honors College will "convert" non-Honors students who take this option (ie, they can earn the "H" ... which seems to be enough for them.

The advantages are clear: it's scalable (they work in groups of about 15-20) as long as you have good leaders; and it's considerably cheaper than a separate section of the class (we do pay the leaders).

It does take someone to 'adopt' this activity (a joy, actually, to work with these leaders), and the class really needs to use non-normative grading (ie, not a curve, but an absolute scale) so that students who are not doing the group work are institutionally disadvantaged because some students are taking this extra class activity while others are not.

Participation does improve test scores. And yet, even with those data, only about 10% of the 1500 Chem 210 students elect to particpate, partly because the work is clearly not just doing drill and practice problems.

The same option is available in Chem 215 (Organic II), and SSG is required for the students who take the special research/projects section of Chem 215.

Starting in 2008, SSGs for Honors credit were introduced into Chem 260 (Survey of Physical Chemistry).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Students are not consumers of education,
they are the products of education.

I want students to achieve at levels that surprise them. This process begins, as it does many years, at 9:10 am on a Wednesday morning in early September, where I’ve not only got the mind-boggling thrill of being the first college instructor ever encountered by a group of 450 new first-year students, but the class I’m teaching is organic chemistry. “Organic chemistry”… two words that can bring a dead stop to the polite chat you are having with that person in the seat next to you on the plane from Detroit to San Francisco. And yet, at 9:10 am on that Wednesday, I have an incredible opportunity to leverage an important thing we know about the transition from high school to college: students expect college to be different from high school.

Organic Chemistry at the University of Michigan

Chemistry 210 - Structure & Reactivity I
Chemistry 210 - Structure & Reactivity I (Honors option - see sidebar)
Chemistry 215 - Structure & Reactivity II
Chemistry 215 - Structure & Reactivity II (Honors option)

Chemistry 211 - Investigations in Chemistry (lab)
Chemistry 211 - Investigations in Chemistry (lab - Honors option)
Chemistry 216 - Synthesis & Characterization of Organic Compounds (lab)

And a special integrated section of Chem 215/216 with a research/project focus

In my view, one of the reasons Organic Chemistry is viewed so - how shall I say it? - uniquely in the pantheon of science classes is precisely what makes it so interesting to teach. Organic Chemistry is likely the first science class - ever - that is not a general survey of topics, but rather a coherent whole... a real look at a disciplinary area. Until Organic Chemistry, students will have taken general biology, general chemistry, and general physics. The only people who study general science are, well, students, in order to take tests in it.

Organic Chemistry, Biochemistry, Genetics, Relativity, and so on, are specific areas of expertise. People study aspects of these quite deeply; but more than that, the instructional design for such subjects is radically different than general classes. General classes are rather similar to a trip to the mall: stoichiometry over here, acid-base in that corner, thermodynamics over there... a hodge-podge of topics under the same roof. But the fact is, these classes are organized on a nearly weekly turnover cycle. You miss acid-base completely? That's OK, it's not actually being built upon, so you get a fresh start. This is nice, but it sets up a really tough mind-set for moving into an area where the ideas are all build upon one another, and so if you miss it at the start, you begin to rack up a cognitive debt that is hard to get over.

In 1989, we (the department of chemistry at the University of Michigan) acknowledged that many of our incoming students have enough of a general chemistry background that would allow them to start their college chemistry with the Organic classes. And so, since then, roughly 60% of the 1200-1500 students who take Organic Chemistry in the fall semester are first-term, first-year students.

I've taught and otherwise helped the development and oversight for these classes since 1989. We take a strongly mechanistic approach to the subject, and emphasize strongly that this is a living subject that people study - including by basing our examination questions on providing data from the contemporary literature, which is as strong a signal as anyone might give that simply becoming familiar with the text, or the old exam problems, is only the start, not the end, of learning this subject. One must be able to create meaning from new and unfamiliar situations.

Here is an one example of an examination problem from the first-term class:

Here is an one example of an examination problem from the second-term class:

 

I've also been responsible for developing other classes over the years.


Chemistry 401/402 - Chemistry for Chemistry Teachers

From 1988-1990, the department collaborated with the School of Education to offer a chemistry class that would be taken concurrently by the pre-service upper elementary students who were taking their Science Methods class. In Chemistry 401/402, we used a series of counterintuitive events to begin each class. For example, we would fill a balloon with water, light a candle, and tell the students to predict what would happen (and why) if the bottom of the water-filled balloon were touched to the flame. They needed to provide an explanation for their prediction, using both words and pictures of what they thought might be happening at the molecular level. Then we would do what we said. The result (that the balloon does NOT burst and extinguish the flame) then needed to be reconciled, and proved to be the basis for discussion during that class period. At the start of the next class session, there would be two demonstrations - one that reflected the previous week's lesson (a boat made of paper is suspended, half-filled with water, and a candle is placed beneath it) and another that set up that day's discussion. In their Methods class, the students would think about how to transform what they were learning into lessons for upper elementary children.


University Course 260 - Law, Ethics, and the Life Sciences

Between 2001-2003, I taught as part of a team of faculty members who created UC 260. The idea was to bring together instructors from the sciences, medical sciences, law, history, and philosophy, in order to have ANY university student wrestle with the different perspectives that might come into play with, for example, the irradiation of vegetables... or stem cell research... and so on. At the end of the term, the students worked in teams and identify a problem for which these three perspectives needed to be drawn out, addressed, and presented in a creative format (a web site, a play, a comic book, a movie...).


History 333 - Big History

Admittedly, I was a guest lecturer for 3 days in this multidisciplinary class, offered for the first time in 2008, but the concept was a good one. The "Big History" concept is one where students are taken from a few femtoseconds, or less, after the Big Bang, and marched forward through time, and the consequential development of physics, geology, chemistry, biology, sociology, and so on, as the universe become more and more organized and the earth became populated. It was a terrific challenge to convey coherently a little bit about my discipline from this historical perspective.