NSF Awards: 0618758
The POGIL Project is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that brings together like-minded educators who wish to effect change within education. It works to disseminate its unique pedagogy, Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning or POGIL, at the secondary and college levels through professional development workshops and the production of curricular materials. The mission of The POGIL Project is to improve teaching and learning by fostering an inclusive, transformative community of reflective educators who design, implement, assess, and study learner-centered environments. The POGIL Project community envisions an educational system that prepares every learner to enrich the world by thinking critically, solving problems, working effectively with others, and experiencing the joy of discovery.
The way in which The POGIL Project intends to transform education evolves from a set of foundational ideas established by research and a set of community values developed through practice. Together these elements define how we approach teaching and learning.
The foundational ideas for POGIL are that:
- Learners construct their own knowledge.
- Learners negotiate meaning actively through student-student discourse in self-managed teams within an instructor-facilitated environment.
- Effective learning in a team emerges from attending to cooperative learning principles and process skills development.
- Reflection and assessment enhance individual learning, team function, and teaching practice.
POGIL activities for a range of STEM courses at the secondary and post-secondary levels are available.
For more information about POGIL and The POGIL Project, visit www.pogil.org.
Clifton Kussmaul
Principal Consultant
Hello and welcome to The POGIL Project's video. I've been using POGIL since 2009 in a variety of computer science (CS) courses, have helped to build the POGIL community in CS, and have led POGIL workshops across the US, in southern India, and elsewhere. POGIL is a great way to engage and support students, and a great community of instructors.
Clif
Rick Moog
Director
Welcome to our presentation: POGIL and The POGIL Project. POGIL pedagogy is being used in classrooms of all sizes and at both the secondary and post-secondary levels across the country and around the world. The POGIL Project welcomes the participation of interested STEM educators who want to support student-centered teaching and learning in their classrooms.
We are not able to provide everything that you might want to know about POGIL and The POGIL Project in this short, three-minute video, so please ask questions and/or visit our website (www.pogil.org) to learn more.
And please note that the references mentioned in the video are provided in the attached resource document.
I look forward to hearing your questions and comments!
Rick
PATRICK HONNER
Teacher
Hi-
POGIL reminds me of the design cycle at the heart of successful engineering programs. Do you see POGIL as an approach to activity design, or course design? For example, I noticed AP Chemistry on the MS/HS list. Is your goal to bring POGIL to AP Chemistry classrooms via specific activities, or is the goal to re-imagine the entire course through a POGIL framework?
Rick Moog
Director
Patrick -
Thanks very much for your question. POGIL is - at its core - a teaching philosophy. It is a way of thinking about teaching and learning, an approach to designing a learning environment. So, in principle, it can be applied at either scale - for a course or for an activity. In terms of , for example, AP Chemistry, we have developed a collection of activities that support the curriculum that the College Board has designated for the course - and teachers use those activities (as Laura describes) very successfully as part of their "instructional toolkit" as they desire. This is one of the powerful aspects of POGIL in terms of its implementation - it is not a "curriculum" to be followed but rather a philosophy of instruction so each instructor can use POGIL - and POGIL activities - in whatever way best suits the goals they have for their students.
Kirstin Milks
patrick honner
Sandra Laursen
We're talking about this question over at video 2153 too. I think it's really powerful to teach a strategy (or philosophy or approach) rather than a specific curriculum, because it's more flexible and responsive to different teaching contexts. But it's harder work for instructors (albeit often fun and creative work), who have to do the work to make it fit. I suspect the curricula help a lot at the beginning, by offering models of how the approach might look in a certain course or discipline, getting folks started to think about adapting the implementation to their own context.
What supports does POGIL provide to instructors who are ready to take this to the next level and POGIL-ize a new course for which model curricula are not available?
Kirstin Milks
Yes to all of this! I'm a HS science teacher who loved the curriculum presented as a cohesive set, even if I choose to use only a subset of the assignments in teaching AP Bio and Earth/space science. I think curriculum development and sharing curriculum with novel techniques is vital so teachers can get a sense of what's possible -- and then make flexible decisions about incorporating lots of different learning tasks into a given course.
Marcy Dubroff
Laura Trout
Teacher
It is certainly easier to implement POGIL when there are curricular materials already published. However, The POGIL Projects offers a Writer's workshop to help get instructors started on their own activities. We have also recently launched the POGIL Activity Clearinghouse (PAC), a community of authors that collaborate on writing and editing materials in a variety of content areas. More information about authoring and the PAC can be found on the website.
Clifton Kussmaul
Principal Consultant
To Sandra's question about helping people write new activities, The POGIL Project runs an activity writing workshop and an author's retreat (both 4-5 days). There have also been a bunch of NSF grant projects to develop activities and/or communities in new areas. For example, I was PI for a 2011 NSF grant for POGIL in CS, which helped me create materials and send other CS faculty to POGIL workshops. Several other grants have supported faculty teams who split up the work to draft, review, & pilot activities for a new course or discipline.
I think there are more things we could do, such as making templates or identifying recurring patterns (e.g., typical questions when the example/model is a graph, a table, a set of definitions, etc) to help teachers create POGIL-like activities more quickly, even if it will require more effort later to revise and improve.
Laura Trout
Teacher
Most teachers start their POGIL implementation by replacing some of their "lectures" or other class activities with POGIL activities. The learning cycle is therefore used on a day-to-day basis, rather than a full course framework. That being said, we find that as teachers use more POGIL in their classes, they start to question their course structure as a whole, and move in a more student centered, inquiry direction.
The use of POGIL activities in AP Chemistry has been very successful. The implementation of POGIL in AP Chemistry varies from a handful of activities over the year, to nearly every day use of POGIL in the classroom.
Kirstin Milks
patrick honner
Clifton Kussmaul
Principal Consultant
HI Patrick, thanks for your question. As Laura said, most teachers start with individual activities, which is the focus of most POGIL workshops. This tends to motivate course level changes. If I spend more time on POGIL activities, I "cover" less content, so I have to rethink course priorities. If I want students to develop skills in teamwork, critical thinking, problem solving, etc., how do I help them and how do I observe or evaluate such skills? We should probably think more about how to support teachers at the course design level.
Similar things happen when we redesign courses to emphasize engineering design or project based work. It often starts with assignment or project level changes, but leads to bigger changes.
Clif
patrick honner
Marion Usselman
Associate Director, and Principal Research Scientist
Thanks for your great video. POGIL appears to be a great example of a project that started as an NSF research project, and has become sustained wonderfully. This is hard to do. Do you have advice for other projects that are seeking to become sustainable after NSF funding ends? What is your "business model"?
Rick Moog
Director
Thanks for your message Marion. Marcy outlined the main ideas for how we are able to sustain ourselves - at least in a short message. But becoming an independent and self-sufficient entity is not easy to do! We would be happy to talk with you about this offline if you are interested.
Rick
Marcy Dubroff
Associate Director
Hi Marion. Thank you for your kind words. I would be happy to share our journey from NSF-funded to self-sustaining organization with you. It might involve more than a website post though, so if you ever want to talk offline, let me know! However, in a nutshell, it involved establishing our project as a non-profit entity, developing revenue streams from our deliverables and creating new ones as well, clearly communicating our plans to our network, and working hard to get input and buy-in at every phase of the process from our practitioners. - Marcy
Kirstin Milks
Clifton Kussmaul
Principal Consultant
I would add that POGIL continues to get NSF support - if you search NSF awards for "POGIL", there are over 20 active projects and nearly 100 results total (including collaborative projects, etc).
Also, not-for-profit projects & organizations, like startup companies, go through stages of evolution with different needs & challenges. We need to understand more about these stages for STEM education projects, and their challenges & opportunities.
Marion Usselman
Associate Director, and Principal Research Scientist
Thanks to all of you for offering to talk with us about moving beyond the NSF support to being a self-sustaining entity. Our group has developed middle school STEM curricula as part of a large NSF Math/Science Partnership (AMP-IT-UP), and a series of project-based high school computer science courses as part of a STEM+C project (Culturally Authentic Practice to Advance Computational Thinking in Youth--CAPACiTY). We have good research data about effectiveness and are gaining some traction in Georgia, but scaling and conducting larger effectiveness studies under varied conditions takes funding, and up to now NSF has not offered many avenues for support. It appears that the new NSF plans may include funds for scale-up projects. But we need to be moving in parallel towards marketing and monetizing, which is difficult for university researchers dependent upon sponsored grant salaries. I would love to pick your brains about strategy.
Marcy Dubroff
Associate Director
Hi Marion. Feel free to send me an email (mdubroff@fandm.edu) so we can set up a time to chat. We are entering a very busy time of the year here at POGIL, but perhaps we can find a mutually agreeable time.
Khyati Sanjana
Senior Manager
Thank you for sharing the video. I agree that growth in process skills is definitely hard to measure. I am curious if you have done longitudinal studies on students that utilized the POGIL framework for learning (after graduation). Additionally, some of these are foundation skills that can be utilized in upper elementary. Have you considered upper elementary?
Rick Moog
Director
Khyati -
Thanks for visiting our video and for asking great questions! Laura has addressed the question about upper elementary implementation below. As far as longitudinal studies go - we have not undertaken this type of study but would love to talk to anyone who is interested in doing so! As you can imagine, our resources are limited in terms of what we can do and this is one area that we have been interested in for a long time but have not investigated! But we would like to...
Rick
Laura Trout
Teacher
At this time we are not specifically training teachers or writing activities for grades 3-5. However, we have a few practitioners (myself included) who have written or used published POGIL activities with elementary children. Early in the third grade year they struggled a bit, but late in third grade seemed to be a great time to introduce the idea of working through an activity to learn a concept as a team.
Kirstin Milks
Hi Rick and POGIL team! I was first trained by Rick at a Knowles Teacher Initiative meeting and cannot imagine my high school science classroom without POGIL. It is the cornerstone of how my classroom operates, and it builds independent, flexible, connected learning spaces for both my students AND me!
At the training, Rick facilitated a POGIL on credit default swaps, a very timely issue at that time! I am wondering if the POGIL project has done work on creating similar experiences for learners to think about STEM-adjacent issues in the news -- or POGILs that are designed to be used in informal science ed spaces, like museum programs.
Clifton Kussmaul
Principal Consultant
Hi Kirstin! This isn't quite the same thing, but I've written some mini-activities about learning research and some topics in diversity/equity/inclusion. Most of them start with data from a research paper, and use questions to guide students to interpret the data and consider implications. I'm not aware of activities designed for informal science education, but this seems like a great idea. Maybe there's a way to get a grant to create materials that many museums could use or adapt.
Kirstin Milks
Rick Moog
Director
Kirstin -
Thanks for your message and your kind words about POGIL. It is always gratifying to learn that teachers find our materials to be useful! I also want to note that the Knowles Teacher Initiative does fantastic work supporting teacher-leaders in STEM (https://knowlesteachers.org ).
I am not aware of any current efforts within The POGIL Project community for activities designed for informal spaces such as museums, but this is certainly an area that we would be interested in supporting. In terms of STEM-adjacent issues in the news, there was a project supported by NSF (DUE 1044344 and collaborators) that involved the development of general chemistry activities within a climate-change context and asked students to apply the chemistry concepts to socio-economic issues. If you are interested in seeing these activities, please let me know.
Rick
Kirstin Milks
Kerri Wingert
POGIL has done so much to pave the way for better chemistry curriculum! When we work with chemistry teachers, we love to hear they are using POGIL because they are already oriented to conceptual chemistry development rather than marching through a textbook. Thanks for your work!
Marcy Dubroff
Associate Director
Thank you so much for your comment, Kerri!