ERIC Number: EJ1308983
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021-Sep
Pages: 11
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0021-9584
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Teaching Chemistry by a Creative Approach: Adapting a Teachers' Course for Active Remote Learning
Marchak, Debora; Shvarts-Serebro, Inna; Blonder, Ron
Journal of Chemical Education, v98 n9 p2809-2819 Sep 2021
Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, all teachers' training courses scheduled for summer 2020 had to transition to online formats. For the arts-integrating course "Teaching Chemistry by a Creative Approach", this shift jeopardized the course's essence, since learning by this approach is based on creative, hands-on, and active learning. Here we describe how the course format and contents evolved from a planned face-to-face format to an adapted, successful online learning experience. Two main goals were considered during the adaptation process: (1) making available to teachers the theoretical and practical backgrounds necessary to internalize the arts-integrating approach through creative, active learning strategies, and (2) providing teachers with actual tools through which they can rethink and develop their own teaching materials to suit remote teaching by incorporating supporting neuropedagogical aspects. Evaluating the immediate and follow-up questionnaires, as well as the assessment of teachers' course assignments, suggests that the online course successfully preserved the essence and the main objectives of the original course, that the course was useful for remote teaching, and that it seems to have had an impact on teachers' practices. We attribute this impact to the well-thought-out process of adapting the course to promote creative, active online teaching and learning. In addition to modifying the course's format, this process expanded the arts-integrating approach to acknowledge the inherent difficulties in learning chemistry, existing also while learning online. We propose this process as a model to be used by educators to rethink and adapt their own practices to improve distance chemistry teaching and learning.
Descriptors: Science Instruction, Chemistry, Teaching Methods, Active Learning, Distance Education, COVID-19, Pandemics, Educational Change, Creativity, Web Based Instruction
Division of Chemical Education, Inc. and ACS Publications Division of the American Chemical Society. 1155 Sixteenth Street NW, Washington, DC 20036. Tel: 800-227-5558; Tel: 202-872-4600; e-mail: eic@jce.acs.org; Web site: http://pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
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Author Affiliations: N/A