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POGIL, a method of active learning: An interview with Glen Ernstrom

Glen Ernstrom, Assistant Professor of Biology and Neuroscience, leading a workshop on POGIL (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning)

Glen Ernstrom, Assistant Professor of Biology and Neuroscience, leading a workshop on POGIL (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning)

What is POGIL?

Glen: POGIL stands for Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning. It’s a mouthful. It is a method of active learning that has two major foundations. One, to emphasize process, the idea of learning how to collaborate, how to do time management, gather resources, resolve problems, conflicts, or disagreements. That’s the process aspect of the learning process. The second foundation is guided inquiry learning.  That’s where you deliver content in a way that students can access that content through an active learning process.

What do you mean by active learning?

Glen:  Active learning is a process where the students take control of their learning, and as the instructor, you provide resources that facilitate learning new content. As a teacher, you have to prepare materials ahead of time: a set of questions, a worksheet centered around a model, or a diagram where students can start to interrogate this model by defining terms and by working their way through a learning cycle process of basic definitions.  Through some sort of evaluation, this brings them to a  higher order of thinking that involves analysis and synthesis. It’s an interactive process within a typical class session.  You might do two or three of these learning cycles, working through a set of questions on the order of ten questions per cycle, with each cycle lasting about fifteen minutes each.

How does this differ from traditional methods of instruction?

Glen: Students active formulate content by solving problems together in groups.  The students interact with each other working on those process goals. An important characteristic of this type of active learning is that students work in groups of three to four, as they work together on these worksheets. Each person in the group has defined roles —  a manager, a note-taker, an oral presenter, or a librarian —   so you work on these process goals while at the same time learning the content. At the most basic level, it is a break from traditional passive instruction towards one where students are encouraged to take control of their own learning.

Why did you choose this to make this change in instructional method?

Glen: I am convinced by several studies that show positive learning outcomes from active learning activities like POGIL.  Students retain the knowledge longer, and they enjoy the learning process better overall. People are also finding that underrepresented minorities perform better in classes with active learning.

What’s prevented you from doing nothing but POGIL?

Glen: There is student resistance. Not all students like the knowledge that they’re going to have to come to class prepared and to be able to exchange ideas, and that they’ll be assessed on that ability rather than just coming to class and passively sitting in a lecture hall. They realize that there’s more onus on them when with respect to class time. There’s resistance and sometimes some pushback on that. There’s also a very common report on course evaluations from some students who perceive this as the faculty not actually teaching. Even as this idea of active learning is trickling through our community, both from a faculty perspective and an administrative and student perspective, there’s still work that needs to be done for students to get used to it. So my approach has been to try to work it in into areas where the subject matter becomes especially tricky, more complex, and less straight-forward. That’s where POGIL really does a good job of reinforcing ideas and helping students really assess themselves. Do I really know this or not?  Then by working in groups and comparing the results of their work in class, they can measure themselves with their peers and see how well they are in doing. They get immediate feedback on their understanding.

If you imagined a world in which the students saw the light and realized that this actually is a fabulous way for them to learn, could you imagine doing nothing but POGIL?

Glen:  I think there  needs to be a balance because people learn in different ways. Even for people that are really into active learning, I think balancing a traditional lecture format with POGIL would be effective. Early in the week, you set the stage and provide some factual content; later in the week you reinforce those new concepts with a POGIL activity. Despite the benefits and advantages of working together and doing these process activities, there are some people that just don’t work that well and find it hard to work in that situation. There still needs to be more studies on this. Because people learn in different ways, having both options available to people is the best route for me, at least right now. And maybe people will find that that’s the way to go.

Section of POGIL exercise that Glen has used in his classes.

Section of POGIL exercise that Glen has used in his classes.

How do you introduce POGIL into a class?

Glen: There are different thoughts on this. Do you explain the theory behind POGIL and explain what POGIL stands for, or do you just say, hey, we’re going to do some class activities to help reinforce this and let the structure teach itself rather than explaining and justifying it. These days students want to know that what we’re doing is useful and that there’s some science behind what we’re doing. That’s why I decided to introduce the term “POGIL,” and  provided some  literature about the method and I showed them graphs showing improved performance in a controlled study.

Having taught in both modes, can you see on-the-ground evidence that by using POGIL students are learning more than they would in a traditional method of instruction?

Glen: The short answer is that it’s too early to draw any conclusions.  I started to using POGIL in a 300-level class this last spring semester.   We did four different POGILs, at different times throughout the semester. That’s about once or twice a month. (Click here to view a sample POGIL.) I don’t yet have solid evidence that there is a correlation between student performance or enjoyment of the course, and whether or not it’s attributed to POGIL. It’s still early going, and I’ll have a better sense as add more POGIL activities when I teach the same course several times. So far  students have not reported any negative comments about POGIL activities. I did see on my latest course response forms where students wrote “the POGILs were helpful.” So that was good to see.

How might one get started with POGIL?

Glen: The nice thing about the POGIL community as a whole is that there is a systematic way to distribute activities that have been field tested, peer-reviewed and evaluated.  So while these questions and  worksheets take about the same time that you would take to prepare a straight lecture.  There are already created and tested activities you can work from.  For example, with the Animal Physiology class, I adapted activities from a Human Physiology POGIL text. There are POGIL books for Biochemistry, Biology, and Chemistry.

Are there other benefits to POGIL?

Glen:  I write lots of letters of recommendation, especially for Pre-Med students. When you look up what medical schools, and many employers are looking for, they’re looking for process skills.  Sure, they want knowledgeable students. But they also want to know that students can work together in team and  know how to manage time. And these are process skills that can I can watch get developed during class time.

So assessment-wise, I’m hearing you say as a scientist that it is too early to say yet, but it’s looking good so far. I would argue you’re voting with your feet, right?

Glen: I think it’s the right way to go. I find the evidence from larger scale supporting activities like POGIL compelling. I think it is a way to make learning fun and engaging. I also think this style of teaching promotes and develops the kinds of qualities we want from critically thinking scholars.

In what way does the process goals side of POGIL connect to your department?

Glen:  In the Biology Department, we’re trying really hard to level the playing field for underrepresented minorities wanting to learn STEM, (science, technology, engineering, and math). POGIL is an excellent mechanism for facilitating and enhancing learning experiences, especially in the first and second year.  In fact, they’re using this even in medical schools now. They’re incorporating POGIL-type activities from large imposing lecture halls to smaller communities of students. This style of teaching can help students who are interested in sciences with different levels of preparation continue to develop a lifelong interest in learning science. And that’s something that we really want to happen.

Resources:

Effectiveness of POGIL

Process-oriented guided-inquiry learning in an introductory anatomy and physiology course with a diverse student population, by Patrick J. P. Brown

Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics, by Scott Freeman, Sarah Eddy, Miles McDonough, Michelle Smith, Nnadozie Okoroafor, Hannah Jordt, and Mary Pat Wenderoth

Learning Goals:

Engage in independent research, inquiry, and/or creative expression.

Read, listen, and observe discerningly

Think critically, creatively, and independently

What stories can you tell?: The Creation of Fifty Years of Green at Middlebury

In the Fall of 2014 Professor Kathryn Morse was mulling over ways to integrate the 50th anniversary celebration of the Environmental Studies program at Middlebury (1965-2015) into her Spring 2015 Introduction to Environmental History course (HIST 222). She attended a workshop presented by Alicia Peaker, Middlebury’s Post-Doc in the Digital Liberal Arts, about Omeka. Kathy had been looking for a way to contextualize the history of the Environmental Studies program at Middlebury within the local, national and international environmental movements which emerged and changed after 1960. When she saw Omeka, she was drawn by the ability to integrate timelines, primary documents, and visual elements into a wide-ranging, multi-part, on-line exhibit.

1961 - 65 section of the site

1961 – 65 section of the site

What was the goal?

The goals of the project included: to collaborate with students to create a resource on the history of environmental studies and environmental activities at Middlebury for colleagues, and current and future students to use, share, and build upon; to provide HIST 222 students with the experiences of collaborative archival research, primary source analysis, and critical thinking about the historical forces shaping their own educations; and to build shared understanding of the college’s history. As a first step, she met with Alicia to discuss how to proceed. Kathy began reworking the 200-level course in order to build in the sequence of skills that students would need.

How did it happen?

To give the students a knowledge base to start with, Kathy shared an initial list of environmental events and ideas and changes in the ES curriculum from the 1961-2015 period, to assist the students as they selected the 5-year periods that they would research in teams of 3-5 students each. After each student chose a time period and Kathy put together eight teams, Kathy chose the remaining period, 1995-1999, to work on herself.

“Every puzzle I had to solve – they were solving too!”

Timeline for project creation

Timeline for project creation

Teacher as Collaborator

Kathy explained that creating her own exhibit was a crucial part of the project. It allowed her to share the experience with her students, and to confront the obstacles and challenges they faced. If she were to pursue a similar project in the future, this is a step that she would take prior to the start of the project, so that she would be able to anticipate where students might run into difficulties. In addition, it allowed her to see how certain decisions about structure and visual elements at the start might help to streamline the end product and create consistency with color and style choices on the nine different exhibit websites. Kathy said she would also consider employing more guidelines about the division of group work to ensure that all students were completing an equal amount of writing, uploading and entering of metadata.

Screen Shot 2015-09-22 at 1.18.44 PM

Making Connections

This project also allowed the students to work with a larger number of staff members on campus including Alicia and the complete staff of Special Collections in the library (thanks to Danielle Rougeau, Joseph Watson, and Rebekah Irwin). This collaborative work also resulted in sharing some archived materials that were housed in the Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest with Special Collections to ensure that the program’s own records, and those of Environmental Council over the years, could also be used as a resource for students now and in the future.

For each individual student, the final piece of the project was a brief research paper in which he or she dug deeper into a single chosen topic or theme within the 50-odd year period of the project, or write in depth about one topic, or to analyze particular themes across a broader span of time. Paper topics included: student concerns and activities with regard to food on campus over time; student environmental organizations over time; the importance and role of response on campus to Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 text The Population Bomb; oral histories with two early graduates of the ES program; the 1970s energy crisis on campus; and many others. One of Kathy’s few disappointments with the project was that there was not enough time to share the individual papers with the whole class. However, many of them are built into the online exhibit as “In Depth” essays to demonstrate the historical curiosity and analysis that the students brought to the project. These essays—and the primary sources archived at the Omeka site—will serve as a jumping off point for future students to complete further research and analysis of environmental trends on multiple scales. As Morse points out, the project lends itself to different interpretations of the broader environmental history of the campus and curriculum.

“I might tell one story, based on this evidence, of change over time. But my students might tell different stories, and that’s ok.”

Learning Goals:

  • Collaborate effectively
  • Engage in independent research, inquiry, and/or creative expression.
  • Explore a field of study in depth

Trading in the Red Pen for an IPad

Louisa Burnham, Associate Professor of History talks with Mike Roy, Dean of the Library, about how she uses an iPad to improve the feedback she gives to her students.

Question One: Over the years you’ve experimented with a wide range of techniques for annotating texts and CO00-12-09-elder-001providing students with feedback on their texts. Can you tell us about your current practice, and how you have refined that practice over time?

Once upon a time, I graded papers with a fountain pen loaded with red ink. Now, my students submit their papers online in PDF versions, and I annotate them on my iPad using a “pencil” shaded pretty much the same as my favorite Visconti Bordeaux ink.

The app I use is called iAnnotate PDF, and I like it very much — it is by far the most used app on my iPad. I can highlight, write with a pencil (I use a stylus), type comments, easily scroll around, and email the papers back to my students with their grades written at the bottom in “ink” just like always.

Circling, drawing arrows, etc. is easy and intuitive with iAnnotate, but some people find writing text with a stylus awkward. Typing on the iPad has gotten easier than before, however: instead of actually typing with my fingers, I dictate my comments inside the iAnnotate typewriter function. It took a little getting used to (you have to say “comma” when you want one, for instance), but now that I am used to it, I find that I write longer comments than I used to.

iAnnotate also allows you to make personalized “stamps” of comments you make frequently. For example, I have one that says “when?” and another that says “be more specific.” They can even be much longer — I have one that explains what the passive voice is and why writing is better off without it. I really like these longer stamps because they free me up for writing about other things.

iAnnotate also makes it easy for me to keep copies of my students’ papers. That way, I can monitor their progress from paper to paper — very helpful. I can call up old papers in a jiffy for reference when writing a letter of recommendation, for instance, and know exactly what it was I said about that student’s abilities.

I don’t know that doing my grading using iAnnotate is faster, but it is better for me. No more stacks of papers to accumulate and carry, and since certain routine things are easier, the quality of my feedback has gotten even better.

When you think about your goals as a teacher, what role does grading play? In particular, how does the feedback you provide help your students improve? In other words, apart from making your life easier by relieving you of certain types of repetitive drudgery, what is the point of being able to provide faster and better feedback to students on their writing?

​Though it matters across the board, it is especially important in College Writing classes — I have taught both First Year Seminars and regular CW classes, and there, the whole point is that they progress in writing skills. Written comments on their papers are valuable in themselves — and also serve as the basis of any advising meetings I might hold with students later. When I can easily refer back to the comments I wrote on the last paper, it can help me to see where a student is making progress and where he or she may not have listened to my comments!  

I talk more and more with my students about the skills they are learning as they work on their writing in a history class. It isn’t ultimately about writing history papers, it is about learning persuasive writing, which they can then use in a thousand contexts in and out of college. A job application letter, for instance, has a thesis (hire me) and uses evidence (here are the reasons you should hire me) to support that thesis. I see part of my job as helping them to sharpen those skills in the playground of medieval history. Good feedback on their writing is essential as part of that learning process.
Having evolved from quill to stylus in your annotation technology of choice, have you in fact seen improvements in your students’ writing? In other words, what evidence do you have that this is actually making a difference in how your students learn?

It’s hard to say, especially given that I no longer have all the older papers that I wrote on with that quill pen! I do think the conferences I have now with writing students are more quickly focused and able to deal with each student’s needs and their overall progress. An iPad is a tool like other tools. Once upon a time, highlighters changed the way many (but not all) students studied and some (but not all) teachers graded. Software like iAnnotate is changing the way some of us (but not all) teach, grade, and do research. I never liked highlighters, but I like my iPad a lot.

Learning Goals

  • Collaborate effectively
  • Apply acquired knowledge to solve new problems
  • Demonstrate skill and sophistication in oral and written expression.

Methods

  • Annotation

Related Resources

 

Multimedia Stories

Several classes at Middlebury create multimedia stories as a part of their curriculum. Want to see what students create? Check out the work of the students in Peter Lourie’s 2014 Adventure Writing J-term class here. Watch the video below to learn more about how the digital media tutors and academic technology staff can assist with these types of projects.

[middmedia cd6868ebca83648aedf8ca834ba11026 hstafford Digital%20Storytelling.2.mp4 width:600 height:450]

Learning Goals

  • Think critically, creatively, and independently.
  • Engage in independent research, inquiry, and/or creative expression.

Methods:

  • Collaboration
  • Multimedia Production

Related Resources

 

Collaborative Electricity and Magnetism Timeline Assignment

by Michael E. Durst, Assistant Professor of Physics

Overview

In PHYS 0301: Intermediate Electromagnetism, I assigned a timeline project where students would explore more deeply the history of electricity and magnetism:  the people, the discoveries, and the real-world applications.  The history of the core theories of electricity and magnetism spans only a century, so this project would help reveal which physicists were contemporaries (and perhaps even interacted with each other).  I also wanted the students to discover the chronology of the experiments which led to our current understanding of electricity and magnetism.
Front page of interactive timeline WordPress site.

Front page of interactive timeline WordPress site.

In addition, being able to present sophisticated phenomena in physics is an important skill for all science majors.  This is why I required the students to create their own documents from scratch, including typesetting the equations and creating a digital image using Adobe Illustrator.  They were challenged to keep their text to one page, including a physics description at the level of the course (rather than an intro level).  While presenting physics concepts is usually considered the domain of powerpoint, I chose to do a web project so that the students could work as individuals (22 separate presentations would have been impossible) and practice preparing typed physics documents (required for our advanced lab course and their senior projects).  Most importantly, a web-based timeline would be the best way to synthesize all these documents into one place so that students could see how they relate to each other.

Learning Outcomes for the Project

This being a liberal arts college, I wanted the students to have an opportunity to showcase their ability to write well.  I did not want to just assign writing, though; I wanted to teach it.  This project therefore included several intermediate steps and opportunities for revision:
  • Week 3: Choose a Topic (not binding, yet, but it helps me prevent overlap)
  • Week 6: Outline (topic is now determined)
  • Week 10: Rough Draft (ungraded; I told students that I would put as much effort into my comments as they put into their draft)
  • Week 11: Polished Draft (ungraded; Comments were submitted through Moodle over Thanksgiving break)
  • Week 12: Final Draft (graded)
An added benefit of the submission of drafts was that it allowed me to clarify the assignment, as the original description was somewhat open-ended.  The students did in fact learn how to prepare their own typed physics documents and images, in addition to describing complex physical phenomena in words (as opposed to homework assignments which mostly use math to describe the same phenomena).
[middmedia cd6868ebca83648aedf8ca834ba11026 hstafford Physics.timeline.mp4 width:600 height:450]

Assessment & Revisions for Next Time

My biggest concern in assigning this timeline project was that the students would perceive it as busy-work.  I was (am) very excited about the project because I have never studied the history of physics, so I was hoping to learn something myself.  In order to make the students be interested, I let them choose their own topics for the timeline.  I gave them several suggestions for physicists and the experiments which led to their big discoveries, but most students chose to ignore them.  I had envisioned the timeline falling mostly in the 19th century, but most students chose to explore the physics behind recent technological advances like wireless charging, MRI, touch screens, and near field communication.  This is not what I expected, but the students seemed to be really excited about applying what we learned in class to the devices they use every day.  When we got together for the grand unveiling of the website, the students seemed quite proud of their images as they scrolled across the screen.

Advice

Since I plan to continue this project next year, I will use this question to discuss the changes I will make for next year.
First, I would get in touch with digital technology folks early.  This may have been too ambitious a project having just arrived on campus.  I am so glad that you were able to coordinate the installation of the Knight Lab Timeline JS before the end of the semester.  Since the Middlebury instance of WordPress is intentionally limited, this could have been a disaster.  Speaking of WordPress, I had great difficulty using equations on the website, as I did not realize I needed to install Jetpack to be able to use the “beautiful equations” feature (which requires equations to be typed in LaTeX).  If I had gotten my act together sooner, I could have had the website in a state such that the students could have uploaded (and troubleshot) the documents themselves.
Before next year’s project, I might explore other options that the Knight Labs Timeline JS plugin.  While this worked quite well, the topics in the timeline do not change length based on their date range.  Also, the timeline topics must be entered via a Google Docs Spreadsheet, which is just another layer of editing in addition to the website itself.  Because I wanted to have a web page for each timeline entry, I had to write html code within the timeline spreadsheet so that the displayed entries would link to the appropriate page.  This is incredibly cumbersome, and it might be too much to ask the students to do.  One more feature I wish the timeline had is some kind of auto-scroll.  As it is now, you have to click through the entries yourself.
Next year, I will start the students’ projects sooner for several reasons.
  • First, this will allow me to teach them how to write in LaTeX, which is the language used for editing equations.
  • Next, I would make the deadlines earlier, even though they will not have seen all the topics required for their entries.

This would allow more time for debugging, in addition to perhaps getting some help from someone in CTLR.  Since my students submitted their final drafts on the last Friday of class, I had to do a frantic all-weekend coding session to transfer all their files into html, including re-typing their equations in LaTeX, uploading their images, and filling out the timeline spreadsheet with links to the new pages.  The website’s grand unveiling occurred at our final exam review session on the following Monday, so I wanted it to be ready before then.

Learning Goals

  • Collaborate effectively
  • Engage in independent research, inquiry, and/or creative expression

Methods

  • Collaboration

Related Resources

Annotating Texts to Deepen Meaning

CV Starr Professor of Russian & East European Studies Tom Beyer is no stranger to utilizing technology in the classroom. During the summer of 2013 Tom approached the digital media tutor program to see if we could assist with transitioning content from an existing Wetpaint site to another platform.

See the video below to learn more about the project and process involved.

[middmedia cd6868ebca83648aedf8ca834ba11026 hstafford Inferno.mp4 width:600 height:400]

Learning Goals

  • Read, listen and observe discerningly.
  • Collaborate effectively.
  • Understand and appreciate difference, commonality, and connectedness across and within cultures and societies around the world.

Methods

  • Collaboration

Related Resources