Chemistry PD Series: Helping our students think at the atomic scale

Chemistry PD Series:  Helping our students think at the atomic scale

This meeting will be held virtually.  RSVP by 4/10/2023 to be sent the meeting link.

Engagement about what’s going on at the atomic scale, e.g., bonding or any other impossible to see phenomena, is well known to be difficult with students! Why? 

This talk is an introduction to what’s going on here, how to understand these interactions, and how to support your students in these discussions by introducing some thinking norms. The goal is to illustrate how improvement to these discussions can be made without dramatically changing any of your activities, but rather by understanding what is necessary to support these thinking practices, whose insight is behind the notion that chemistry is the central science.

Presenter Mitchell Bruce is a professor of chemistry at the University of Maine.  His collaborators on this project are Alice Bruce (professor and chemistry department chair at the University of Maine) and Joe Walter (at the RiSE Center at the University of Maine and Lincoln Academy in Newcastle, ME).