Like so much in the last few years, participating in the VIPEr Fellows project has forced me to do some hard thinking and has required me to give myself grace. Between the pandemic, starting as a new department chair in July 2020 (and continuing as of this writing), and adjusting to many other personal and global events, I haven’t done much of anything to the standards I would ordinarily hold myself.

I really didn’t know what I was getting involved with when I applied to be a fellow. A colleague of mine had done it previously and I was encouraged by my department to look into it. So, I genuinely approached this entire journey as a blank slate. Actually…I might have been a skeptic. I’m probably not the only faculty member here who chose to go into academics because they enjoyed their classes while a student, and those classes were predominately traditional lectures.

Every time I reflect on my teaching of inorganic chemistry, I always think of the turning points I have experienced along the journey of learning inorganic chemistry.

My journey as a fellow has at times been both helped and hindered by the pandemic.  The need to integrate more online resources and reassess how to deliver content has made me very reflective on what are the most effective approaches for the student mindset that has also been shaped by trying to learn from multiple platforms.

Like all the Fellows, the pandemic impacted my best laid teaching plans including delaying the teaching of my course by a year. This meant that the last time I taught my foundational inorganic course was four years ago. And COVID made me more sensitive to wanting to provide my students with the most amazing course.  I made my plans and prepped the class and Canvas site. By the end of January, I realized that the plan wasn’t working. It was time to frantically switch gears.

Please double-click the title to expand the reflection.

I am so grateful for participating the VIPEr workshop 2022, in particular for the COPUS data. Institutionally, we have to submit a peer observation of teaching as part of annual review, but we don’t have a protocol as through as COPUS.

My second year as a VIPEr Fellow extended into a third year, after teaching was upended by COVID in March 2020. Instead of completing the data collection in spring 2020, I used my in-person Spring 2021 course as the second semester of participation in the Fellows program.

Like most of cohort 1, my second year as a VIPEr Fellow did not go as expected, in that both of my semester options for completing the second half of the project ended up being moved partly or fully online by the pandemic.

As I look back through my email, I was “looking forward to this experiment(!)” back in August of 2017.