Attending the VIPEr Fellows workshop, I could feel the collective exasperation, exhaustion and frustration from a group of highly intelligent and highly motivated individuals who were perhaps, like me, feeling less motivated than ever before, beaten down by the prior pandemic years of disarray and drastic changes.  I felt relieved to be given permission to also feel these things (outwardly anyways) that I have tried to “power through” in the preceding years.  What do we do when the people who might encourage us when we go through stagnation are also going through those same tough times for such an extended period of time?  Well, my perception is that the VIPEr Fellows group was both feeling the same things and that moreover, we can still encourage each other from the bottom!  Importantly, I sensed the continued resolve from the group that progress is being made and that the path forward is being forged.

After the workshop and as I prepare for the semester ahead, I felt reinvigorated to ask myself the tough questions about how I teach and how it can be done more effectively for my students.

Do we all need to shapeshift our teaching in order to best reach our students on a year to year basis (today and be ready for more changes going forward)? 

Are we simply regurgitating the pedagogical models we have seen in how we teach because that is the least difficult to imagine being successful?

Even with the recognition that this might be true, I seem to push back against diving into massive changes to “how” my Inorganic Chemistry is taught, despite both the student signs and the small class sizes that would facilitate active changes being made.  I have thought about these changes for many, if not all, of my years of teaching without summoning the activation energy needed to go full bore.

One especially damning moment of the conference was that when reviewing my COPUS data I watched myself take on (not relinquish?) almost all the workload in the classroom despite my mantra to the students every year has been “Whoever does the work does the learning”.  As I watched back the video evidence, my students were SO comfortable in their seats, leaning back with feet on the chair in front of them that it was apparent they needed a jolt, and there I was up front lecturing and lecturing some more.  However, in one of my lectures, I had a specific activity that involved the students in learning how to construct diatomic molecular orbital diagrams and it was clear that students enjoyed the variety and seemed to get more out of the content and were actively engaging in the learning process.  This reinforced to me that my courses can nurture improved student engagement if I release unilateral control in the classroom and get back to my basic tenets of how I want to best push students to succeed and learn as chemists and scientists.

                Maybe it was poetic justice that I roomed with Ben Lovaasen at the workshop, with whom I share enough of a passing resemblance that it was suggested that one of us is simply the Jahn-Teller distortion of the other, a joke only an inorganic chemist could love.  But reflecting on this at the end of the conference I thought maybe that is a fitting description of the small (or sometimes large) adjustments that we can make to improve as educators.

So, maybe I need to let myself be stretched (along the Z axis?) to become the best teacher I can be at this moment in time.  This workshop has given me the confidence to change and adopt different strategies in the classroom while simultaneously retaining my strengths as an educator.  I never felt pressured to make drastic changes to my personal style and yet I came away more comfortable to stray away from the comfort of pure lecturing.  I also walked into this workshop with numerous questions about my own ability to best reach my students and somehow left with three times as many questions and yet more confidence than ever.  

Here is to the Fall semester!