Welcome to season two of the POGLE podcast. I'm Matt Tarca, producer of the POGLE podcast for the POGLE Project.
POGLE stands for Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning, a student-centered approach that guides students in constructing their own understanding of content
and helps them develop important skills such as teamwork, communication, critical thinking, and problem-solving.
The POGLE podcast is an ongoing conversation from the POGLE Project that celebrates innovative educators both in and out of the classroom.
For our third episode, we will focus on the first of five strategic goals in the POGLE Project strategic plan, which is to grow and support POGLE practitioners.
We will talk about some of the recent initiatives that have helped us pursue this goal, including the National Conference to Advance POGLE Practice,
the Networks Working Verb, and the upcoming Climate Justice Symposium.
A fundamental aspect of teaching in a POGLE classroom is building personal relationships, student-to-student and student-to-teacher.
It is no surprise that Goal 1 of the strategic plan encourages us to reach out and build personal relationships that are so important in any organization.
We have some folks with us today who have been instrumental in that outreach.
Today, our host Wayne Pearson, who is a retired chemistry professor from the U.S. Naval Academy, interviews our three panelists, Tim Herzog, Gail Webster, and Kristen Plessl.
Wayne, Tim, Gail, and Kristen, thank you for being here today to discuss the importance of strategic goal one.
And Wayne, I will now pass the baton over to you.
OK, so we have some folks with us today who are very instrumental in our outreach program in the POGLE project.
I would like to introduce Gail Webster.
Hello, I'm Gail Webster.
I am a former chemistry professor, and I have left that and I'm now a AAAS fellow in Washington, D.C.
And Tim Herzog.
Hi, I'm Tim Herzog.
I'm a chemistry professor at Weaver State University in Ogden, Utah.
And Kristen Plessl.
Hi, everyone.
Kristen Plessl, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
OK, let's start with talking about some of the outreach programs that the POGLE project has been involved in.
And I'd like to start with NCAP.
And hopefully I'll get this name correct, the National Conference to Advance POGLE Practice.
And Gail, you along with Chris Mayfield, you were co-chairs of the planning committee for last summer's conference and a very successful conference, I might want to add.
Could you describe NCAP and how it fits into the outreach efforts of the project?
Sure. NCAP was really a brainchild of Kristen and a planning group at POGLE National Meeting to include more people coming together to really discuss and share practices and to talk about research and all kinds of things.
And to really pull more people into the project to be more active in the project.
There were a lot of people that were using POGLE, but if you're the only one at your institution, it can be pretty lonely.
So bringing folks together who have gone to some sort of training for POGLE has really filled a niche that we needed in the project,
because it's a way also for people from across different disciplines and from different educational institution types.
So high school teachers, community college teachers, universities, everybody's there together sharing.
OK, so if I were a practitioner who wanted to go to an NCAP, what kinds of experiences would I have there?
You would be able to go to a roundtable discussion on topics where maybe a couple of different people are presenting from their unique perspectives.
You would be able to go to workshops on things that we don't necessarily have at the regional meetings or for the E-Series.
You would be able to go to poster presentations from practitioners.
You would be able to go to plenary sessions where we have excellent speakers come in and talk to us about how their work really intersects with what we do in the POGLE project.
You would be able to work on your writing. They have author coaching.
So if you're starting to write your own activities, you can get some feedback on it.
And I'm sure I'm missing other things that I can't think of right off the top of my head.
Well, there you go. Well, it sounds jam packed to begin with.
So when is our next conference and how can people attend?
Well, I think, aren't we planning for 2023?
Hopefully in Utah, I think, right? Because that was where we were supposed to be.
Then we went virtual. And so the hope is to be back in Utah.
All right. And so before that happens, there'll be a call for applications?
Absolutely. It'll go out to everybody in the database.
I'm sure we will post it on the POGLE practitioners page on Facebook.
And anybody who has gone to some sort of a workshop is welcome to apply to come to NCAP.
So when people apply to come to NCAP, we do offer some financial assistance for people.
It's limited, but through the Jim and Kathy Spencer Fund,
we have funding to help support practitioners from all different levels to come to NCAP.
So we really encourage folks to apply because we might be able to help them get there.
I say it sounds terrific, but I also know that it is terrific
because I have attended three NCAPs and I can't wait for number four to come along.
So that's fantastic. Absolutely.
Okay, Tim, let's talk a little bit about networking with POGLE practitioners.
Last year, you were the steering committee liaison for the Networks Working Group.
Could you describe a little bit how the project is making efforts to bring people together
by establishing networks of practitioners?
Sure. We've been working on this for a long time on trying to think about how to connect.
We started off kind of talking about advanced practitioners,
and that was the project that really led to NCAP.
But we've been continuing to try to think about how to connect POGLE practitioners together.
We had an effort for a few years to try to really connect people at the local level,
probably from 2017 to 2019.
We worked pretty hard on that and trying to build small communities of people in local areas
so they could meet and help each other and build community in their local areas
and share in common problems.
We had some success with that, but after the PNM in 2019,
we decided that we wanted to do a more virtual part to it.
And we were building up to building a Facebook group when actually organically,
Sarah Fox, a member of PNM, actually started a Facebook group of her own,
and we co-opted it with her blessing.
And then that became a really active and dynamic group that was perfectly timed before a pandemic.
So one of the gifts of the pandemic, if you will,
is that we all learned that we can actually do some things remotely
and work together in ways that we hadn't thought about before.
And that network on Facebook became a really great resource for POGLE practitioners,
and a lot of people joined in and shared ideas about teaching during a pandemic
and teaching virtually and trying to do POGLE virtually.
And everybody found it a great community place where we could just share our frustrations
and share things that we wanted to try to figure out, and we problem-solved for each other.
And so that team has been, the network's team has been supporting that effort in all kinds of ways
by kind of feeding ideas into it, building some structure to it in terms of creating moderation strategies
and having people serve as moderators.
Although I will admit the POGLE community doesn't need a lot of moderators.
They tend to just be really nice to each other online.
So that's been a really great thing is that we haven't really had to limit very much of what people are doing.
We're also working toward trying to find ways that we can use affinity groups to find other ways to connect people
that have more specific connections about whether it's their content area or it's about the level that they teach at,
whether it's high school or college, or whether it's about particular projects that they're working on.
We're trying to use the networks, use that team and the Facebook platform to do that.
So if you're interested in joining our Facebook community, probably the easiest thing to do is just search POGLE practitioners
from Facebook and look for our group, or you can go to facebook.com forward slash groups forward slash POGLE.
All right. So Kristen Pussell is with us today.
I think more than any other person you've been involved with, there are E-offerings like the E-Series and E-Learning,
just to mention two of those.
Could you describe that part of the outreach effort and perhaps give us sort of an idea of what's coming on down the line?
Absolutely. So following the first NCAP, we saw the value of all of these different,
both larger professional development opportunities, but also thinking about smaller ones,
using the wide variety of talent across the POGLE community to share with other people.
So we created our E-Series, which are many workshops, if you will, really engaged interactive sessions,
which we actually stole from the very first few from the first NCAP.
And we continue to use NCAP sessions to inspire our next E-Series offerings.
We offer them three in the fall and three in the spring, variable topics,
many of which can be brand new POGLE practitioners can jump in and to learn more about any particular topic,
some of which are more geared towards our more advanced POGLE practitioners.
We try to hit a mix every year with interdisciplinary topics that would be interesting to any of our POGLE practitioners.
That is expanding in the next year to something that I'm really excited about.
I was on the POGLE Steering Committee recently, and Rick Moog challenged us to think after Gail's co-chairing,
the largest POGLE event ever in the NCAP, which was virtual.
Rick Moog kind of said, I think we can do something every year.
What would this look like if on the off NCAP years, as Gail had said, we do this every two years.
What if we do something virtually and what could that look like? What would that be?
So a subgroup of the Steering Committee got together and started envisioning what this would be.
And rather than make it just another NCAP, we really wanted to think about what could we offer virtually
that would be harder to do in person and would engage a wide range of people.
So this next year, you will be hearing very soon about an event which we're calling the POGLE Climate Justice Symposium.
This is a three day virtual workshop. We have partnered with a small group of people across the United States,
Heather Price, Deb Morrison, and Sonia Ramingtenducet, all experts in the field of climate justice,
who are going to help come so that people participating can learn about climate justice
and then learn how to incorporate it in their classrooms, leaving that three day workshop
with a plan, action plan to incorporate it into their classrooms, including creating a new network.
It's been a really engaging and exciting experience. I can't wait to see how it all comes together in the next few months.
But keep an eye out. We'll have a number of outreaches.
And this would be something that would be open for not only people who are already using POGLE in their classrooms,
but also people who are not. So if you have a friend who maybe is not using POGLE,
but climate justice might be the topic to bring into them, we encourage you to share that with them as soon as we get all the materials out and published.
So Kristen, when is that symposium going to take place? That will be in June 2022.
So look out for information coming late this winter.
OK, so it really truly will be an off year offering just about the same time that NCAP would take place in the other years.
It'll be about mid-June, I think, because of some scheduling conflicts. But yes, that's exactly the intention.
But as we move forward and continue to offer this in other years, we expect the topic to change.
So we don't expect climate justice to be the topic. We really are building this philosophically in a way that we can change the topic to be whatever would be engaging at the time.
OK, so well, that's it for episode three of the podcast series.
I think you get an idea of what the project really does try to do to grow and support POGLE practitioners, which is goal number one of the strategic plan.
In future podcasts, we will deal with the other goals and again give you an idea of what the project is actively doing to reach those goals that are part of the strategic plan.
So I want to thank everybody for being here today and giving us some insights into some of the different types of things that the project is doing to to keep in touch with practitioners and to grow the effort of using POGLE in the classroom.
So thank you until we see you next time. Bye bye.
Thanks to all of you for listening to today's conversation on the POGLE podcast. For additional details on how you can engage with the POGLE project or its working groups, contact associate director Marcy Dubroff at marcy.dubroff at POGLE.org.
That's marcy.dubroff.org.
The POGLE project is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. If you would like to make a donation so we can keep providing podcasts, low cost workshops, and classroom materials, please visit www.pogle.org backslash donate.
Intro and outro music of our podcast is produced by POGLE practitioner, Wayne Pearson.
Please join us next time where we discuss the second goal of POGLE strategic plan to provide high quality POGLE activities through the pack and endorsement process.
Until then, enjoy your week.
Intro music of our podcast is produced by POGLE practitioner, Wayne Pearson.