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.
This podcast celebrates the 2022
POGLE Early Achievement Award winners,
or Peach Awards.
Today, co-host Wayne Pearson,
who is a retired chemistry professor
from the U.S. Naval Academy,
will introduce the project's Peach Awards.
Siobhan Julian from Webster Schroeder High School
in Webster, New York, is our high school winner,
and our post-secondary award winner is Andy Aspas
from Anoka-Ramsey Community College
in Cambridge, Minnesota.
Wayne, Andy, and Shaban,
thank you very much for being here today,
and Wayne, I will now pass the baton over to you.
So welcome, everyone, to our celebration
of the 2022 Peach Awards.
What are the Peach Awards, you might ask?
Well, in 2015, the POGLE Project Steering Committee
and the Board of Directors established
the POGLE Early Achievement Award,
fondly known as the Peach Award,
to recognize significant and enthusiastic contributions
of new practitioners to the POGLE Project.
The award is given annually
to one post-secondary-level recipient
and one high school-level recipient.
To be considered for the award,
a practitioner must have advanced the goals
of the POGLE Project, as defined by its strategic plan,
demonstrated an exceptional level of enthusiasm
for student-centered learning, and POGLE in particular,
demonstrated some project leadership,
and actively participated in disseminating
the POGLE pedagogy.
It is my pleasure to introduce the 2022 awardees.
Shaban Julian, a chemistry teacher
at Webster Schrader High School in Webster, New York,
is our high school awardee.
Shaban is noted for her classroom use of POGLE
and her outreach to teachers in her school district.
She has contributed to the project
as a workshop facilitator
and as member of the networking working group
to further the outreach to current
and new POGLE practitioners.
Our post-secondary awardee is Andy Osbos,
a chemistry instructor from Anoka Ramsey Community College
in Cambridge, Minnesota.
Andy has always been interested in different pedagogies,
but after a three-day fundamentals workshop,
he became a dedicated POGLE practitioner in the classroom
and an active member of the project.
He serves as chair
of the Strategic Collaborations Working Group
and is also a facilitator for POGLE's virtual workshops.
And I'll say I've had the privilege of working
with both of our recipients and working groups
and workshops in the POGLE meetings.
I can say from firsthand knowledge
that these are great people and they work really hard.
Congratulations on the awards and welcome to the podcast.
Thank you.
Thanks so much, Wayne.
Okay, so I don't think it can be overstated
how significant the Peach Award is in the POGLE community.
You have both been recognized not only for your application
of POGLE methods in your classrooms,
but also how much you've contributed to the POGLE project.
How does it feel to receive this recognition?
Siobhan, let's start with you.
Absolutely bonkers.
Everything that I've done in respect with the POGLE project,
I have been over the moon about.
My first POGLE project event was actually NCAP 2017.
And when I found out I got into that work, to that conference,
I was like running around my school, shouting.
I was like, oh my God, I'm going to NCAP.
And then it was the facilitator training the next year.
And I was like, oh my God,
they're never gonna pick me, like no.
And they're like, oh my God, oh my God,
they're gonna pick me.
And then same thing with POGLE national meeting in 2019.
He's like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.
So like every single thing that I've done
with the POGLE project, I've just been like,
I can't believe you picked me for this.
I am so excited for this.
I am so incredibly excited to do this.
So needless to say, when y'all give me an award,
I just, my brain fell out of my head.
I was just, I, you know, dead completely.
I am, it is so incredibly, I'm so honored.
This is so crazy.
And yeah, it's insane.
So that's what I felt.
That's what I feel about this recognition.
Okay, that's absolutely fantastic.
I guess we can see that the enthusiasm part
is really, really there, Siobhan.
It's, Andy, how about you?
Well, yeah, it was hugely unexpected, I guess,
you know, because everything that I've been, you know,
working for in the POGLE project has just come
out of my appreciation for everything that the project does.
And, you know, it was just real natural for me
to want to be involved in some of the working groups
and to want to get the word out to others about POGLE.
And I guess it never really occurred to me
that that would be, that that would be award worthy.
So I'm really tickled that I get this award,
but more than anything, it's just been an honor
for me to be working with the project as much as I have.
Absolutely.
Well, well-deserved award for both of you.
We all have a backstory that resulted
in us choosing teaching as a profession.
It's somewhere along the line.
We made a decision that we wanted to teach.
What, this is kind of a three-part question actually.
And I'll start with you, Andy,
what led you to become a teacher?
How did you become interested in teaching using POGLE?
And then why did you decide to work with the project?
Well, you know, how I became a teacher,
I had a lot of experience with teaching.
And so why I became a teacher,
that wasn't a decision that I made really early on
in my life or even in grad school.
I was just really interested in chemistry
and organic chemistry, but over time,
it really became clear to me that I really enjoyed
interacting with students directly,
much more than me in the lab doing my own research.
Didn't help that I wasn't the best researcher anyway,
but I really spent a lot of my time thinking
about what I was gonna be doing with students
and maybe not quite as much time worrying
about what my own research projects were.
So it became pretty clear to me early on
that I wanted to do something academic.
I was really fortunate at getting an opportunity
of joining the State Community College System
here in Minnesota where teaching,
the scholarship of teaching and learning
and the science and art of teaching is really highly valued.
And I really appreciate being in that kind of environment.
As for Pogal, I was also really fortunate
to be part of a department that had a couple
of real early adopters to the project and the pedagogy.
Back in the early 2000s, if you can believe that,
one of my colleagues went to one of the very first
BCCE presentations where people were really starting
to get the word out about Pogal.
And I came into the department not long after that.
So it was a real sort of natural part
of our department already.
And I incorporated that into at least one of my classes
already because that was just kind of the thing to do.
And over the years, I slowly started incorporating more
but it was still at a fairly casual level
with a lot of other kind of practices and pedagogies
and doing a lot of different things.
Wasn't until far more recently that after I decided
to shift away from a lot of my other types
of responsibilities that I really wanted to focus
on my own professional development.
And that's what brought me into really learning
how to make the most out of Pogal in my classroom.
It's really shown me that someone can get their feet wet
with Pogal and fairly casually introduce some
of the techniques in, but to really get the most out of it.
One of the trainings that the project offers,
they are so valuable in helping you manage your classroom
properly and help your students get the most out of it.
So that three-day fundamentals workshop that I went to
was absolutely transformative for me in seeing
how much the pedagogy is beyond just the worksheets.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of people
that still treat these as worksheets
and it's so much more than that.
It's just as important the technique that you do
in facilitating and the way that the process skills
are emphasized and everything like that.
So from there, it fits so well with my personality
in teaching and I think it's become so important recently
as the light has been shown on a lot
of sort of questionable teaching practices
as people are moving to Zoom and things like that,
that for us to have a really good,
really good well-proven method for allowing students
to really engage with each other,
learn the content really deeply
and practice these process skills.
It's become so important to my own personal teaching
and it's become a little bit of a mission of mine
to help other people get exposed to that as well.
And I think we have somewhat parallel stories.
I recognized early on in graduate school
that I was a much better teaching assistant
than I was a synthetic inorganic chemist.
And so that shaped me in that direction.
So I think a number of us have gone down that road.
When did you start working with the project?
It was not long after the Three Day Fundamentals workshop.
I was so impressed with how that workshop
was ran that I wanted to get involved.
So that's when I took the first opportunity
to sign up to go to the facilitation training.
And I'm very fortunate to be part of the first group
that started doing virtual fundamentals over Zoom.
And for us to have, you know, to not only show
that it can be acceptable, I guess,
to do something over Zoom,
but to actually have a really good high quality experience
where people and students collaborate with each other
and really learn from each other,
that can happen over Zoom.
So I was really happy to be part of that.
Yeah. All right.
Fantastic.
Siobhan, how about you?
What's your story?
Well, I think it's really interesting
that the two of you have already mentioned
going to college and grad school
and realizing that you like the teaching
way more than the research
because I'm gonna now add a third plot line of that
to that story.
Yeah, because I fell in love with chemistry
when I was an undergrad and I went on to PhD program
in biochemistry and I was there for five years
and it basically was five years of me slowly realizing
this is not what I like.
I do not enjoy this research.
I'm not very good at it.
And I think, like, I started thinking like,
what do I enjoy?
What do I like?
And I kept on thinking,
I always loved whenever I was a TA,
that was my favorite portion of it.
So I also knew though that like the PhD
was not going to happen.
My research was just going so poorly.
So I left the program and I knew that I wanted
to be a high school chemistry teacher
and that's how I wound up there.
So again, didn't really start that until my late twenties,
but as soon as I started that,
I knew it was the right thing for me.
It was like, oh yeah, this is what I'm supposed to do.
And when I started teaching,
I also knew from the education courses I had taken
that I wanted to incorporate inquiry into my classroom.
I didn't want to be just like regular lecturer,
cookbook labs.
I didn't want that.
But at that time, if you wanted to do inquiry,
it would be, you did it in terms of labs.
Like you did open-ended labs,
students design their own labs.
That was where you pulled in the inquiry portion
into your classroom.
And so that's what I was doing for about the first three,
four, five years.
Very vividly remember, went to a conference,
the Science Teachers Association of New York State,
their annual conference.
And I went to a workshop and this person was talking
about literacy in high school chemistry.
So not even related to Pogel, but talking about literacy.
And one person asked the presenter,
well, how do you have time for all this stuff
and still lecture?
It said, I don't lecture anymore.
I do Pogel.
And I went, what?
I went like, ding.
Like, what is this Pogel of which you speak?
You know, what do you mean you don't lecture?
What is this magical thing you use that you don't lecture?
And I had to know more.
And I went back home after that weekend
and immediately went online.
I found a Pogel-like activity.
It was not an official published one.
It was just one that someone had written
for high school chemistry, put online, put on their website.
And it was on the same stuff that I was doing that week.
Literally the same topic.
I apparently threw caution to the wind like a mad woman,
printed it, handed it to my students, went,
we'll see, like, kind of like,
I don't know what I'm doing, but like, let's give it a try.
And it was the fact that when they finished that,
they had learned and were answering correctly questions
about what I was going to lecture on that day.
And that's what sold me.
Like, 100% of like, wait,
how are you correctly identifying these?
And the words never left my mouth and you still learned?
And like, done, sold, sold, all in.
You know, I didn't become involved in the project
until a few years later, mostly because,
so I never actually went to the three day
fundamentals workshop because I couldn't afford it.
It was too far away.
Like, I would have to travel too far.
And as a high school teacher, that's really tough.
So instead I sat my little booty
in front of the Poggle.org website
and I dug and I dug and I dug,
but I found absolutely everything I could.
I was like, oh, rolls?
Did I have rolls?
Okay, what are these rolls?
Oh, look, there's a list of possible rolls.
Okay, so let's try that.
Oh, hey, that seemed to work pretty well.
Okay.
You know, and I found like, I read the research goals.
I read about the different ways of reporting out.
I basically tried to research as much as I possibly could
because I knew that I couldn't,
it wasn't within my means to go to a introductory workshop.
So my first involvement with the project was NCAP 2017.
And like, thank God for that
because I started to feel like I was,
am I still introductory if I've been doing it
for like four years solid?
And I was like, I don't know.
And then NCAP came along and I was, oh yeah.
Conference where all I do is talk with other Poggle people
about Poggle?
Yeah.
And I think just to echo back to what Andy said at the
beginning, everything that I've done with the project
has been me in my mind giving back
because Poggle has just utterly transformed my classroom.
It's utterly transformed how I view my profession
and my professional development.
And I'm really just trying,
I'm trying desperately to say thank you.
You know, I really am.
I'm really just trying, all of this is just to say thank you
to the project so much for everything that you've given me.
So everything I've done in the project
has been with that in mind.
Oh, fantastic.
I think it's always a good feeling when you leave
the Poggle Island.
I was the only practitioner in my institution
and then I realized there are all these other people
and they really look at things the way I do.
And it's really a great, great feeling when that happens.
It was incredible for me to go from being the only person
around in my entire school who like knew what it was
to having these phenomenal conversations.
It was unbelievable, it was crazy.
That's great.
Okay, so this particular award,
the Peach Award is for early achievement
as a new Poggle practitioner.
The implication, I think even the expectation
is that your achievements don't end here.
One of the great things about working with the project
is that you can work in any number of areas.
It could be social networking or the writing of activities,
developing assessment tools,
advocating for teaching equity and so on,
a lot of different areas.
When you look into the future,
what are your interests in helping to move the project
forward, Siobhan?
So this is definitely something that I think about
fairly a decent amount.
I made the decision in my professional life
a couple of years ago when I was feeling overwhelmed
by a lot of other things.
What Poggle is what I love,
Poggle is what I wanna focus on.
I kinda wanna cut out some of the other things
that were just stressing me out.
And in the immediate future,
so I somehow got roped into a second working group.
So I am now actually currently involved
in two working groups,
which was never really on the,
on in the point in the context of me,
but then I was like, all right,
I guess I'm part of the high school activities
working group, working group now, cool.
And then I was also really, really excited.
I'm sitting on the steering committee for the 2023 NCAP,
which I've never done before.
And, but really jazzed about that because like I said,
NCAP 2017 was my first experience with the project.
So I'm really excited to be working on to help plan,
that same conference for future people,
people coming into the Poggle project.
My sort of long-term like pipe dream,
I am just, I feel really, really strongly
and really, really passionately about disseminating
Poggle pedagogy beyond STEM, beyond even high school.
Like I love what Mary Sullivan is doing
with writing her art Poggle.
I like, that's the stuff that I just,
I really wanna do, I wanna help as much as possible
to get, you know, that those things out there.
Like, yeah, I would love to sit down
with a seventh grade social studies teacher and be like,
okay, what do you cover and how can we make a Poggle?
Because I think this pedagogy works beyond just,
you know, college chemistry and high school chemistry.
You know, it works.
And right now we are, you know,
there's so much published stuff within that realm,
but there's such possibility for so much more.
And that's, you know, that's what I see.
And I wanna try to make it happen with the Poggle project.
I don't necessarily know how,
but I wanna try to make it happen.
Fantastic.
I think there's room for maybe Poggle activities in opera.
Do you think so? There we go.
Well, like when I actually,
when I, cause I've done some like really,
some informal like trying to show what Poggle is
to the people in my district.
I actually wrote a Poggle about opera.
That's how I did it.
I was like, I'm gonna write a Poggle about opera
and I'm gonna use that to show you what Poggle is
and also to teach you what a coloratura is
cause I don't think you know.
So, and it's nice because I got,
like I had Spanish teachers there going,
oh yeah, no, I can see how I could use this in Spanish,
in high school Spanish.
And like English teachers and they're like, this is great.
Where can I get a book of activities?
And I was like, oh.
So yeah, I think about that.
I think about that a lot.
And I wanna try to be able to say here, here's the book.
Yeah, there you go.
Absolutely.
Andy, where do you see yourself going within the project?
Well, I've been really fortunate
to be part of the strategic collaborations work group
already and we've got a lot of real interesting things
coming up.
We've been able to establish a partnership
with the learning assistant alliance,
a similar sort of group to ours in its structure,
but they develop methods for undergraduate students
to be embedded within large classes,
but these students are trained
on facilitating active learning.
So it was a real natural fit with the Poggle project
for us to be part of the training that they get
and an option for curriculum for that.
So we're looking at expanding that kind of partnership
and we've got lots of other options and ideas
on the future for other similar organizations
and similar ways that we can help get Poggle out there.
Part of our professional development days
for our school twice a year all the time.
And I keep thinking how Poggle is the answer
to a lot of these questions that are being asked.
There's so much talk about the achievement gap and equity.
There's so much talk about actively engaging students
and Poggle can be the answer to so much of that.
So I've started to get involved at the state level
with professional development and with academic technology
and being able to hopefully introduce some of the Poggle
project into things like that is really interesting to me.
I've always been really, really interested
in academic technology and I've done a lot of stuff lately
with OneNote and Microsoft Teams and things like that
that kind of push the boundaries a little bit
on how Poggle has been implemented kind of in the past.
And I think it's great to be kind of thinking
about creative ways to use the technology
to allow students to interact with each other
outside of the classroom as well as inside of the classroom
or remotely too.
So personally I'm looking forward to doing some authoring.
I've been part of the, I've gotten into the PAC,
the Collaborative Feedback Training.
That's been a great exercise that's helped me learn
a little bit more about writing and the revision process
and just that attitude about how something
doesn't have to be perfect.
You try it out and it's probably mostly gonna fail,
but there might be a couple of good things
and you work and you emphasize those
and you change up the rest of it
and that's how the stuff gets going.
So I'm really excited personally to be able
to implement new things and hopefully help get the word out
more, you know, this is, it's such the answer
to so many of the issues that we're encountering now
that I think it's so natural for us to be part
of more educators professional lives.
Absolutely, well, you both recognize that you're gonna be
a big part of moving the project forward in later years
that Poggle's not stagnant, it's gonna change,
it's gonna adapt to the times.
It is gonna use the technology, move into different areas
and I think we're in incredible capable hands.
That's terrific.
I do wanna congratulate you guys again
and thank both of you for sharing your time with us
on the Poggle podcast.
To let people know we are gonna have official presentations
of these awards at our summer PNM meetings
and if you come to that PNM meeting,
make sure that you sign up for Siobhan's trivia nights
cause they are absolutely fantastic.
Yes!
Absolutely and again, I'll say it again, congratulations
and thanks for being with us today.
Thank you so much, Wayne.
Thanks a bunch, Wayne.
Thanks to all of you for listening to today's conversation
on the Poggle podcast.
For additional details on how you can engage
with the Poggle project or its working groups,
contact associate director Marcy Dubroff
at marcy.dubroff at poggle.org.
That's marcy.dubroff at poggle.org.
The Poggle 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 Poggle practitioner, Wayne Pearson.
Please join us next time
when we interview the 2022 winner
of the project's first impact award.
Until then, enjoy your week.
Intro music of our podcast
is produced by Poggle practitioner, Wayne Pearson.
Please join us next time
when we interview the 2022 winner
of the project's first impact award.
Until then, enjoy your week.
Intro music of our podcast
is produced by Poggle practitioner, Wayne Pearson.
Please join us next time
when we interview the 2022 winner
of the project's first impact award.