Guest Teaching
Having the opportunity to teach the lab that I wrote to 2 sections of College Chemistry 1 students was a very important part of my internship experience. Previously, I did not know much about the environment at community colleges, and I learned a lot in the short amount of time that I spent there.
Before I taught my lab, I had several meetings with Dr. Smith at Madison College. I got a feel for the building and saw the professor offices and the classrooms where College Chemistry 1 is taught. It is important to me to be familiar with the space when I am teaching or giving a presentation. I also got to see "behind the scenes" of the chemistry lab, and take note of what materials were available in the stockroom.
To the left, you can see the slides that I used for leading the pre-lab discussion. As the students came into the room, I had them pair up and share their answers from the pre-lab assignment. As the students were talking, I walked around the room and introduced myself to the groups of students and asked them some questions about the hypotheses they made.
Once everyone was settled in, I asked the class about what they knew about water quality. With some gentle prompting, many of the students were able to bring in knowledge from their experiences outside of class. For example, one student talked about being from “the country” and how different the drinking water is in Madison than where she was from. Others mentioned run off from animal agriculture and that they had seen algae and bacteria warnings for the local lakes.
Algae in Lake Mendota was my prepared example to talk about, as it is a very visible water quality issue in Madison. By the end of every summer, the lake starts to have a greenish sheen on top of it and often there are beach closings throughout the city due to algal toxins. Lake algae was a good example to talk about why chemistry is important for water quality because there are specific nutrients that cause algal blooms - notably nitrate and phosphate, which should be familiar to students in a chemistry class.I also took some time to talk about how my own research at UW-Madison was related to water quality. By talking about myself and my knowledge, I was able to gain credibility as a guest instructor and also introduce the idea that effluent from wastewater treatment affects water quality.
The remainder of the pre-lab discussion was directly focused on the chloride lab and included a class wide discussion of student hypotheses and a demonstration of how to complete the titration. The demonstration was an element of the class which I struggled with the first time through, but was able to improve for the second section I taught. The first time I went too fast, and I had all of the materials I needed stashed at the front of the room, so I ended up needing to show many students where to get all of the supplies and repeating the instructions. The second time, I didn't set up for the demonstration and I made a point of walking around the room to collect all of the materials and explain each piece of equipment. This approach was much more effective. While the students were working on their titrations, I walked around and checked in with each group, making sure everything worked and answering any questions. The lab ran smoothly, and I enjoyed interacting with everyone.
When the students turned in their lab reports, Prof. Smith graded them and then allowed me to conduct my own assessment. I developed a rubric for each section of the lab and "graded" the papers myself, though these scores were not revealed to the students. I was impressed by how thoughtful some of the responses were. Overall, I had a very good experience guest teaching.
(next page: Teaching as Research)