Application Information

You bring the chemistry experiment,

we help turn it into an inquiry experience!

The CLC Innovators Program application is made up of the following sections:

Institutional Context

The application asks a few basic questions about the institutional context of the team. This information helps the CLC leadership to ensure a diverse range of institutions participation in the CLC Innovators Program. These include:

Basic categorization of the institution
Title of department/program
Primary contact for the institutional team
Basic travel information (will we need to support your travel via plane, train, or automobile?)

Letter of Support

One indicator of successful curricular reform is the support that the curricular reform initiative receives at the home institution. To facilitate successful implementation of the laboratories developed as part of the CLC Innovators Program, we ask that institutional teams provide evidence of support from their home institution via a letter of support. The letter should come from leadership at either the department, program, or division level and be on official letterhead. The letter should include information regarding the following:

Verbal support of team members attending the Summer Institute and follow-up virtual meetings, recognizing the time commitment that comes with this engagement.
Understanding that the laboratories developed will be implemented at the home institution the year subsequent to the Summer Institute.
Recognition that innovative curriculum can take time to implement and calibrate; the first iteration may not be "smooth" and student course evaluations may reflect this experience. Thus faculty/instructors/staff who implement these innovative pedagogies may need reasonable allowances regarding evaluation metrics to provide time to fully implement these high impact practices effectively.

Team Makeup

In the application - names, titles, and email addresses will be provided for each of the following:

Curricular Designers

2-3 faculty, instructors, and/or staff who are charged with development of chemistry laboratory curriculum
- Two curricular designers must participate to provide the support and capacity for successful implementation at the home institution
- All categories of faculty, staff, and/or instructors are eligible as long as the development of chemistry laboratory experiments is part of their assigned duties

Student Workers

Teams must include 1 student worker
- Provides student perspective in development process and implementation support
- Student workers can be undergraduate or graduate students depending on the institutional context of the team

Laboratory Idea

You bring the chemistry experiment,

we help turn it into an inquiry experience!

While the laboratories will be honed at the summer institute, teams should come to the CLC Innovators Program with a chemistry experiment on which they will build the inquiry experience. This could be an experiment previously used at your institution, one published in a peer-reviewed location like the Journal of Chemical Education or Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education, or something brand new (though we expect the basic approach to the experiment to be worked out prior to application). Thus, we ask that you provide us an idea of the experimental methodology that will underly your inquiry lab. The summer institute will be focused on turning these experimental procedures into an inquiry-based experience! The application will ask for the following:

- What courses the laboratory will be implemented in (Laboratories developed during the summer institution should be scheduled for implementation in the academic year directly following the institute)
- What content area and general methods will be used
- Chemistry experiment methodology uploaded as a separate document

Inquiry Method

All laboratories developed/restructured as part of the CLC Innovators Program will be inquiry-based. Thus, during the application process, we ask that institutional teams identify what inquiry method(s) they are interested in potentially using and what their vision is for the inquiry experience. To facilitate this decision, we have developed a list of resources linked for each of the following methods below including a primer for the method and multiple examples of published chemistry laboratories that utilize the method. Additional inquiry-based methods are also welcome.

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