If you use guided notes in your chemistry classroom, chances are you’re relying on lecture to deliver content. That’s not a bad thing! Lecture is efficient, structured, and ensures students actually get the information they need. Plus, it’s likely how your students will learn once they get to college. But let’s be honest: even the most well prepared lecture can start to feel like you’re talking at your students rather than with them. And nobody likes that. Tossing lecture out the window isn’t the solution! The key is to sprinkle in simple strategies that keep students actively engaged while you teach.
Turn and Teach
I won’t go too crazy talking about Turn and Teach because I have an entire blog post on why I love it so much. The gist is that you teach for 5 or so minutes. And pairs of students, A & B take turns teaching the other what you just taught them. One talks, the other listens, you circulate the room and search for really great communication or misconceptions. Then you hop back into teaching. It’s one of my favorites because students have mentioned how well it works at helping them to understand tough topics. It quickly became my favorite tool for enhancing lecture when I actually took the time to do it.
Here’s three much quicker (and easier) ways to make your chemistry lectures more interactive.
Self Assessment
This is probably the easiest of all the strategies and potentially the most helpful. As I’m teaching I’m reading the faces of my students. I’m trying to gauge how well this is going. Sleepy faces usually means I need to act a bit more silly and do a bit more storytelling. But if those faces are confused, I might do a turn and teach to give them a chance to chat with a neighbor. But typically, I’ll drop in a 3-2-1 assessment.
Students just hold up their fingers to give you an idea of how they’re feeling about the content they’re learning. I give this prompt with one request. Here’s a few examples:
- How are you feeling about this chemistry right now?
- How’d you do on that practice question?
- How did you score on your quiz?
Usually 3 fingers are held up for being an expert, or feeling ready to move on.
Two fingers is for needing more practice, or having 50-70% of the right answers for a couple of questions
One finger is reserved for “lost puppies” who need the content reexplained, or need to sit with a partner for some time to grapple with the work.
Keeping it Low Stakes
This takes less than ten seconds, but it gives you an instant read on how your class is doing. If most of your students are holding up three fingers, you know you can keep moving. If you have a good mix of twos, you can give another practice question or two before moving on. And if you have quite a bit of ones, you can back track a bit, or have 1s and 3s pair up for group work.
For the most part, students participate in this because it’s a very low-stakes check in. They don’t have to risk raising their hand to admit they’re lost or have a question.
Whiteboard Checks
Mini whiteboards are an absolute game-changer during chemistry lecture. They give you a way to ask quick calculation or recall questions and see everyone’s answers at once.
I bring this out a lot during my Bonding Unit and Stoichiometry. It works great for diagrams and calculations. “Draw the Lewis structure for carbon dioxide.” Everyone draws their answer on their whiteboard and holds it up.
The magic here is that you can instantly scan for understanding. You’ll spot who nailed it, who’s close, and who might have drawn something completely off. That’s feedback you simply don’t get if you only call on one or two volunteers to come to the big board for everyone to see. Depending on your seating arrangement, most students won’t see each other’s answers, so again, pretty low stakes and typically you’ll get a lot of engagement.
Question Blast
When I’m in front of a chemistry classroom, you may as well call me the “Queen of Questions.” (This is why I REALLY STRESS everything in chemistry is about the electrons. Because my Question Blast almost always starts with “Where are electrons?” and “What’s the charge of an electron?”)
In order to help students see connections between concepts (read: Atomic Structure → the rest of chemistry) I ask a LONG string of questions. Let’s say the topic is dissolving ionic compounds, specifically NaCl.
- Where are electrons?
- What’s the charge of an electron?
- What type of bond does NaCl have?
- Which is gaining electrons?
- Which is losing electrons?
- What’s the Lewis structure for water look like?
- Is it a polar or nonpolar molecule?
- What area is positive on a water molecule?
- What area is negative on a water molecule?
- How would Na+ and Cl– behave near the positive area of a water molecule?
- How would Na+ and Cl– behave near the negative area of a water molecule?
Okay, so I’ll tell you: water is able to break apart Na from Cl. It’s called dissociation.
Using the Questions Blast
See my Question Blast? Right there is ELEVEN questions you can ask your students to help understand what you’re teaching. You can do this for the teaching, or for a recap of the content. You can call on individual students like this, “James, where are electrons?” “Anne, what’s the charge of an electron?” Or you can instead call them out to the whole class. The idea is to kind of sort of make these “rapid fire” questions, hence the term “Question Blast.”
What I love about a Question Blast is how inclusive they are. Unlike think-pair-share, Question Blasts let multiple students contribute in seconds without a huge time investment. It’s a fast way to boost participation and get students actively thinking, even in the middle of lecture. You can even target tougher questions to specific students to check for understanding. Plus it makes for incredible spiral review, since you’ll be tracking back to Atomic, Periodic Table, Bonding and IMFs all year long.
Bringing It All Together
Self Assessment, Whiteboards and Question Blasts, are all short, simple strategies you can weave into your chemistry lectures without derailing the flow. They take less than a minute each, but they break up passive listening and get students processing information on the spot.
If you’re already using guided notes, these techniques are the perfect complement. They keep your students active without sacrificing structure. I mean, is there anything worse than a jigsaw activity? The bottom line? Chemistry lecture doesn’t have to be boring. With just a few small tweaks, you can turn your classroom into a place where students are listening, participating, and actually excited to learn chemistry.
