Classroom climate

• To introduce chemical principles that are important for the environment

• To emphasize classroom climate as a factor in effective teaching.

This workshop introduces the chemistry of the environment. It addresses selected topics such as water quality and purification, recycling, and the hole in the ozone layer. Students are naturally drawn to these topics and studying them in chemistry helps them understand important issues in the world around them. In this program, teachers create classroom environments that help students to learn.

"Kids naturally gravitate to this topic, so we usually pick a few labs during the course of first year chemistry and have them either go out to get and analyze samples, or have discussions on these topics and come up with their interest in acid rain. When they get into acid-base chemistry, we talk about the misconceptions that they have . . . So these topics are really easy to get into, almost any unit that you do in chemistry. The kids actually come up with these questions, and if they don’t, you make sure that they have them."

Caryn Galatis
Thomas Edison High School, Virginia

Proceed to Unit 7.1