Science and chemistry contributes!

Lets…

• reform science education to maximize its importance and positive impact.
• steer science literacy to be used in all levels of school in promoting personal, national and global wellbeing.
• support the students to become more innovative and motivated to study and entrepreneur.

 

Description of the training course

This course offers the teachers the curriculum- and research-based tools, how to tackle the wicked global challenges with the help of science education. Hardly any topic is as important as the quality and sufficiency of the natural resources on Earth. We need to solve these challenges. The participants learn how novel ideas of science and chemistry contribute the challenges in extending the sustainable welfare and prosperity for all living creatures.

Training course answers three main questions:

• How to include phenomenal activities related to sustainable development in your chemistry teaching throughout the school year?
• What topics are highly important to teach, but yet not taught?
• How to assess the students’ performance?

All participants get a free book, which is based on a Ph.D. thesis of the trainer.

Methods 

The modern teaching of science is holistic and engaging. The approaches in this course are based on the best practices of Finnish teachers and the novel research about student-centered, interdisciplinary and inquiry-based teaching methods. The focus is in understanding and solving the global challenges by using science teaching skills.

Topics

When it comes to different teaching topics, science education is more controversial than ever before. The field of chemistry, for instance, creates welfare and provides solutions to our problems, but also produces wicked problems that we are not able to solve for the time being. Inspiring teaching of chemistry takes both of these sides into consideration. Teachers learn how to inspire their students to study by using engaging socio-scientific issues.

The practical tools and knowledge of the course relate to e.g. product life-cycle analysis, system thinking skills, sustainable development issues and wicked problem solving. After the training, the participants can apply the basic concepts of life cycle assessment and green chemistry to every product that is dealt with in science class.

Student Assessment

It is challenging to assess student-centered inquiry-based pieces of learning in a big class of students. This course helps the teachers to develop their assessment practices towards the most important research-based and Finnish curriculum featured learning goals.

More information: marianne@edugems.fi