Initial Publication Date: January 8, 2020

The POGIL Project

About

Who is this program for?

The POGIL Project provides professional development for instructors and faculty members at the secondary and college level. POGIL (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning) pedagogy is applicable to all STEM disciplines in classes of any size.

The mission of The POGIL Project is to improve teaching and learning by fostering an inclusive, transformative community of reflective educators who design, implement, assess, and study learner-centered environments. We envision an educational system that prepares every learner to enrich the world by thinking critically, solving problems, working effectively with others, and experiencing the joy of discovery.

Because POGIL is a student-centered instructional approach, in a typical POGIL classroom or laboratory, students work in small teams with the instructor acting as a facilitator. The student teams use specially designed activities that generally follow a learning cycle paradigm of exploration, concept invention, and application. The POGIL approach has two broad aims: to develop content mastery through student construction of their own understanding, and to develop and improve important learning skills such as information processing, communication, critical thinking, problem solving and metacognition and assessment.

What is our approach?

The POGIL Project offers an array of professional development opportunities to support instructors at all levels in developing and implementing guided inquiry instructional practices. These opportunities include:

Half-day and full-day workshops that introduce POGIL pedagogy and implementation.
Three-day summer workshops that provide a more in-depth exposure to POGIL. These events include separate tracks focusing on classroom facilitation, activity authoring, or POGIL laboratory experiences.
Writers' Retreat. This four-day event provides an opportunity for activity authors to spend extended time on their writing in a scaffolded, cooperative environment.
National Conference to Advance POGIL Practice. This biennial three-day event brings together secondary and post-secondary instructors from all disciplines to share experiences and learn from each other through a variety of workshops, presentations, and other interactive sessions.

Example situations:

A STEM department desires to incorporate more active learning approaches directly into their courses - both large introductory courses and smaller upper level courses.
A chemistry department wants to restructure recitation sections for a large enrollment course to involve team-learning approaches and train graduate students to implement this approach.
An institution wants to decrease achievement gaps in introductory courses across several STEM departments.

More about POGIL and The POGIL Project:

The POGIL Project is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that brings together like-minded educators who wish to effect change within education. It works to disseminate its unique pedagogy, POGIL, at the secondary and college levels through professional development workshops as well as the production and dissemination of curricular materials.