Chemistry Solutions

Figure 1. A page from the author's plan book from early in her career with highlights showing notes she wrote to herself for future years.

I’ve always enjoyed professional development (PD). Okay, maybe not all professional development — but I’m thinking specifically of the sessions and workshops that really stretched my teaching practice, made me reflect on my strengths and challenges, and made me excited to get back into my classroom the next day, week, or month.

My favorite time of year for professional development is the summer. (Not everyone will agree!) In my experience, however, summer conferences like ChemEd and BCCE have always rejuvenated my passion for teaching, providing opportunities to connect with other practitioners, and helping me tune up my pedagogical skills.

In fact, these are the places where my most transformative ideas have originated. They’re also where I first developed a love for inquiry learning and became inspired to start on a journey of developing and using POGIL (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning) activities throughout my instruction. I enjoy taking a break from the physical school building during the summer, and I like being able to think and reflect on my practices while I’m not right in the middle of teaching.

Planning with notes

As one who has been around for a while, my habits are always evolving — but my general approach to both lesson planning and professional development has been consistent. Throughout any school year, I leave notes to myself in my lesson plan book about how I want to tweak or scrap certain lessons for the following year. Whenever it is time to start planning an upcoming unit, the previous year’s lesson plan book is the first resource I consult.

This is why, when attending professional development events, even during my earliest years, I’ve always shown up armed with a legal pad and pencil. I take abundant notes, annotating them with stars or margin notes whenever an idea strikes a chord with me regarding a particular lesson or unit. Sometimes, I have captured ideas that are so inspiring that I remember, at the appropriate time during the academic year, to look back at my notes and incorporate the ideas into my plans. More frequently, however, my note-packed legal pad would simply sit in a bag of conference expo “freebies” in the corner of my classroom, untouched. How many good ideas died in those tote bags — no one will ever know!

One summer, as I was packing for the ChemEd conference, it suddenly seemed logical to take my faithful old lesson plan book with me to the conference (see Figure 1). What a game-changer! I still used the legal pad to take notes during the sessions, but the lesson plan book stayed on my nightstand. Each night, I opened the plan book to look over the day’s notes and translate the ideas, while they were still freshly brewing in my mind, into the relevant sections of my most reliable planning tool, the previous year’s plan book.

The notes didn’t always make perfect sense to me when I later came across them, but I certainly implemented more of the ideas that year than ever before, when those notes had been resting securely in my freebie bag. I found that the simple act of transferring ideas from my temporary notepad to my more permanent lesson plan book later helped to nudge me to implement the new ideas that had so excited me when I first heard them — even while in the midst of a busy year.

Converting notes to reality

One example of a great idea that I’d saved in my plan book originated during a particularly memorable demo I attended. The presenter showed the changing colors of vanadium in different oxidation states and proposed it as a way to demonstrate successive ionization energies. That night, the idea went directly into the section of my plan book for my Periodic Trends unit. The following year, after developing and using the demo in my class, I was thrilled that I’d given myself that reminder.

During another summer, I attended a session about converting “cookbook” labs into inquiry labs. A lot of notes went in my plan book that night! I realized that about half of the labs I was using during a given year could be made so much better and more effective if I’d just incorporate some inquiry processes into them. So, I dug into the plan book and tagged certain labs that had come to mind during the session. This simple act began a several-years-long phase of transforming how I approach learning through the lab.

Though my general planning process has stayed the same, I have graduated, in recent years, to using Google Sheets (Figure 2) instead of a physical plan book. Since I can access Google on my phone or iPad, this more modern approach allows me to add notes to my plans right at the end of a PD session or workshop, rather than waiting to compile it all each night. I can just open last year’s planning file, find the part of the year where the new lesson would be used, and insert a note. I can also add links directly into the online spreadsheet for any websites or materials shared by presenters that will be useful for my later planning. Moving to an electronic planner has also made it much easier to keep track of new simulations and certain ChemMatters articles that have caught my attention, as tracking these down from my paper notes used to be a big challenge!

Connect beyond your notes

You might use a lesson plan app, your school’s learning management system, or even a paper plan book. Maybe you consult a monthly calendar or organize file folders in a drawer by unit. You may like to attend summer or weekend PD workshops or prefer the PD activities organized by your school or district. Whichever PD format or venue you prefer, I encourage you to look for fast and easy ways to recall and implement the great ideas that have inspired you.

For me, the most effective solution is to leave reminders where I’ll see them in my normal course of planning. This way, when I’m in the thick of the school year, these notes bring the added bonus of reminding me that I am a member of a larger chemistry teacher community. Remembering how teachers support each other by sharing ideas and bonding over challenges can sometimes be the positive boost I need to make it through a tough week! We are not alone — and there are plenty of smart and creative teachers out there who are glad to help and share ideas.

In the November issue of Chemistry Solutions, you’ll read about different ways that teachers have directed their own professional development, and learn about tips and resources your colleagues want to share with you, including:

• Learn from one teacher who has incorporated ideas from her own professional development experiences to provide several strategies for including metacognition throughout her classroom structures. You can use her easy-to-implement techniques or be inspired to create your own strategies to help students to become more self-aware about their learning habits.
• Hear about a teacher’s intentional process of blending professional development with networking to build different types of collaborations. Think about your own collaborative practices and consider how you might grow as a collaborator or increase the variety of your collaborations.
• Take inspiration from an education researcher who encourages high school teachers to stretch themselves by finding a professional conference where they can present their ideas to peers. Follow her journey of attending her first conference, from getting past the initial fear of rejection to feeling pride in her experience of presenting a poster and short talk at the most recent ACS Spring Conference.
• Add some fun into your students’ day by giving them a “secret message” puzzle for a quick review of periodic table terms, or by challenging them to compete against the computer in the interactive guessing game about the elements titled, Guess What: Periodic Table.
• Try out the lab from the 2022 article, titled Safely Introducing Students to the Chemistry Lab by Modifying a Classic Investigation and read the article for an important discussion about maximizing the “WOW” of chemistry while minimizing the risk to students and teachers.
• It may seem a long time ago (especially in Google-years), but a 2017 Tech Tips article, Using Google Forms for Remediation, contains great ideas for using tech that is still relevant today. Inspired by a book she read, this teacher used a “lab report” to summarize how she tested the effects of implementing Google Forms remediation opportunities in her classes.

Ironically, good professional development can often give you too many ideas to implement in a single year. I will admit, there have been times when I would find one of my lesson notes but didn’t have the time or energy to pull it off. In such cases, I might decide that I’d use it next year or replace it with a different idea. Or maybe I’d even decide that it wasn’t as good an idea as I originally thought. All of these reactions are OK. My main recommendation is this: Don’t let those great ideas sit idly in a bag, slip from your mind, or get lost in the shuffle of a busy school year. Consider using my method or developing one of your own. But whichever approach you use, try to give yourself the chance to intentionally decide which ideas you will turn into reality.

I hope that one of these articles may remind you of an idea that you meant to try out, but somehow never got around to. Maybe right now is a good time to look back on your recent PD experiences to recover those ideas and make sure they will come to your attention at the right time of year for you to use them! Happy planning!



Laura Trout
DivCHED Representative
2025–2026