Welcome to season two of the POGLE podcast. I'm Matt Tarka, producer of the POGLE podcast for the POGLE Project. POGLE stands for Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning, a student-centered approach that guides students in constructing their own understanding of content and helps them develop important skills such as teamwork, communication, critical thinking, and problem solving.
The POGLE podcast is an ongoing conversation from the POGLE Project that celebrates innovative educators both in and out of the classroom. This podcast episode celebrates the inaugural 2022 POGLE Impact Award, which is bestowed on individuals or teams of individuals who have achieved extraordinary outcomes related to the POGLE Project's strategic plan.
The award celebrates sustained impact and or innovation achieved by a member or members of the POGLE community and highlights a strong footprint in both the project and the POGLE community. Today, co-host Alex Grouchault, who is a professor of chemistry at Rider University and chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, interviews Laura Trout, who has been selected as the first recipient of the Impact Award.
Laura Trout has a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Central Washington University and a Master of Science in chemistry from the University of Washington. She has been teaching for 25 years in both public and private schools in Washington State and Pennsylvania. Laura has been using POGLE activities in her classes since 2000.
She became involved with the POGLE Project in 2004 and has been writing and implementing guided inquiry activities, facilitating POGLE workshops, and serving the POGLE community ever since. She served as the editor-in-chief of the High School POGLE Initiative, which produced four POGLE activity books for high school – biology, chemistry, AP biology, and AP chemistry. She has also helped to produce a lab manual for AP chemistry for PASCO scientific, which utilizes POGLE techniques.
She was a member of the POGLE Project's steering committee for two terms. Recently, Laura has taken a position with the project as materials coordinator and continues to teach part-time at Lancaster Country Day School in Pennsylvania. In 2021, she earned the 2021 Div-Ked Award for excellence in high school teaching for the Middle Atlantic Regional Meeting. Alex and Laura, thank you very much for being here today. And Alex, I will now pass the baton over to you.
So today on the POGLE podcast, we're going to meet our winner of the POGLE Impact Award. The POGLE Impact Award is bestowed on an individual or team of individuals who have achieved extraordinary outcomes related to the POGLE Project's strategic plan. The award celebrates sustained impact and or innovation achieved by the member or members of the POGLE community and highlights a strong footprint in both the project and the POGLE community.
So I have the pleasure today of speaking with Laura Trout, who's the winner of the inaugural POGLE Impact Award. Laura has been teaching chemistry at various high school levels and has been a STEM coordinator for her institution, Lancaster Country Day School, which is a private school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. For the POGLE Project, she's best known as the leader of the development team for the high school materials that were published by Flynn Scientific.
She's also served two terms on the steering committee and also serves as the workshop materials coordinator. Laura, welcome to the POGLE podcast. Hi, Alex. Thanks for having me. Oh, it's a pleasure to talk to you. So, you know, as I think about the description of the POGLE Impact Award and then, you know, just a couple of the accomplishments that I mentioned, it is clear that your work for the project has had a significant impact on the community.
In fact, a couple of people who nominated you for this award said that the use of POGLE at the high school level wouldn't be where it is today without your drive and encouragement. So I'd like to start there. You know, when you started with POGLE, there wasn't much happening at the high school level. Can you tell us a little bit about the landscape when you went to your first POGLE workshop and how did, you know, how did that guide you in your work with POGLE?
Sure. Yeah, that's a good place to start. So, first of all, I'd just like to say thank you to the steering committee for giving me this award and it's very much an honor. And I'm very proud of the work that I've done. So it was great to be acknowledged with that. So I was introduced to POGLE at a biennial conference on chemical education in 2000. It was in Michigan. And at that time, there were not a whole lot of high school teachers even going to BCCs.
So it was kind of difficult as a high school teacher to find sessions to go to. But I saw this session about inquiry. And I thought, okay, it's a three hour session that'll fill up my morning that sounds good. And it was my first introduction to POGLE. It was my first POGLE workshop. So what eventually what got me there, I'm going to back up a little bit. What got me there was a Dow Chemical teacher workshop.
It was a summer workshop for two weeks at Dow Chemical. And I was introduced to inquiry at that workshop. One of the assignments that we had to get paid for all of our travel and everything was we had to create an inquiry lesson plan. So at the time, inquiry was sort of the education buzzword for high school teachers. And, you know, there were probably a lot of people doing it, but not enough. Most of science was lecture based. Labs were mostly verification labs or cookbook labs.
But things were starting to change. And that's, as you said, like the landscape at the time was that. I don't know if it was because I was a new teacher or if that truly was the landscape in the nation at that point. But I specifically went to BCCE thinking I want to expand my repertoire of inquiry. And when I sat down in the Poggle workshop and did the the nuclear atom activity, it was like, oh, my gosh, I can do inquiry in my classroom as well as in my lab periods.
So that's what got me really excited. Yeah. You know, it's funny. I remember that BCCE and I remember. I mean, it wasn't even called Poggle at that point, right? They were part of the new traditions. So you were really you were indoctrinated very early on in this work. And as you said, you started out, you know, there wasn't much activity in the high school realm.
You know, and all these like the nuclear atom was, you know, that was developed to be taught in, you know, a freshman chemistry college course. So and in terms of sorry to interrupt in terms of chemistry, in terms of chemistry, there wasn't a lot of inquiry going on, like in the physics area, they had modeling from Arizona State. But they hadn't they hadn't developed their chemistry modeling curriculum yet at that point.
So I had a physics colleague that was really encouraging me in my quest for inquiry for chemistry because she was doing modeling. And so that was sort of, you know, that was also a driver, a driver for me. So, right. So so the there's the story among the Poggle community that initially Rick Moog, who's the executive director of the project, was really not quite sure that Poggle was going to work at the high school level. At the high school level. And yeah, you, you saw differently.
So what, so what was it about this, this thing that you got introduced to it at Michigan that said, okay, I can do this at the high school level I mean you sort of said that initially from your first workshop, but tell us a little bit about what what spoke to you. Yeah, I think, um, I guess I'm, I'm a little bit competitive and I'm proud. And so when Rick told me that he didn't think high school students should could do it, I really just lit a fire under me.
And probably, it was probably so impactful because I had that attitude when I started teaching. I was a skeptic of inquiry, and it was the Dow Chemical workshop that really changed my mind and and being forced to try an inquiry lab in my classroom. And I, I just couldn't believe what my students were doing. I mean the students are so creative, and they're so resilient and being able to work through their frustration when they're working on something with inquiry and I loved seeing that spark.
And when I first did that inquiry lab in my classroom from Dow Chemical. I mean, you don't know what you're talking about. I mean, that's basically like, I've seen this happen, and whatever needs to be done to make it happen in a high school is what I'm going to do, like, obviously, maybe the activities we're going to need to be
modified or a little more hand holding or something, but I just knew that I wanted my high school students to get that same feeling that little squirt of dopamine that they get when they learn something on their own, that I was seeing in lab, but I wanted to do it in my in my like lecture time as well. Yeah, so, like, as we've said when you started out there wasn't anything really for high school teachers who was all college level.
So did you like start right out and say okay I'm going to write my own stuff or were you just trying to rework the college material to work in your high school setting. I, I promptly went to the exhibit hall and bought the Moog and Farrell book. And I do what all good teachers do and I plagiarized quite a bit so I did rewrite all of, I did rewrite the activities that I started with.
Because just looking at the activities, I knew there were just the scaffolding wasn't there that my kids were going to need as sophomores in high school. So I took, you know, basically the learning cycle of Rick's and and John's activities and I added more questions to the learning that helped scaffold for the kids at the high school level what they were going to do but quickly I realized, just with this new found inquiry perspective that I was exploring as a teacher.
And I found that I was teaching that way in lecture, like, I had five sections of honors chem that year and it was so repetitive and boring, but, but it was actually a really good place for me to start exploring this because by the fourth or fifth class of the day.
I'm asking the same questions over and over again why can't I just put this on a piece of paper and make it a Poggle activity. Right. So, I mean, did you find, I mean I know that, you know, from talking with high school teachers who use Poggle, it's not something that they do every day in the classroom, or for many of them it's like they'll do a little bit of introductory or some scaffolding and then, you know, I mean was this something that you were doing like on a regular basis daily or.
No, I, I left the conference, the BCC conference with a goal that I would write five Poggles that year. I knew that it was going to take some time. And even even just modifying the moog and feral materials took a lot of time, and what was really great at the, in the situation that I was in that year with five sections of honors chemistry, we were also on a block schedule. So, on one day, I would have.
I write an activity, and I would try it with my first class, and then I had a prep period that I could rewrite the whole thing. And then, then I could try it with my second class. And then I was done for the day, so I read write it again that night, and then I would try it two more times with the next class before lunch, which I would rewrite it, and then I would do it with my fifth class.
So, I got four years worth of rewrites done in a year to sort of, I won't say and they were nowhere near perfection. Right, but, you know, a college professor or somebody who only teaches one section of a class that might take them five years to get the activity to where I got it in one year, because I did so many rewrites right but it was exhausting. I was just going to say, it sounds efficient but also quite exhausting.
But five times that year was enough. Yeah, I would say two or three times would have been just fine. So, yeah. Wow. So I mean did the kids who are in your first block ever feel like they were the guinea pigs.
Um, I think, I think actually all the kids sort of felt like they were guinea pigs because this was a, this was very unheard of at the time, like this was not how education went and so they, they thought this was really strange anyway and yeah, there were a lot of times when I had to just in that especially in that first block, when I had to just say you know what this question really should say is right, blah blah blah blah.
I refer to that as facilitating through the pitfalls of the activity. So, exactly. Right. But so, you know, and of course, I mean a lot of people are familiar with this sort of, you know grew into the hispy project, which you then you know we got together. And we have materials now for high school in chemistry. It's what else is biology chemistry, AP chemistry biology and AP biology. Okay.
And so, so that grew out of a of a Pogal spur grant. Right. Yes. Right. Yeah, that's, that's what I was reading about. And so, you know, so now you know we have all these high school materials and everybody knows that Laura trout is the high school materials guru. A lot of people with a lot of people standing behind me. Yes.
And there, there are so many other fun stories that we're just not going to tell over this short podcast about how that grew up. Yeah, but I want to sort of change directions here because you know part of the nature of the Pogal impact award is that the winner of this award should have a strong footprint on the Pogal community. And, you know, and you've done more than just do the high school activity development group.
You've been the curator of the materials that we use in the Pogal workshops, and a member of the steering committee for the project. So, you know, it's doesn't sound like you had a whole lot of free time. So what motivated you to take on these other roles, among other project. Yeah, I would say. Well, there's a couple things. First of all, Rick is really good at encouraging people to step out of their comfort zone. So, I agree to that. Yes.
So, his, his confidence in me when I didn't have confidence in myself helped get me more involved in the project. And, you know, just his encouragement for me to be on the steering committee or write more things or, you know, develop some workshops and that sort of thing. And, and the leadership role that I took in the hispy project when we wrote the high school materials that you know I was really learning leadership at that point, and a lot of that came from Rick.
The other thing is, honestly, it came comes from my dad. And, you know those key moments in your life that you keep going back to and you just, they were a pivotal moment, and I had a conversation with my parents in the kitchen. I was probably a junior in college, or maybe a sophomore in college. And we were talking about me declaring my major which I had known since I was in the second grade that I was going to be a teacher, I just knew that that's what I wanted to do.
But when it came down to actually declaring my major. My dad said to me, Why do you just want to be a teacher, I don't understand it. You're so good at chemistry, you're so talented, you can do so many other things why just be a teacher. And I looked at him and I said, I'm not just going to be a teacher. I'm going to help other teachers be really great teachers. Hmm. And he said, Okay.
And he's never questioned me being a teacher. Since that conversation. And I feel like I didn't purposely get there, but somehow I managed to get there. And you sort of, you fell in with the right crowd to do exactly that. Yes. And I think it was something that has always been in the back of my mind, but whole goal was the, the Pogel community was the perfect vehicle for me to reach that goal. Yeah, I mean, that sounds. Boy, that sounds very compelling.
Yeah. So, you know, and a big part of the Pogel project is developing this community practitioners, and you know you've been a strong proponent of this and now I think we understand a little bit more of your motivations but, you know, you show up as I was thinking about this, you know I see you everywhere, you know you're at PNM.
You're at NCAP, you know I could be visiting the Pogel office and oh, there's Laura Trout I mean I know you live nearby. I happen to make my way into Lancaster and I'm leaving one day and there's Laura Trout coming right back in, you know, and I mean a lot of people seem to know who you are from all these meetings so I mean what keeps you coming back. Yeah. I. It's ego really no I'm just
no it's, it's because I get as much from it as other people do. So, you know, it's, it's not just, you know, the little recognitions of what I've done which is nice but also I've made so many great friends that honestly, as you know one or two chemistry teachers in a building. I really need those people outside of my school building to support me and encourage me and just be there to listen. I mean throughout this coven landscape. I guess.
I've been working with a lot of high school teachers to to create second editions of the high school materials. And it honestly, I think it has allowed us to survive this last two years. Just psychologically and emotionally. It's therapy, it's the, it's the therapy that every single teacher needs. And, yeah, so I think just mentally emotionally.
This has been a really tough year for two years for high school teachers and the sessions that we've had for writing those new activities, they always start off with like 30 minutes of just therapy. Right there therapy sessions for us, and everybody from all over the country is going through the same thing, you know I've got teachers in Idaho and Seattle and Oklahoma and, you know, Chicago and it's a common experiences that we have.
Yeah, and I think, you know, one of the things I completely agree with you because, you know, one of the things that I find is that even though I can talk with my colleagues here at my institution, the POGO community is just so much broader. And you sort of realize that issues that are going on at my institution are not just my institution it's like, it's everywhere, you know, right, be covered or, you know, whatever, whatever other thing is going along in education. So, yeah.
The other thing about being at, you know, a lot of these events is in order to do my job well at the POGO project, I need to sort of have my finger on the pulse of what's happening in the POGO community, so that I can develop the next workshop or develop the next tool or write the activities that need to be written or, you know, just encourage people, you know when things get started.
So, I think that also motivates me to keep going to the meetings is that if I lose touch with what's happening each year in the POGO community then I won't be able to do my job. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Laura trout. It's been a real pleasure talking with you, and I want to congratulate you on your well deserved POGO impact award. Thank you.
Thanks to all of you for listening to today's conversation on the POGO podcast. For those who will be attending POGO national meeting in June, Laura trout will be officially recognized as the winner of the POGO projects inaugural impact award, and the project will
stream the award ceremony. Please be on the lookout for more details at POGO.org for additional details on how you can engage with the POGO project or its working groups, contact associate director, Marcy Dubroff at Marcy Dubroff at POGO.org. That's marcy.dubroff.org.
The POGO project is a 501 c three nonprofit organization. If you would like to make a donation so we can keep providing podcasts, low cost workshops and classroom materials, please visit www.pogle.org backslash donate intro and outro music of our podcast is produced by POGO practitioner, Wayne Pearson, please stay tuned for future podcasts from the POGO project. Until next time, enjoy your week.