On February 27th and 28th, 12 teachers from all across Victoria started as the first cohort in the Deakin Chemistry Education Professional Learning (DeCEPL) program, proudly supported by the Chemistry Education Association.
After an extensive expression of interest process and lengthy communication with schools, our DeCEPL program in 2020 was finally underway, with a full two-day program at Deakin Downtown, Melbourne. The teachers were given an excellent overview by Madeleine Schultz of the status of Chemistry Education Research (CER) in the last few decades, and how it has influenced where CER is heading today. Along with Lisa Chiavaroli, Seamus and Madeleine then gave an overview of ‘hot topics’ of CER for the teachers to consider for their own group research projects.
But the majority of the two days was provided to the teachers to form groups around shared topics of interest, and to brainstorm and workshop activities and evaluation processes, supported by the ESC staff. After Day 1 there were plenty of sore heads, but it was fantastic to see by the end of Day 2 each group’s plans start to solidify and they were able to head back to their schools with a firm direction on what they will be doing next.
‘Day 3’ will be in May, but before then we will meet with each of the three small teacher groups to support them in bringing their research up to the implementation phase!
We won’t put all of the seminar resources from the two days here, but we will share the introductory slides, to give some indication of what the program involves (and the DeCEPL program will run again for teachers in 2021).