Why I Do This Work

I was a quiet student. Enthusiastic about almost everything, but quiet. I loved learning and I loved science, but I had never quite figured out how to make my presence felt in a classroom. I sat in the back, absorbed everything, and kept my excitement mostly to myself. By the time I arrived at college, I still did not know what I wanted to do. That is, until I took General Chemistry.

My General Chemistry professor noticed me. Not because I raised my hand or spoke up, but because she was paying attention. She wrote a small note on my returned exam: she thought I should be a chemistry major. Then she sat down with me and helped me map out four years of coursework and think through what a career in chemistry could look like. That conversation changed everything.

What she gave me was not just information. She gave me permission: permission to belong in chemistry, permission to be the kind of scientist I actually was. Before that moment, I had always felt like an outsider in the classroom, someone listening in and absorbing knowledge rather than contributing to it. I thought my enthusiasm made me less credible, that there was some correct, serious way to be a scientist, and I did not quite fit the mold. She showed me there is no one way to be a chemist.

That experience is the reason I teach the way I do. Every student who walks into my Organic Chemistry course carries a version of that same worry, that chemistry is not for someone like them, that their particular way of being curious or asking questions or moving through the world does not belong in a science classroom. My job is to make sure they never leave my class still believing that. They contribute something irreplaceable every single day, and I want them to know it.

There is no one way to be a chemist. Every student who walks through my door has a unique identity, a unique way of seeing the world, and chemistry is richer for it. My goal is to make sure they believe that about themselves before the quarter ends.

The Problem I Am Trying to Solve

Organic Chemistry has a reputation. Students call it the weed-out course, the GPA-killer, the class that decides whether you get into medical school or have to rethink everything. That reputation is not entirely unearned. The course is genuinely challenging, but the mythology around it does something harmful: it tells students the difficulty is about them rather than about the design of how the course is taught.

What I have seen, year after year, is not students who lack ability. It is students who lack a sense of themselves as capable chemistry learners. They can read the textbook. They can sit through lecture. But they do not believe that their reasoning counts, that their questions are worth asking, or that the discipline has anything to do with their actual lives. That disconnection, between the content and the student's sense of self, is where learning collapses.

Albert Bandura's social cognitive theory frames this precisely. Self-efficacy, a person's belief in their own capacity to execute the behaviors necessary to produce a specific outcome, is one of the strongest predictors of academic persistence and achievement (Bandura, 1997). In chemistry education, students with low chemistry self-efficacy disengage before they even encounter hard concepts. They preemptively decide they cannot do it. My teaching is designed, at every level, to interrupt that process.

Bandura identifies four sources of self-efficacy:

• mastery experiences,
• vicarious experiences,
• verbal and social persuasion, and
• physiological states.

All four are present and intentional in my classroom. I design assignments so that students experience early success. I structure group work so they see their peers, people just like them, reason through hard problems in our community setting. I give specific, honest, encouraging feedback that communicates belief in their capacity. And I build a classroom culture that lowers the physiological stakes of being wrong and uplifts the idea of taking chances and making mistakes all for the sake of learning.

Feedback shows that struggling students have finally been able to grasp Organic Chemistry fundamentals. That outcome does not happen by accident. It happens when students believe, at a cellular level, that they are capable of understanding chemistry, and when the course is designed to keep building that belief, one scaffolded assignment at a time.

Structure That Creates Freedom: The Big Ideas Framework

The first thing I do to foster agency is make the course approachable. Students cannot take ownership of their learning if they do not know where they are, where they are going, or what counts as success. Organic Chemistry is famously perceived as a sea of disconnected facts, reaction mechanisms to memorize, functional groups to catalog, rules that seem arbitrary. My course is organized to dismantle that perception.

Chemistry 351 is built around five Big Ideas (these were already established by colleagues in the department when I began teaching at Western). They are conceptual anchors that reveal the underlying logic of the discipline rather than presenting it as a collection of things to memorize. Each Big Idea represents a genuine principle of chemical reasoning, how molecules communicate structure, how electron delocalization shapes reactivity, how three-dimensional arrangement determines function, how thermodynamics governs stability, and how reaction rates determine products. Every topic we cover, every assignment, every exam question exists in service of one of these five ideas.

Within each Big Idea, students work toward specific Learning Targets accompanied by clearly articulated Success Criteria: concrete, observable descriptions of what mastery looks like. Students know, before they are assessed, exactly what they are being asked to demonstrate. This transparency is not just a logistical convenience, it is a structural equity intervention.

First-generation college students, students balancing jobs and caregiving, students who have been told in subtle and unsubtle ways that science is not for them, these students often spend enormous cognitive energy trying to figure out what is expected of them rather than actually learning. Clear structure reduces that burden. It communicates: you are not being tested on your ability to decode what I want. You are being tested on chemistry. That shift matters enormously.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) research supports this approach. The UDL framework, developed through the work of CAST, asks educators to provide multiple means of representation, action and expression, and engagement (Meyer, Rose, & Gordon, 2014). Transparent learning goals are a foundational UDL strategy precisely because they reduce unnecessary cognitive and emotional barriers and allow students to direct their energy toward the learning itself.

A Flipped, Active Learning Model

If students are going to develop genuine agency in chemistry, the capacity to reason independently about molecular problems, not just reproduce procedures they have memorized, then class time needs to be where that reasoning happens–not where I present information at them.

I use a partially flipped structure. Students engage with core content before class through short recorded pre-lecture videos with embedded questions. These videos are available on Canvas and can be paused, rewound, and returned to as many times as a student needs. There are no penalties for wrong answers on the embedded questions, but completing them before class is expected. Students also get multiple tries so they can figure out the correct answer and bring any questions they have into the classroom to ask and share with our learning community. This model gives every student, regardless of how quickly they process new information, equal access to the foundational content before we work with it together.

Class time is then reserved for the activities where student agency matters most: working through problems collaboratively, asking questions in real time, making and correcting errors in front of peers, and practicing the mechanistic reasoning that is the actual language of organic chemistry. Students use molecular model kits, work at whiteboards, complete structured participation worksheets, and engage in small-group problem solving. These multimodal strategies support spatial reasoning, critical in a discipline built on three-dimensional molecular geometry, and reduce the cognitive overload that prevents students from accessing the underlying chemical logic.

The syllabus also communicates something important in how it talks about class participation: It says, “Learning is a social endeavor.” This is not throw-away language. It reflects a genuine theoretical commitment. Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of learning holds that cognitive development occurs through social interaction, that we learn first in collaboration with others, and only later internalize that understanding individually (Vygotsky, 1978). My classroom is structured accordingly. Students work through problems together before they work through them alone. The social dimension of learning is not a supplement to the chemistry; it is how the chemistry gets learned.

Weekly Metacognitive Check-Ins: Building the Habit of Self-Awareness

One of the quieter but most consequential features of my course is the weekly metacognitive check-in embedded in each lecture participation activity. Alongside uploading one of their completed in-class worksheets from the week, students reflect on what they currently understand, what still confuses them, and how they plan to study before the next exam.

This is not busy work. It is a deliberate pedagogical intervention grounded in research on self-regulated learning. Students who develop the capacity to accurately monitor their own understanding, who can distinguish between “I can follow this when someone explains it” and “I can actually do this independently,” are far more likely to seek help at the right moments, study more efficiently, and persist through difficulty (Zimmerman, 2002).

In Organic Chemistry, the illusion of understanding is a particular hazard. Students can watch a reaction mechanism worked out on the board and feel like they understand it. They may not yet, however. The metacognitive check-in creates a structured pause in which students have to articulate, in their own words, what they actually know. It builds the habit of honest self-assessment, and it gives me real-time information about where the class is struggling, so I can adjust instruction before the next exam rather than after.

This also connects to Bandura’s physiological and emotional encouragement as a source of self-efficacy. Students in Organic Chemistry often experience significant anxiety, which they misread as evidence that they cannot do the work. The weekly check-in normalizes confusion as a stage in learning, not an endpoint. It creates a low-stakes channel through which students can acknowledge struggle without it feeling like failure.

Problem-Based Learning: Chemistry That Belongs to Students

The centerpiece of my approach to fostering agency is a series of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) assignments built around a single real-world topic that serves as the through-line for the entire quarter. Four assignments, one due before each exam, scaffold progressively through the course’s five Big Ideas, returning each time to the same molecules and the same real-world context but asking harder questions.

The research basis for this approach is well established. Problem-based learning produces stronger long-term conceptual retention than traditional instruction, develops transferable reasoning skills, and increases student motivation and engagement, particularly for students from underrepresented groups in STEM (Prince, 2013; Hmelo-Silver, 2004). But the mechanism matters: PBL works when students encounter problems that are genuinely meaningful to them, when the chemistry is not abstract but is clearly about something they care about or recognize from their own lives.

A Topic That Changes Every Quarter

One of the most deliberate features of my PBL design is that the topic changes every quarter based on the interests of the students in that particular class. At the start of each term, I survey students about their majors, career goals, and areas of curiosity. That information shapes which real-world context I build the entire PBL series around.

Topics I have used include:

• Capsaicin and food science: Why does spicy food burn? Why does milk help? How does a single molecule activate a heat receptor in your mouth? Students analyze the structure of capsaicinoids and dairy components, investigate how hydrogen bonding and intermolecular forces drive capsaicin’s binding to the TRPV1 receptor, apply amino acid acid-base chemistry to understand how pH affects receptor affinity, and work through the synthesis of capsaicin derivatives with higher analgesic potency, connecting their kitchen instincts to mechanistic organic chemistry.
• PFAS and environmental justice: Why are “forever chemicals” everywhere? Why can’t we get rid of them? Students analyze the hybridization and polarity of PFAS structures, explain their environmental mobility using intermolecular forces, compare C–F bond stability to nucleophilic attack resistance using thermodynamic and kinetic reasoning, and evaluate real degradation strategies including a bacterial enzyme that cleaves C–F bonds via an SN2 mechanism. Each unit also includes a question about the disproportionate impact of PFAS contamination on Indigenous communities and low-income neighborhoods, connecting the chemistry directly to environmental justice.
• Pain medications and drug design: How does ibuprofen work? Why is fentanyl so addictive? Students classify NSAIDs, SSRIs, steroids, and opioids by structural features, assign stereochemistry across drug classes and reason about why enantiomers produce different biological effects, investigate opioid protonation and the cutting-edge research on selective activation in injured tissue as a path to reducing addiction potential, and work through aspirin’s mechanism of action and the SN2 electrophile site in fluoxetine.

This rotating topic approach does something important beyond motivation. It communicates to students that their interests and identities have a legitimate place in the science classroom, that organic chemistry is not a fixed, impersonal canon to be transmitted, but a lens that can be turned toward anything they find meaningful. The act of redesigning the series each quarter is itself a form of fostering agency: it demonstrates that the course belongs to them, not just to me.

How the Scaffold Works

Every PBL series follows the same internal architecture regardless of topic:

• Unit 1 (Big Idea 1+2): Students build a structural vocabulary for the molecules in their topic, analyzing hybridization, geometry, polarity, and bonding. This is the entry point: students at every level of preparation can identify structural features and label atoms, giving everyone a meaningful way into the assignment before the reasoning demands escalate.
• Unit 2 (Big Idea 3): Students examine 3D shape, stereochemistry, conformational analysis, and intermolecular forces. The questions here require synthesis of the structural vocabulary from Unit 1 and apply it to molecular behavior, how shape governs biological activity, how chirality determines drug efficacy, how intermolecular forces explain environmental mobility.
• Unit 3 (Big Idea 4): Students engage with acid-base chemistry, pKa, thermodynamics, and reactivity. This is where the real chemical reasoning deepens: students must apply ARIO analysis, compare equilibria, evaluate bond strengths, and connect thermodynamic and kinetic arguments to the behavior of real molecules in biological or environmental systems.
• Unit 4 (Big Idea 5): Students apply the full arc of the course, structure, bonding, stereochemistry, reactivity, to substitution and elimination mechanisms in their topic molecules, often working with reaction schemes drawn from the primary research literature. This final unit is the capstone: students synthesize everything they have learned across the quarter in a single integrated problem set.

Within each unit, questions move from concrete and representational (e.g., draw a Lewis structure, label hybridization) to analytical (e.g., compare pKa values, explain orbital overlap) to evaluative and generative (e.g., design a less persistent molecule, propose a degradation mechanism, evaluate a greenwashing claim). This progression is the scaffolding: it ensures that students with different levels of preparation can enter the assignment meaningfully, while all students are pushed toward higher-order reasoning by its end.

Students work in collaborative groups of up to three. This is not incidental. Collaborative problem-solving is both a source of vicarious efficacy, watching a peer reason through a problem successfully raises a student’s belief that they can do the same, and a form of verbal persuasion, as group members provide each other with real-time encouragement and feedback (Bandura, 1997). The social structure of the PBL is, in itself, an efficacy-building intervention.

Social and Ethical Dimensions

Each PBL series also includes questions that ask students to consider who is affected by the chemistry they are studying, who bears the costs of chemical decisions, what responsibilities scientists carry, and how chemistry education equips citizens to evaluate health and safety claims. In the PFAS series, this means examining the disproportionate contamination burden on Indigenous communities and asking what chemists owe those communities. In the pain medication series, it means engaging with the corporate decisions that produced the opioid crisis.

These questions are not enrichment. They are integral to how I position chemistry as a discipline with human stakes. Chemistry is not value-neutral. The molecules we make, the reactions we design, the policies we advocate for or ignore, all of these have consequences for real people, often people who had no say in the chemistry decisions that affected their lives. Students who understand this are not just better-informed citizens; they are more motivated chemistry learners, because they understand why it matters.

Chemistry is not a neutral discipline. The molecules we make have consequences. I want every student to leave my class understanding both the chemistry and the responsibility that comes with knowing it.

What Fostering Agency Actually Means

Agency, in my classroom, is not the same as student choice. Students do not choose whether to complete the PBL assignments or which Big Ideas they want to learn. Agency is something more fundamental: it is the experience of being a competent actor in one’s own learning, of approaching a difficult problem and believing, at some level, that you can figure it out.

Building that belief is slow, cumulative work. It requires the kind of structure that makes success possible for students who have never succeeded in a chemistry course before. It requires tasks that are genuinely connected to students’ lives and interests, so that motivation does not depend entirely on willpower. It requires a classroom culture in which being wrong is treated as evidence of thinking rather than evidence of inability. And it requires an instructor who communicates, consistently and specifically, that students’ reasoning matters, that their voices are not just tolerated but needed.

My general chemistry professor did all of these things for me with a note on an exam and an hour of her time. I have been trying to systematize that experience ever since, to design a course in which every student has access to the kind of encounter she gave me, regardless of how quiet they are, regardless of whether they look like anyone’s idea of a chemist, regardless of what their previous experiences in science have been.

I want to nurture students who genuinely grasp the chemistry, because they believed they could, because the course was designed to build and sustain that belief, and because they found, somewhere inside Organic Chemistry, something that was theirs. I want every student who leaves my classroom to believe there is no one way to be a chemist, and that their particular way of being curious, asking questions, and engaging with the world is exactly what chemistry needs.

References

• Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman.
• CAST. (2018). Universal design for learning guidelines version 2.2. http://udlguidelines.cast.org
• Hmelo-Silver, C. E. (2004). Problem-based learning: What and how do students learn? Educational Psychology Review, 16(3), 235–266. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:EDPR.0000034022.16470.f3
• Meyer, A., Rose, D. H., & Gordon, D. (2014). Universal design for learning: Theory and practice. CAST Professional Publishing.
• Prince, M. (2013). Does active learning work? A review of the research. Journal of Engineering Education, 93(3), 223–231. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2004.tb00809.x
• Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.
• Zimmerman, B. J. (2002). Becoming a self-regulated learner: An overview. Theory Into Practice, 41(2), 64–70. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_2