Conference Report: The 2026 POGIL Practitioner Collaborative

At the end of June, I attended and presented at the 2026 POGIL Practitioner Conference, and learned a lot: new things to try, aspects of POGIL I want to lean into and explore, and about bandwidth, what it is and how to protect it in myself and my students. This post will go over a few of these things, give me a chance to process my notes, and to record and share a few things I want to try. 

For the uninitiated, the original 2003 National Science Foundation Grant (NSF Grant # 231120) abstract mentions "Constructivist and learning cycle principles are combined with an emphasis on essential learning processes and student-student interactions to create a new educational model called Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL)." The grant also describes faculty development, trainings, and other professional development opportunities for educators and others. A POGIL activity consists of a model for students to explore, answer probing questions about, and then apply these ideas to other questions. Students work in groups, usually with a role assigned, such as Manager, Presenter, Recorder, and Reflector. The process of learning through skills like Oral Communication, Critical Thinking, Teamwork, Problem Solving, and others are discussed within activities, through facilitation, and in other assignments and activities.

Since this initial grant the POGIL Project has grown, and this year the inaugural POGIL Practitioner Collaborative was held June 29th through the 30th and an optional workshop on July 1st. It was fully virtual with participants from the US, Canada, and South Africa. The topics ranged from utilizing process skills in different ways, to using AI effectively. The idea of cognitive bandwidth was introduced to many of us by Cia Verschelden in her plenary What is Bandwidth and Where Did It Go?, and further discussed during the half-day work on Wednesday morning. (I'll discuss what I took away from Cia's sessions in a separate post.) The types of sessions also varied from Dynamic Dialogues where facilitators in different breakout rooms held honest conversations about challenging topics, Flash Forums where presenters had around 5 minutes to present on an idea and take questions, and Inspiration and Ideas sessions where presenters could transfer in between breakout rooms where presenters shared an idea and collected feedback. My session Student Reflection Using Process Skills was an Inspiration and Ideas session, and I'll share more on that in a later post. 

The initial set of icebreakers were the best kind of POGIL professional development; presenting issues faculty have to resolve, and participants sharing out ideas and things they do to address them. One idea I know about but better understood its benefits from this conversation was having students report out on the board. The idea being that if a group has an answer you want others to see, have that group's Presenter write it out on the board. For that group it gives them a chance to get feedback from their peers, and helps to correct that answer if needed. For the Presenter it gives them the chance to write out their work on a whiteboard (a skill on its own), they are sharing their group's answer so there is no personal risk they are taking, and can give them a sense of satisfaction that they are working with their group to answer these questions. For other groups it gives them a signal that others are on a specific question confirming if they are ahead or behind, gives them a student response to evaluate, and shows the direction another group took in answering a question.

Big Takeaway 1: Have fast groups present their answers on the board. 

Something else that was discussed were student groups that were slow at answering questions. Someone discussed how 'tightly' some groups will answer questions, that there is a concern that any answer being incorrect is somehow really, really bad. POGIL activities, using the learning cycle, usually start with questions that explore a model, and are generally things like "Circle all prime numbers." or "Write down the three items that are shaded in." They are meant to orient a student to the model, and are not meant to be challenging. I have certainly witnessed students getting very concerned that these questions seem too simple, and others in the session did as well.

Big Takeaway 2: Remind students that the first few questions are not that 'deep' and should not take too much time. 

There were quite a few smaller takeaways I'll share here in no particular order. Most are about facilitating group work, but others span the practice of being an active learning practitioner. 

• One way to organize groups is to consider who is an initiator, a person who will start conversations. Other participants discussed changing one of their roles to Initiator to make it someone's job to read and start answering a question. I'm not sure if I'm there, but it could be helpful if students generally aren't starting conversations. 
• Questions that ask students to connect new concepts to prior concepts can deepen student understanding. Questions that preview future ideas can slow down 'faster' groups.
• Project models up on the overhead. This can especially be helpful if there are multiple pages of questions and the model is only on the first. 
• Share with students what and how questions are Reported Out. To Report Out on a question means to ask some number of groups to share their answer. Usually this is done with questions that confirm understanding of the course material so far. 
• Collect a folder of praise. In teaching with active learning it is usual to have students resist this type of instruction. It asks a lot of students, while in a lecture classroom students can be passive. To balance negative feedback it can be helpful to collect positive feedback and revisit it when overwhelmed. 

I then attended Thinking POGIL Classrooms presented by Chris Oehrlein, Mathematics Department Chair at Oklahoma City Community College, and President-Elect of the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges (AMATYC), of which I am a member. The presentation was very effective at describing the Building Thinking Classrooms (BTC) framework, and describing its similarities and differences from POGIL. Through his facilitation, Chris had the group think about how we can use both methods to support student learning. He also shared his thoughts, which the group agreed with, that POGIL could be used for concept development, with BTC being used for applying concepts and computations. He also mentioned that POGIL Process Skills could be used concretely to help students in answering BTC questions to provide additional guidance.

I've been using POGIL for about 8 years, and BTC for about 3 years, and really appreciated this session. I liked Chris's framing that both frameworks could be used in collaboration, and not as either one or the other as I was thinking. There are some topics that students could learn with BTC on its own, but those are focused on computations. With bigger ideas, like in statistics, it is very difficult for students to 'come up with' ideas like sampling distributions, or the logic of hypothesis testing. I'm looking forward to finding opportunities where I can pivot POGIL applications questions into BTC. 

The second day started with Flash Forums, a series of 5-minute, 5-slide presentations that shared quite a few ideas; using the 3Cs from the KEEN Entrepreneurial Mindset to create POGIL learning cycles, using AI in Intro Stats, growth-focused grading practices, research on whether faculty can determine which students are 'engaged' just by looking at them (they can't!), an app for the ELIPSS rubrics for process skills, and measuring student self ratings of process skill use during class. These sessions were incredibly fast, and in reading my notes and the slides, I have a few takeaways. 

• Teaching students how to prompt AI for code for R or Python can support them in using coding in Introduction to Statistics. I struggle with asking students in Intro Stats to code, as there are no coding prerequisites or other indication that students will be asked to code in the course. It certainly is a useful skill, I recommend all students irrespective of major to learn how to do some code or markup, but the course is packed as it is. Maybe AI can mitigate some aspects of teaching coding, along with statistics?
• I need to read Grading for Growth by Clark and Talbert. While I've tried to do quite a bit of what is described (clearly defined standards, reattempt without penalty) I know I need to improve providing helpful feedback. I've tried to make marks indicate progress but failed pretty miserably at that. Hopefully this book will share other ways of going about it that I can use. 
• Looking at students isn't enough. You need to assess what they know. I kind of already knew this, but this confirms that I need to use exit tickets to assess understanding. 
• I need to utilize the ELIPSS standards. I have heard about these before, but lost track of them. 
• Consider having students reflect on process skills using written responses. In the drive for efficiency my exit tickets include Likert-Scale questions for process skills, and I probably need to change that to more open ended questions like "How do you know your group worked well together today?"
• I need to think more about AI use in my classes. I have a few ways I recommend students use AI, as a personal tutor, to explore topics they are struggling with, etc. However I haven't changed much of my core set of learning objectives, nor do I use it during class. I certainly have thoughts on what to do as to how it changes class work outside of class, and will be sharing those thoughts soon.

The three-person panel had a central question I am personally struggling with "What are the challenges and opportunities in teaching and learning?" The session title was "The Future of Teaching is Now" and the panelists had some deep and meaningful thoughts to share. Dr. Brian Gilbert is a chemistry professor at Linfield University, whom I met at a prior POGIL 3-day workshop. Dr. Jessi Hill is Director of the Morgan Teaching and Learning Center at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Shannon Wachowski is a K-12 Partnerships Manager with Lawrence Hall of Science, UC Berkeley, and was a facilitator at a different POGIL 3-day workshop I took years ago. Each had interesting perspectives and ideas to share, a few of which were;

• Our principles and values should drive our actions and reactions to technology and our students. We all know the specifics of what and how we teach are changing, and our core values of curiosity, student support and learning should drive how we structure the specifics of what students do. 
• High quality instruction and instructors are variables that will count for more as much of what we do online becomes automated. Centering the human will be valuable. 
• AI is a central challenge in the next five years, and the POGIL Process Skills may be a tool to shift the way we teach from content to process. Sure, students will still need to know specific concepts and computations, yet how they learn those topics can be supported through the process skills.
• One way to get involved and stay current on AI use is to join committees, workgroups, or other organizations in your area. It doesn't even need to be in your institution, K-12 school districts, local and municipal governments, and almost every other organization is thinking through how AI use will impact their operations. 
• K-12 science education has two elements I want to explore more; supporting educators not just with high quality materials but also high quality professional development, and in connecting data science and computing with STEM. Related to prior posts, I am thinking of putting some eggs in other baskets which includes offering professional development for grades 6-12 educators. 

A few points on the popularization of evidence-based approaches and how much farther active learning has to go to gain broad usage (not acceptance) were discussed by Brian and Rick Moog, the principal investigator of the initial POGIL grant. Within POGIL workshops and groups it can be very easy to believe everyone is doing active learning, however that isn't the case. I took these reflections as indication that there is still work POGIL practitioners have to do to share what we do, and how we support student learning. I hope that my writing here helps with that in some small way... At the least it gives me a place to process what I am thinking about. 

The last session I attended was Accessibility in Writing POGIL Activities by Kristi Deaver, a chemistry and physics teacher at Ankeny Centennial High School in Ankeny, Iowa. I thought the 'accessibility' was going to be focused on the technical requirements colleges and universities have in regards to U.S. Department of Education requirements. Rather the session shared a POGIL Activity Accessibility Matrix whose goal is to "Design POGIL activities for learner variability from the start rather than accommodating afterward." Instead of the technical form of accessibility I was focused on, this was more about the cognitive accessibility of a POGIL activity, in alignment with Universal Design for Learning principles. While not what I thought, the matrix and discussion were very helpful, as they point to a number of specific problems and issues I have in writing a POGIL activity that routinely get in student's way. Having this matrix, a checklist that addresses the most common issues and problems in a POGIL activity, and using it in my activity review this summer will certainly improve the quality of my activities, and their usefulness for students. 

This being the first POGIL Practitioner Collaborative I was so impressed by the variety of formats, the real and meaningful topics that were discussed, and the real sense that everyone was addressing problems and issues together, irrespective of one's expertise with POGIL. I get so many good ideas and feelings from working with other POGIL practitioners, they are one of the reasons I have hope that I will continue on in this profession.

Updates to Summer Course Review;

• Use the POGIL Activity Accessibility Matrix when reviewing my activities. 
• Review the ELIPSS standards to see when and where I can integrate them into my courses. 
• Update Exit Tickets to include self-reflection of POGIL Process Skills, using more open-ended prompts. 
• Find places where application questions can be changed to BTC format. 
• Identify questions that fast groups answer before slow groups, and write a note having those fast groups' Presenter share their answer on the board. 
• For explore questions that students get stuck on, include in facilitation notes the reminder that these first few questions are not 'that deep'. 
• Find where a single model spans multiple pages, and include it on slides to project for the whole class... Should I just have a daily slide with each model? Maybe a single slide deck with all models?

Did anything above resonate with you? Any questions or ideas you want to share? Do so below and lets continue doing what we can to support student learning.