Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL)

Rick Moog is the Executive Director of The POGIL Project and Professor Emeritus, Chemistry, at Franklin & Marshall College (Pennsylvania). He has been using a guided inquiry approach to teaching since 1994 and is the co-author of POGIL materials for general chemistry and physical chemistry and of several journal articles and book chapters concerning POGIL pedagogy and its implementation. Rick received an A.B. in chemistry from Williams College and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Stanford University. He is the 2016 recipient of the George C. Pimentel Award in Chemical Education from the American Chemical Society and, along with his late colleagues Jim Spencer and Frank Creegan, was also the co-recipient of the 2015 James Flack Norris Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Teaching of Chemistry from the Northeast Section of the American Chemical Society. 

 

Why I chose to develop the POGIL model

Early in my career (early 1990s), I was frustrated that so many of my bright and earnest students were not experiencing success in my courses despite the clear, engaging, and well-planned lectures that I was delivering. I recognized that something was wrong … and didn’t simply blame the students. At that time, evidence was accumulating that more active approaches to instruction could lead to better outcomes for all students. Combining the constructivist philosophy of Dewey and others, the collaborative learning ideas of Johnson, Johnson, and Smith, and the emerging research on how people learn, the Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning approach was born.