THE THREE ISOMERS OF BUTANOL

I have been working on involving more open ended questioning in my classes – how can I better incorportate the ideas of inquiry and sustained inquiry in my teaching? The following is the re-working of a lab on the isomers of Butanol. By making this lab into more of a thought experiement students are more engaged in communicating their ideas and predictions – and we have less chemical waste too. I am playing with the ideas of argumentation and exploration. I use whiteboarding quite a bit for this process as students seems much more willing to write something down if they feel they can easily change it or erase it.