Lenny Vuocolo

My lecture courses focus on a “concepts first, numbers next” approach to learning. I integrate activities and software that encourage students to apply concepts to new and/or practical situations and to derive new concepts from those they currently know. In the Professional Communication Skills (PCSC) course, students learn about faculty research in the department and communicating professionally both on their own and from their peers, enforcing the notion of learning information through communicating/teaching it in various formats. Further implementation of peer learning techniques will be in the Introduction to Experimental Chemistry course where some parts of experiments will involve small groups deriving procedures to reach a goal and class pooling of data for interpretation of results. In the safety seminar students not only learn about current waste procedures and safe laboratory practices, but they also get to inspect a laboratory on campus and report whether these practices are currently enforced. The Junior and Senior seminar enforce the literature experiences from PCSC and the safety training from the sophomore seminar through providing feedback on seniors’ research or literature presentations.