Teaching Chemistry by a Creative Approach: Adapting a Teachers’ Course for Active Remote Learning

Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, all teachers’ training courses scheduled for summer 2020 had to transition to online formats. For the arts-integrating course “Teaching Chemistry by a Creative Approach”, this shift jeopardized the course’s essence, since learning by this approach is based on creative, hands-on, and active learning. Here we describe how the course format and contents evolved from a planned face-to-face format to an adapted, successful online learning experience. Two main goals were considered during the adaptation process: (1) making available to teachers the theoretical and practical backgrounds necessary to internalize the arts-integrating approach through creative, active learning strategies, and (2) providing teachers with actual tools through which they can rethink and develop their own teaching materials to suit remote teaching by incorporating supporting neuropedagogical aspects. Evaluating the immediate and follow-up questionnaires, as well as the assessment of teachers’ course assignments, suggests that the online course successfully preserved the essence and the main objectives of the original course, that the course was useful for remote teaching, and that it seems to have had an impact on teachers’ practices. We attribute this impact to the well-thought-out process of adapting the course to promote creative, active online teaching and learning. In addition to modifying the course’s format, this process expanded the arts-integrating approach to acknowledge the inherent difficulties in learning chemistry, existing also while learning online. We propose this process as a model to be used by educators to rethink and adapt their own practices to improve distance chemistry teaching and learning.