In April 2025, the PA Community College Consortium Cooperative Agreement (PC4A) offered two faculty development workshops on the POGIL instructional method.
Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning, or POGIL, is a student-centered, group-learning strategy and philosophy developed through research on how students learn best. In a POGIL classroom, instructors act as facilitators for small teams of students working through activities that are specially designed to be self-managed and encourage higher-level thinking.
The in-person POGIL workshops were hosted at Penn Highlands Community College and Bucks County Community College and were attended by faculty from PC4A partner schools. During the workshops, faculty were provided with an overview of the POGIL method and participated in a facilitation example to provide them with the skills needed to develop activities tailored to their content areas.
Participants were very pleased with the workshops based on the results of the satisfaction survey. 100 percent of participants rated the quality of the workshops as excellent or very good, and 95 percent would recommend the workshop to other faculty. One participant said, “The workshop allowed for me to view new information from the student’s perspective. This is a strength because I know good strategies of the type of information they may need help with or how to deal with a student who struggles.”
Waleed Farag, program director of PC4A, said, “The POGIL method is not only backed by research, but it is also funded by the National Science Foundation and Department of Education. I am pleased that we were able to offer such well-received workshops to partner faculty, and I hope that participants will be able to implement these strategies in their classrooms.”
The PC4A Project is a federally funded grant awarded to IUP in September 2022 with an overall goal of strengthening the cybersecurity workforce in the US. PC4A community college partners include Bucks County, Butler County, Montgomery County, Northampton, Penn Highlands, and Westmoreland County. For more details, visit the PC4A website, and direct any questions to pc4a-stem@iup.edu.