Designing Effective and Innovative
Courses in Mineralogy, Petrology,
and Geochemistry
Audio access: Call in 1-800-704-9804
Access code: 6316214
Please mute your phone by pressing *6
Alternate number: 1-404-920-6604 (not toll-free)
Technical problems? Contact John at
jmcdaris@carleton.edu
Program begins at 3 pm EDT, Thur. Mar. 29
Please bookmark the workshop program at
http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/coursedesign2
012/program.html
Introduction
On the Cutting Edge, funded by
NSF and supported by NAGT.
Workshop is follow-on to summer
2011 workshop on Teaching
Mineralogy, Petrology, and
Geochemistry in the 21st Century
Second time Cutting Edge has
offered a topic-specific course
development workshop
Introduction
Focus on min/pet/geochem course
design will allow us to brainstorm
topic-specific issues
Leading edge ideas in these fields, and
how we can integrate aspects of these
into undergraduate courses
Interesting opportunities to integrate
GIS and remote sensing
Making courses relevant
Designing outstanding hybrid courses
Introduction
Builds on 17 years of course design
workshops
Emphasis on workshop
Will leave you well on your way to
following through
Benefit from everyone’s expertise,
develop a network
Add to the Cutting Edge collections
of resources for teaching MPG for
the benefit of the community
John McDaris
Barb Tewksbury
Workshop personnel
Dave Mogk
David McConnell
Rachel Beane
Collaborate nuts and bolts
 Muting your phone – press *6
 Optimizing windows
 Using the chat function
 Raising your hand; other tips
 Problems? Please do not use the chat
function to report problems. Send email to
John at jmcdaris@carleton.edu
or post a question on the tech thread of
the discussion board.
 All important links and instructions are on
the workshop Program page!
Your primary specialty
Mineralogy
Petrology
Geochemistry
Other
Academic level of students in the course
you are working on at this workshop?
First year students
First year and sophomores
Juniors and seniors
All four years
Which are true in your department?
Only min is required
Min and pet are required
Min, pet, & geochem are
required
None of them are required
We have a hybrid Earth
materials course instead
of min and pet
Geochem is not taught as
a separate course in our
department
Do you have experience in GIS
and/or remote sensing?
A. Yes, and I include GIS/RS
assignments in courses that I teach
B. Yes, I have extensive experience
but I don’t include it in my courses
C. Yes, I have a bit of experience but I
don’t include it in my courses
D. No
Workshop overview
Kickoff – goals
April 12 – designing effective
assignments and activities; making
courses relevant; presentation on the
role of the affective domain.
May 3 – showcase of best ideas so
far; presentation on assessment;
discussion of hybrid courses,
GIS/RS, and project design.
Summer work
October 25 online poster session
Making courses more effective
Major theme of On the Cutting Edge
has been improving student
learning by making courses more
effective.
This workshop not only to develop
great new assignments and
activities but also to address the
effectiveness of courses as a whole.
What does it mean to make a
course more effective?
Course Audition and Spoken
Language at RIT School for the Deaf
For pre-service teachers who will have
hearing-impaired students in class
Instructor wanted students well-prepared
for future tasks as in-service teachers
Goal: students will be able to analyze pupil
characteristics, classroom performance, and
learning environments to design, implement,
and assess lesson plans that will enhance
spoken language learning.
Goal: Analyze pupil characteristics, classroom
performance, and learning environments to
design, implement, and assess lesson plans that
will enhance spoken language learning
Previous organization
Around topics such as nature and
physiology of hearing loss, interpreting
audiograms, troubleshooting hearing aids,
designing lesson plans
Final high stakes project – not successful
New organization
Moderately hearing-impaired child
Severely hearing-impaired child
Profoundly deaf child
Goal: analyze pupil characteristics, classroom
performance, and learning environments to
design, implement, and assess lesson plans that
will enhance spoken language learning
Same topics revisited with
increasing complexity in each
course chunk
Enables students to have repeated
practice toward goals with
increasing independence
Same overall content but goals
threaded throughout the course
Students better prepared for future
What does it mean to make a
course more effective?
Example from a Mineralogy course
designed at a Cutting Edge workshop
several years ago
Required course for geo majors
Instructor wanted students to do more than
just “know about” minerals – wanted
students to be able to use knowledge to
solve geological problems.
Goals: Students will be able to synthesize
mineralogical data (visual inspection,
petrographic microscopy, XRD and SEM/EDS)
to address specific geological problems.
Goals: synthesize mineralogical data (visual
inspection, petrographic microscopy, XRD and
SEM/EDS) to address specific geological problems.
Previous organization
Around topics such as crystal chemistry,
Miller indices, systematic mineralogy, lattice
structures, space groups, etc.
Final project to “pull it all together”
New organization
Core
Mantle
Crust
Content in context, increasing complexity
of practice in analysis and synthesis
Making a course more effective
Faculty commonly have “application”
goals as well as content goals.
Typical course organization
Teach the content background and
techniques for most of the semester.
Assign a high stakes final project - can
students apply what they’ve learned and
do sophisticated hypothesis-framing,
independent data-finding, analysis, and
communication on their own?
Success is typically mixed and
commonly doesn’t “stick” well
Making a course more effective
If you want students to be good at
something, they must practice.
Course is more effective if students
have practice toward the
“independent analysis” goals
threaded throughout the course
instead of just in the final project.
Articulation of goals beyond
content coverage and technique
mastery are important because
they drive what kind of practice
students need during a course.
Importance of goals to course design
Example from an art history course
Survey of art from a particular period
Vs.
Enabling students to go to an art
museum and evaluate technique of an
unfamiliar work or evaluate an
unfamiliar work in its historical context
or evaluate a work in the context of a
particular artistic genre/school/style
Content coverage is not enough to
enable students to achieve 2nd set
of goals
Importance of goals to course design
Example from a bio course
Survey of topics in general biology
Vs.
Enabling students to evaluate claims
in the popular press or seek out and
evaluate information or make informed
decisions about issues involving
genetically-engineered crops, stem
cells, DNA testing, HIV AIDS, etc.
Requires very different kinds of
practice to enable students to
achieve the 2nd set of goals
Common denominator
 What sorts of things do you do
simply because you are a
professional in your discipline??
I use the geologic record to
reconstruct the past and to predict
the future.
I look at houses on floodplains, and
wonder how people could be so
stupid
I hear the latest news from Mars and
say, well that must mean that….
What do you do??
Physicist: predict outcomes based
on calculations from physics
principles
Art historian: assess works of art
Historian: interpret historical
account in light of the source of
information
English prof: critical reading of
prose/poetry
Approaching it from the
standpoint of what you do
 Your course should enable your students,
at appropriate level, to do what you do in
your discipline, not just expose them to
what you know.
 Start by answering the question
 In context of min or pet or geochem, what do
you do? What does analyze, evaluate, etc.
involve?
 Alternatively, what is unique about your world
view/the view of min or pet or geochem??
 We’ll give you a few minutes to think, and then
we’ll hear from everyone.
What we’re going to do
Set goals: what do you want your
students to be good at?
Plan the course: how will you cover
content plus thread practice on the
goals throughout the course?
Develop assignments: what
assignments/activities would help
students make progress toward the
goals?
This is an effective design method; not
meant to be the only effective one
An aside on terminology
Design model is goals-focused
Terminology: goals vs. objectives vs.
outcomes vs. learning goals vs.
learning objectives vs. learning
outcomes
Geology faculty at our workshops largely
not fluent in edu-speak
Some have encountered terms defined
differently in different venues
Our workshop participants wasted time
and energy coping with the distinctions
An aside on terminology
For our workshops, we collapsed
goals, objectives and outcomes into
one standard English term “goals”.
Goals for us will be concrete and
measurable (“My goal in life is to
make a million $$”; “My goal next
year is to make the Olympic sock
wrestling team.”
Goals: teacher-focused or
student-focused?
Teaching is commonly viewed as
being teacher-centered.
Reinforced by the teaching
evaluation process
Commonly reinforced by how we
phrase course goals: “I want to
expose my students to….” or “I
want to teach my students about…”
or “I want to show students that…”
Goals: teacher-focused
or student-focused?
“It dawned on me about two weeks
into the first year that it was not
teaching that was taking place in the
classroom, but learning.”
Pop star Sting, reflecting upon
his early career as a teacher
Goals: teacher-focused
or student-focused?
We can’t do a student’s learning
for him/her
Exposure does not guarantee
learning
Students learn when they are
actively engaged in practice,
application, and problem-solving
(NRC How People Learn)
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9853
Goals: teacher-focused
or student-focused?
Focus should be on what the
students are able to do as a result of
having completed the course
Not just what the instructor will
expose them to or show them.
Need to set course goals for the
students, not the teacher.
Goals: teacher-focused
or student-focused?
We’ll set student-focused goals
We’ll answer the question what do I
want my students to be able to do??
I want my students to use their strong
background in order to ____
rather than just
I want my students to have a strong
background in ____
Goals involving lower
order thinking skills
Knowledge, comprehension, application
list
explain
calculate
identify
describe
mix
recognize
paraphrase
prepare
Examples of goals involving
lower order thinking skills
At the end of this course, students will
be able to:
 list the major factors that can lead to slope
failure.
 identify common rocks and minerals.
 recognize examples of erosional and
depositional glacial landforms on a
topographic map.
 cite examples of poor land use practice.
 know how to read phase diagrams.
 calculate standard deviation for a set of data.
Examples of goals involving
lower order thinking skills
At the end of this course, students
will be able to:
 discuss the major ways that groundwater
can become contaminated.
 compare and contrast the features of the
three major types of plate boundaries.
 describe how pressure and temperature
influence the behavior of rocks during
deformation, and give an illustrative
example.
 explain how the greenhouse effect works
and explain why burning of fossil fuels
increases the greenhouse effect.
Examples of goals involving
lower order thinking skills
While some of these goals
involve a deeper level of
knowledge and understanding
than others, the goals are largely
reiterative.
Goals involving higher
order thinking skills
Analysis, synthesis, evaluation, some
types of application
derive
predict
analyze
design
interpret
synthesize
formulate
evaluate
create
Examples of goals involving
higher order thinking skills
At the end of this course, students
will be able to:
 evaluate geologic risk in an unfamiliar area
and make an informed decision about
where to live.
 identify interconnections in systems and
predict how changes in one part/aspect of
the system will influence other
parts/aspects of the system.
 analyze the evolution of a region over time.
 use data from recent Mars missions to reevaluate pre-2004 hypotheses about Mars
geologic processes and history/evolution
Examples of goals involving
higher order thinking skills
At the end of this course, students
will be able to:
 Make an informed decision about a
controversial topic, other than those
covered in class.
 Frame a hypothesis and collect appropriate
field data to address a research question.
 Design models of ___
 Solve unfamiliar problems in ____
 Find and evaluate information/data on ____
 Predict the outcome of ____
Examples of goals involving
higher order thinking skills
What makes these goals different
from the previous set is that they
are analytical, rather than
reiterative.
Focus is on new and different
situations.
Emphasis is on transitive nature of
skills, abilities, knowledge, and
understanding
Why are overarching
goals important?
If you want students to be good at
something, they must practice;
therefore goals drive both course
design and assessment
What kind of goals to set?
Higher order or lower order
thinking skills?
Measurable outcomes or not?
Abstract or concrete goals?
We’ll set goals with higher
order thinking skills
Overarching goals involving lower
order thinking skills are imbedded
in ones involving higher order
thinking skills
“being able to interpret tectonic
settings based on information on
physiography, seismicity, and volcanic
activity” has imbedded in it many
goals involving lower order thinking
skills
Why is it important to articulate
higher order goals?
 Students learn more when they
successfully use their knowledge to do
higher order thinking skills tasks.
 Higher order goals tasks are hard for
students.
 If you want students to be successful,
they must practice.
 Assignments and activities need to give
students repeated, relevant practice
related to the goals that you value.
 Can’t design effective activities if you
don’t have the goals in mind.
We’ll set concrete goals with
measurable outcomes1
 Clearer path to designing a course when
overarching goals are stated as specific,
observable actions that students should
be able to perform if they have mastered
the content and skills of a course.
 A: Students will be able to interpret unfamiliar
tectonic settings based on information on
physiography, volcanic activity, and
seismicity.
Vs.
 B: Students will understand plate tectonics.
 A is measurable; B requires a proxy.
1You
can design a task that students can do that will allow you to
measure directly whether they have have achieved the goal.
We’ll set concrete rather
than abstract goals
Abstract goals are laudable but
difficult to assess directly and difficult
translate into practical course design
Students will appreciate the complexity
of Earth systems.
Students will be able to think like
scientists.
Do these goals
meet our criteria?
Students will be exposed to the main
concepts in structural geology.
Students will understand that global
warming is a complex issue.
Students will be able to identify rocks
and minerals.
Students will be able to apply their
knowledge of groundwater
contamination to analyze reports and
claims in the popular press.
Course goals draft
 Go to the Participants page on the workshop
web site; click on goals next to your name.
 Fill in the course information section.
 Write a draft of your higher order goals and
answer the questions in the first section.
 Stop before the “grand challenges” section.
 Save often!!! And keep a Word doc backup
(template available on Program page).
 Leave Collaborate on; hang up your phone.
 Post questions to chat.
Call back in to 1-800-704-9804 at 4:30,
using access code 6316214.
Feedback on goals draft
 Access each participant’s goals page via the
Participants page, and provide feedback in
the discussion box at the bottom.
Do the goals meet our “rules” (studentfocused, higher order, measurable outcomes,
concrete rather than abstract)?
 What suggestions do you have for improving
wording or focus and for threading goals
throughout the semester?
 What do you particularly like about the goals?

 Leave Collaborate on; call back in to 1-
800-704-9804 at 5:00, using access
code 6316214.
A list of leading edge ideas
Would be useful to have a list of
grand challenges, leading edge
ideas, and frontiers in MPG that
could be incorporated into courses.
During the workshop
Brainstorm an initial list
Add to the list over the course of the
workshop
Develop ways to integrate into courses
A list of grand challenges,
leading edge ideas, frontiers
Break into small groups - group
assignments are on the Program page
Each group makes a list on its
workspace page – link on Program
page.
Add relevant data sources or
references if possible.
We will organize the ideas and make a
web page.
Small-group
brainstorming sessions
 Leave Collaborate on; hang up phone.
 Go to the Workshop Program page, and call
back in using your group’s code.
 Group task:
 Assign a time keeper and a recorder.
 Brainstorm a list of the current grand
challenges, leading edge ideas, and frontiers in
mineralogy, petrology, and geochemistry.
 Post questions to Collaborate chat, if you like.
 Groups finish by 5:30.
 Call back in to 1-800-704-9804 at 5:30, using
access code 6316214.
Homework for April 12
 HW is also listed on Workshop Program page
and on the Assignment #1 page
 Complete the daily road check by Fri. noon.
 Finish goals review by Apr. 5 if not yet done.
 Read the feedback that the others have provided
on your goals draft and ideas, and revise.
 Do not overwrite your original goals.
 Enter your revised goals in the revised goals section
on your own goals page.
 Finish your revised goals by midnight April 11.
 Answer the other questions on your goals
workspace page by midnight April 11.
 Read and contribute to discussion threads.
 Resources: online CD tutorial at
http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/coursedesign/tutorial/index.html
Thank you for your
hard work today!
We are all looking forward to
working with you over the next
seven months.
If you have any questions, don’t
hesitate to send an email.