Saturday, January 11, 2014
Working group breakout session 10:00 to 12:00; people started arriving around
10:23am
Primary discussion topics:
Pedagogy
Use of Technology
Numbering the important topics in order to identify the primary topics of the day.
Topics 1 and 2 are the critical, overarching questions
3 and 4 are easily lumped
5 and 6 are lumped due to the role of technology
7 (virtual experience) discussed yesterday
Topic 1: Next generation pedagogies
o Research based pedagogies
 Learning research – not conducted in a class setting
 Active research (research in practice) - applying research ideas in
class and seeing how it goes
 Observations, student feedback, self-evals
 Using research that is available for use in teaching
- Social psychology -> STEM->geosciences
- But how do these methods influence students of
different levels? – there is no research supporting
different types of learning
- What does the research tell us? – Ideas of using
methods that are compatible within specific cultural
norms ; however, there isn’t extensive research that
supports the idea that some techniques are better than
others
- Does the benefit come from cutting the material in favor
of activities and more techniques? – Are we short
changing the best students?
- Multiple modes of delivery at the same time and
methods must be changed in order keep students
engaged.
o The novelty can be critical in conveying ideas
 More dissemination of best practices - spreading useful
techniques
- Characterizing the number of faculty that access
teaching resources
 Motivation of faculty members to adapt their teaching methods
to encourage student learning
- Instructor professional development is important

More and more adjuncts may result in reducing quality
teaching – according to college goals
- Many are current on the science, but not on teaching
techniques
- This may be the same for graduate students – training
graduate students may improve future teaching
techniques.
o But how do you motivate graduate students to improve their teaching
techniques?
 TAs generally go through training before getting to teaching
 There might be issues with lumping many different fields which limits
the benefit to geosciences
 There are critical differences between liberal arts and sciences
making it very difficult to fill classes
 But we can’t do that any more – the diverse classes
 Faculty need to spend time with TAs in order to ensure quality
teaching
 Budget cuts make this more difficult – more pressure on
resources
 Improve availability of workshops and training for young scientists
 How do you deal with advisors that do not want their students
involved in the teaching development
 In the UK, specific training days that are required. This prevents
advisors limiting student involvement
 Could NSF have some requirement for teacher development
 There needs to be leadership support –admin buy in
 So people don’t perceive gaining teaching skills to be
detrimental to their careers.
 Even higher than admin, there needs to be a shift in the
University goals – quality over quantity of students
 Encourage Regents/high level individuals to examine the
quality of education
 Encourage classroom attendance of regents/high level admin
to attend classes
o What is the message that we want to send to R/HLA
though classroom visits?
 Regent visits to gain an idea of the difficulty teaching a wide
range of students
o What do the best teachers do? Teaching techniques that
get students out in 4 years
o How are new techniques/tech make a difference
 Provide Pres/HLA with the information they need to convey
the importance of geoscience education
 Encourage more geoscience faculty to collaborate with other
departments to publish in education journals

Let people know that scholarship, proposals and journal pubs
available through this collaboration
 Make IRB more important
 Seek out faculty that can help with education techniques
o This requires equal intellectual gain
o Have some mechanism of evaluation
 This requires geoscience faculty to make an effort to reach out
to education faculty
o R1 institutions do not support teaching development
 Teaching can be used against you, but bad teaching doesn’t generally
hurt you.
o TAs and new faculty want to do a good job
 There needs to be guidance for them – providing help is necessary
 The main issue may actually be the lack of guidance from senior
faculty
o How do we encourage senior faculty members to improve teaching
Topic 2: skipped
Topic 3 and 4: How to we get geoscience faculty improve teaching techniques
o We know how to teach better, but how to get research faculty involved
 We need to make this interesting to research faculty
 Encourage the importance of NSF broader impacts
 Use centers of teaching and learning
o Faculty may be in denial about their skills
 How to we encourage faculty to improve? – Technology and methods
 Maybe we can’t – focus on upcoming TAs and young faculty
 It isn’t the method, it is the delivery
 Focus on people that are interested in improving teaching
o Ensure that NSF broader impacts should include improved teaching
 This can be a powerful motivator to encourage improved teaching
 Ensure that teaching improvement is an important broader impact
 There needs to be some metric to judge the broader impacts
 Evaluate awardee on meeting broader impact goals
 Longer-term addition of education publications to NSF jackets
 NSF collection of teaching data in order to determine the success of
implementation of new pedagogy
 There should be a rubric to evaluate broader impact
 But most review panels do not consider teaching an important
broader impact
o How do we make people use new teaching techniques?
 Require faculty to use specific techniques
 Use of Geoportal – allows students to look at videos, test
question banks, etc



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Grading schemes that involve assessment of student
involvement online and in class
 Requirement of specific goals within syllabi that are developed
by the entire department
- General ed, discipline specific, course level goals
- Student assessment of new learning techniques – not
necessarily student reviews, but focus on technique
o Most important point? Most difficult to
understand?
Gentle leader in the department
 Non-threatening reaching out to other faculty members
 Leadership academies – some type of certification
 Teaching awards that require some sort of public lectures
How do you deal with bad evaluations when introducing new
pedagogies?
Improved learning outcomes
 Online programs that generate word cloud from student
feedbacks
 Evidence that new pedagogies do improve student grades
 Issues with evaluating the same class you teach
- Find external evaluators
 Using control groups at larger colleges
Topics 5 and 6: Technological Advances in the classroom
o How do we evaluate new technologies?

Immediate feedback from students – phones, clickers
 Phone based clickers
 Can be used even in small classes

Online feedback programs
 I don’t know buttons in slide shows
 Word cloud generators
o Flipped classrooms
 Lectures at night, work in class
o Hybrid Course
 Online components remove face time
o Is technology a worthwhile investment in pedagogies?
 Do NOT confuse technology with great teaching
 Any innovative teaching techniques should be evaluated
 Must be an early-adopter
 Faculty must adapt to what the students use
 Lack of student knowledge in widely available may limit your ability
to use new ‘old’ technologies
o MOOCs
 Could impact the bottom of line of many smaller institutions
 MOOCs could replace intro level courses
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 Within geology you need the field and lab experiences
Are there courses for faculty about teaching?
 This might be a mechanism to spread new teaching techniques
- Ease of access may encourage faculty learning of
new techniques
 Webinars for faculty
No research on the effectiveness
Make the case that MOOCs are not the same as direct student-teacher
interactions
Content – is it in place? How do we get it in place?
 Work to intertwine pedagogy and the content
 Context of the content can improve relevance