During my time at NC State, I have attended many workshops and seminars with the goal of becoming more reflective of my teaching style. Some of these are described below.
My own scholarship on teaching and learning has included a talk and several poster presentations, discussed here.
Title: Introduction to Teaching
Facilitator(s): Dr. Barbie Honeycutt
Date: January 15th, 2010
Summary: The Introduction to Teaching workshop is designed to introduce participants to the fundamentals of effective teaching and learning in the university classroom through exploration, application, and reflection. This workshop is designed to provide basic information about a variety of teaching topics and to offer “best practices” for enhancing teaching and learning in the university classroom.
Title: Writing Learning Outcomes
Facilitator(s): Dr. Barbie Honeycutt
Date: January 25th-29th, 2010
Summary: This workshop is designed to introduce participants to the process of writing effective learning outcomes. As the basis for structured teaching and instruction, learning outcomes help to define teacher expectations for students within the curriculum, and writing learning outcomes is one of the most important steps to take before entering the classroom. In this workshop, we will discuss the importance of learning outcomes in the classroom and learn how to design successful learning outcomes.
Title: TurningPoint Clickers I: Basic Principles and Hands-On Practice
Facilitator(s): DELTA
Date: February 4th, 2010
Summary: This class covers basic principles of using clickers with TurningPoint and TurningPoint Anywhere for in-class instruction as well as more advanced techniques such as creating participant lists, delivering quizzes and exporting results for use as grades using TurningPoint software.
Title: Motivating Students: Techniques to Dramatically and Positively Impact Your Classroom Experiences
Facilitator(s): Dr. David H. Henard
Date: February 12th, 2010
Summary: The difference between teaching to a full class of eager, engaged students and one with empty seats and lethargic students is vast. This workshop introduced several techniques that can dramatically and positively impact your classroom experiences.
Title: ClassEval and Research on Teaching Evaluations
Facilitator(s): Dr. Paul Umbach, Dr. Douglas Gillan, Dr. Meredih Adams, and Trey Standish
Date: November 16th, 2010
Summary: Faculty and presenters will explore research about the use of incentives for responding to ClassEval, non-responses related to ClassEval, ClassEval trends at NC State and general trends in student evaluations.
Title: Sensitive Issues in the Classroom
Facilitator(s): Drs. Rebecca Leonard, Anna Bigelow and Rupert Nacoste
Date: March 18th, 2011
Summary: Faculty who have significant experience and expertise in leading discussions that bear on sensitive social and historical issues will provide insights and advice for faculty who will be teaching diversity courses or have to deal with sensitive topics in their classroom.
Other workshops I have participated in have included: Engaging Students: An Introduction to Using Games in the Classroom; Introduction to the Teaching Portfolio; Learning Styles; and Maintaining Student Interaction, Engagement and Achievement When Your Class Size Octuples!
I have also been fortunate to be able to attend many talks specific to the scholarship of teaching and learning in the geosciences at the November 2010 Geological Society of America conference in Denver. This was a wonderful crash course into the research going on in geoscience education. These presentations included, but were not limited to (with presenting author in parentheses):
GeoWorlds: Virtual Learning Environments for the Geosciences (Caroline Davies)
Integrating Bloom’s Taxonomy of Critical Thinking with Physical Geology Content (Charles Fletcher)
Reasoning About Plate Tectonics and Earthquakes: Student Multimodal Sense Making with Gestures, Self-Generated Drawings, Labeling and Verbal Explanation (John Bedward)
Student Demographic Characteristics and Learning Gains on the Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI) in an Introductory Geology Lab Course (Christina Estes)
The Little Engline that Could: Less Prior Knowledgee but High Self-Efficacy is Equivalent to Greater Prior Knowledge and Low Self-Efficacy (David McConnell)