Grove Center spring seminar to be held March 26-27
The Cada R. and Susan Wynn Grove Center for Excellence in Science Education will host its spring seminar on March 26 and 27 on the Penn State University Park campus.
The two-day event will feature a presentation by Kimberly Tanner, professor of biology at San Francisco State University, titled “Collectively Improving Our Science Teaching: Department-Wide Efforts in Scientific Teaching,” from 3:35 to 4:35 p.m. on March 26, in 102 Thomas Building.
The event will also include two hands-on workshops led by Tanner, both on March 27: “Maximizing Learning by Moving Towards Active Learning,” from 9 to 10 a.m. in 202 Osmond Laboratory, and “Engaging Students and Making Classrooms Fair and Inclusive: Cross-Disciplinary Tools, Insights, and Strategies to Promote Student Success,” from 2 to 3:30 p.m. in 110 Osmond Laboratory.
Seminar: “Collectively Improving Our Science Teaching: Department-Wide Efforts in Scientific Teaching”
Many efforts to improve science teaching in higher education focus on a few faculty members at an institution at a time, with limited published evidence on attempts to engage faculty across entire departments. We created a long-term, department-wide collaborative professional development program: Biology Faculty Explorations in Scientific Teaching. Over three years of Biology FEST, 89% of the department’s faculty completed a weeklong scientific teaching institute, and 83% of eligible instructors participated in additional semester-long follow-up programs. A semester after institute completion, the majority of Biology FEST alumni reported adding active learning to their courses. These instructor self-reports were corroborated by audio analysis of classroom noise and surveys of biology course students on the frequency of active learning techniques used in classes taught by Biology FEST alumni and nonalumni. Three years after Biology FEST launched, faculty participants overwhelmingly reported that their teaching was positively affected. Unexpectedly, most respondents also believed that they had improved relationships with departmental colleagues and felt a greater sense of belonging to the department. Overall, our results indicate that biology department-wide collaborative efforts to develop scientific teaching skills can indeed attract large numbers of faculty, spark widespread change in teaching practices, and improve departmental relations.
The seminar will also be live streamed via Zoom Webinar.
Workshop: “Maximizing Learning by Moving Towards Active Learning”
In this interactive workshop, participants will experience multiple examples of how active learning can work in undergraduate courses, with a particular emphasis on biology and chemistry. Attendees will experience examples of how to integrate active learning in 1-, 5-, 10-, and 20-minute examples that highlight common teaching strategies. In addition, participants will explore how student work produced during active learning can be systematically analyzed quickly to guide teaching decisions. Finally, participants will explore how to structure students’ active learning outside of class to prepare students and maximize learning during in-class activities.
Register for this workshop.
Workshop: “Engaging Students and Making Classrooms Fair and Inclusive: Cross-Disciplinary Tools, Insights, and Strategies to Promote Student Success”
Teaching diverse populations of students requires instructors to construct learning environments that are inclusive and equitable. Research in psychology and other disciplines suggests that how students personally experience learning environments strongly influences engagement, motivation, sense of belonging, and conceptual learning. In this interactive workshop, participants will share a common experience as the basis for discussing how students may experience classroom environments differently from one another. Individual participants will then have the opportunity to self-assess their current awareness of 21 common equitable teaching strategies and identify those that could be immediately implemented in their classrooms.
Register for this workshop.
About Kimberly Tanner
Kimberly Tanner is a tenured professor of biology at San Francisco State University. Her laboratory, the Science Education Partnership and Assessment Laboratory, investigates what is challenging to learn in biology, how biologists choose to teach, and how to make equity, diversity, and inclusion central to science education efforts. She is engaged in discipline-based education research, directs multiple K-16-plus biology education reform efforts, and is deeply engaged in faculty professional development. She is a founding editorial board member and current co-editor in chief of the leading journal in her field, CBE—Life Sciences Education, and recently completed service as a National Science Foundation program director. Trained as a neurobiologist with postdoctoral studies in science education, Tanner is a proud first-generation college-going student, accustomed to she/her pronouns, and proud mom of a professional drummer and an aspiring robotics engineer, both produced in partnership with her college sweetheart and biochemistry lab partner.
More Information
Questions and requests for additional information can be directed to Kalina Kelley.