Do you recall your first geoscience course? For many geoscience teachers, it was this first taste of plate tectonics, landforms, fossils or oceanography that suddenly made us realize we had found our calling. We hope that some of today's new students who experience their first earth science courses will become inspired just like we did. Yet some students take a 100-level geology course because it seems to be the least-daunting way through their college's science requirement. Thus, faculty of introductory courses have a big job on their hands, managing a wide range of students, taking them through the basics of earth science, and hopefully imparting some inspiration along the way.

This web module is for those who teach introductory earth science courses. Here you will find ideas for designing a new course, spicing up an existing course design, or adding innovative activities or teaching methods.

Resources for Teaching Introductory Courses

• An extensive collection of introductory-level geoscience courses, spanning a host of geoscience topics
• Browse over 400 classroom and lab activities aimed at intro-level audiences. If you use one of these activities, we also encourage you to provide an activity review.
• Strategies for working with large classes
• Tips on motivating your introductory students
• A bookshelf of popular books used by faculty in their intro courses
• How to address misconceptions often held by intro-level students
• Outcomes, presentations and posters from past workshops for faculty who teach introductory geoscience courses
• Do you teach an intro course? Submit your course or activity to our collections.
• Have a topic to talk about? Stop by our discussion area.
  
  

Other Materials for Teaching Introductory Courses

• Site Guide: Resources for Teaching Large Classes - a directory of helpful materials from across the SERC websites
• The Starting Point - Teaching Entry-Level Geoscience portal, which contains over 30 modules built around pedagogic approaches for introductory courses, plus hundreds of example activities
• Our site on preparing K-12 teachers for teaching earth science courses

Field Trip Guides and Databases

• The Montana-Yellowstone Geologic Field Guide Database - The Montana-Yellowstone Geologic Field Guide Database is a pilot project for making the field guide literature more accessible and useful to geoscience educators, students, and researchers. While the database is not an exhaustive listing of every published field guide, nor does it provide direct links to the full text of each reference (except for a few unpublished field guides which are reproduced as pdf files), the database is a fully-searchable listing of 50 of the best references for exploring the geology of this fascinating region.
• NAGT's Pacific Northwest Section Field Trip Guidebooks
• NAGT's Far West Section Publications
• Field Guides - Illustrated field guides for sites near Bozeman and Big Sky, MT.
• Geologic Guidebooks of North America Database : This database from AGI and the Geoscience Information Society contains bibliographic references and location for published field guides.
• The University of Texas at Austin has compiled a substantial e-library of field trip guides (more info) on their Walter Geology Library website.

Join the Discussion

Join the Teaching Introductory Courses Email List or the Teaching Introductory Courses discussion board.