Traveling Workshops

The Traveling Workshops Program (TWP) brings national leaders in environmental, sustainability, and geoscience education to your campus, regional, or national event. The Traveling Workshops Program focuses on opportunities to strengthen both courses and programs including attracting and supporting diverse students. It brings together expertise from numerous NSF funded projects including the On the Cutting Edge, InTeGrate, SAGE, and GeoNeeds. The TWP is a part of NAGT's On the Cutting Edge Professional Development Program.

At the end of an NAGT Traveling Workshop, participants will have a combination of the following, dependent on the workshop theme:
Apply for a Workshop

  • Strategies and approaches that have worked for others in the US and Canada.
  • A collection of resources, including department best practices, curricula, courses, modules, and activities, on the topic(s) of their choice.
  • A departmental, program, or individual action plan for moving forward.
Participants from past workshops write:

"I go into tomorrow with a renewed enthusiasm for making us a better department and to make us an integral part of the University and community."

"Bringing the workshop to the department is a highly valuable vehicle for engaging the entire department, and I really can('t) say enough about this model. Kudos to the Building Strong Geoscience Program..."

Themes


Workshop Synopsis

Complete description of the steps that the department, program, or group needs to carry out to help the workshop leaders provide a successful workshop experience.

Workshop Facilitators

Bios of faculty members and education specialists that lead Traveling Workshops.

Workshop Themes

There are six workshop themes that host institutions can choose from, split into two broad categories: Strengthening Your Departments and Programs and Strengthening Your Courses. Please read through each of these themes and select the one that best fits your interests. Within each of these themes there are numerous sessions and topics that can be combined to produce a workshop that is the most beneficial to your department, program, or group. Determining which sessions and topics best fit your workshop will be coordinated between the host institution lead and the workshop leaders AFTER the workshop application has been selected. In addition, workshop themes can be combined if the host institution is interested in addressing course-level and department- or program-level issues.

Strengthening Your Departments and Programs

These programs are designed for departments, institutions, or groups of institutions linked by transfer programs or other shared interests. Sessions can be adapted for program leaders from multiple institutions.

Building Stronger Geoscience and Environmental Science Departments and Programs

These workshops bring two trained leaders to your institution to facilitate a working session with all members of your department. These workshops bring the knowledge gained from InTeGrate, and other NAGT-sponsored efforts onto your campus to support conversation and planning by your department as a whole. They offer a menu of interactive sessions fully supported with online resources. All sessions feature presentations, discussions, and action planning with a focus on success for all students. Formerly part of the Building Strong Geoscience Departments project, previous traveling workshops visited 35 departments from 2009-2016, meeting with more than 250 faculty members at two-year colleges, four-year colleges, comprehensive universities and research intensive, PhD granting institutions. Learn more about example programs »

Strengthening your Cross-campus Environmental and Sustainability Programs

This interactive workshop is designed for existing or developing environmental and sustainability programs that extend beyond a single department. By means of a series of activities, facilitators will help you develop a shared vision, grapple with issues such as depth versus breadth, and identify strengths and opportunities, including local resources available to your program site. A set of sessions, tailored to your needs, sets the stage for an in-depth conversation about how the components drawn from academic disciplines and co-curricular programming become a coherent whole. Some examples might be how the program integrates with the campus's sustainability initiatives, addresses environmental justice issues, engages with climate change, and incorporates international research and learning. We will also consider how cross-campus programs gain institutional buy-in. At the conclusion of the workshop you will have built a robust action plan to guide your program's ongoing efforts. Learn more about example programs »

Strengthening Earth Science in Teacher Education

This workshop is designed for faculty and administrators involved in K-8 teacher preparation programs as well as science programs that include and/or support geoscience teaching. It is appropriate for faculty who teach introductory geoscience courses, general education science courses (including faculty at two-year colleges), science methods courses, and other courses that engage future teachers, as well as the program directors and advisors who work with future K-8 teachers. This workshop will facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration necessary for future teachers to build their own skills and confidence in teaching Earth science that is engaging and relevant for their students. The outcomes of this workshop will include a better understanding of how individuals and programs across many disciplines contribute to K-8 teacher preparation, and how those contributions align with the needs of future teachers and their required competencies. Participants will make use of that new understanding to develop action plans that are specific to their role and their campus. Learn more about example programs »

Supporting the Success ofAll Students: Making a Brighter Future for All of Us

This workshop focuses on the success of all students, including the need to address diversity of your student body. Based on changing demographics, we can no longer rely on the same methods of attracting and nurturing students, as there will be fewer of the demographic groups the sciences have traditionally drawn from. Science programs need to appeal to a more diverse population to remain a thriving and relevant community poised to meet the needs of our society. The workshop has 5 flexible components that emphasize understanding your current students and community, supporting the whole student, supporting all students, transitioning students into your program from multiple contexts, and launching them onto the next phase of their life (e.g. education, career).The workshop provides activities and resources for assessing where you are now as well as planning and implementing actions that can be taken on a range of timescales (from immediate to long range). Workshop session offers best practices in attracting students in diverse educational settings to successfully transition to science fields through having well-planned strategies to meet students' needs to prosper at every stage of transition. Learn more about example programs »

Strengthening Your Courses

These full-day workshops bring high quality teaching and learning workshops directly to departments, institutions, and regions. With a focus on improving teaching and learning, these workshops provide an ideal opportunity to learn about new pedagogies, re-energize old ones, and to spend time with colleagues reflecting on what we teach and how students learn. The workshops can be designed to emphasize material applicable beyond the geosciences, and can be combined with the Building Stronger Departments workshops described above.

Strengthening Your Intro or Upper-Division Course

This workshop will include key elements from Designing Effective and Engaging Courses which address the four elements of Developing Goals and Learning Outcomes, Metacognition and Motivation, Active Learning, and Assessment. You can choose to expand on any of these sub-categories in more detail as you also choose a given topic. Finding the time, energy, and inspiration to develop a new course or to re-design an existing course can be a challenge for faculty. Building on more than a decade of On the Cutting Edge workshops, this session will help faculty establish student learning goals for their course and, in the context of those goals, develop course materials that reflect best practices in effective teaching and assessment. Learn more about example programs »

Make Your Course More Effective and Societally Relevant

This workshop is designed to infuse societal relevance to (re)design and strengthen your course materials. Each workshop is customizable with topics depending on the interest of participants. The workshop can be designed for courses taught at any level and for instructors in a variety of disciplines including STEM, the social sciences, the humanities, and interdisciplinary fields. Over the course of the workshop, participants will engage in a series of activities that will help them think about their course from the student learning perspective. Participants will learn about pedagogical techniques by engaging in them, not just by hearing about them. Participants will leave the workshop having begun to (re)design their course and with an action plan and resources for continuing the process. Learn more about example programs »

Application Deadlines for each academic year:

  • October 15 (for Spring/Summer Workshops)
  • January 15 (for Summer Workshops)
  • March 15 (for Fall Workshops)
  • June 15 (for Fall/Winter workshops)

Application

Please note that it can take 5-7 weeks to plan your workshop. Bear this in mind when deciding which application deadline to submit against.

For questions and more information, please contact Mitchell Awalt, mawalt AT carleton.edu


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