School of Ice: A Model for Advanced Professional Development for Geoscience Faculty at Minority-Serving Institutions with Applications to Other 2 and 4 Year Colleges

Monday 3:00pm TSU - Humphries: 203

Author

Louise Huffman, Dartmouth College
The School of Ice (SOI) program from the US Ice Drilling Program (IDP) is designed for college faculty who teach at minority-serving institutions or historically black colleges and universities, but lessons learned transfer easily to any science course based on current research. The institute builds participants' background knowledge about ice core science and climate change while also providing experiences with activities and labs for transferring information to their students.

After five years of highly successful workshops, our model has provided valuable lessons for creating powerful experiences for participants. This presentation will identify some of the key ideas including pairing researchers and educators as presenters;
creating leadership teams capitalizing on partner strengths; building a science community willing to participate in education and outreach; and building participants' science content background knowledge and confidence while providing them with teaching models for transferring the knowledge to their students. Another important element is to demand teacher buy-in to ensure replication and dissemination. Also, IDP's drilling technologies make it an ideal platform for intertwining engineering concepts and practices with science research to meet new science standards.

In this session, we will share results of evaluations including the impact on the educators as well as longitudinal analysis of data from interviews with past participants concerning continued impacts on their teaching, courses and students. Faculty who have attended this institute in the last five years have reported increases in their understanding of the content and how to teach it. They also report increased confidence in their ability to teach ice core science and climate change concepts.

Elements of these successful workshops can inform both the development of college professional development and student courses, as well as the creation of successful education and outreach programs for science research teams wanting to increase the reach of their research results.

Presentation materials:

School of Ice (PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) 80.4MB Jul15 19)