Program

Homework

Please complete the pre-workshop survey by 5:00 pm on Monday, July 10.

Thursday

8:30 Introductions and icebreaker (Karen)
- Discussion: What are all of the things that TAs do? How do these impact students?
  
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  - Prepare teaching materials, such as notebooks and slides - help students learn
  - Grading assignments - providing evaluative feedback to students about what they're learning
  - Hold office hours - allows students to be involved and engaged; may also provide them feedback and help them learn; provide an opportunity for personal connection
  - Lecture, either in a lecture setting or at the beginning of a lab activity - content delivery
  - Provide emotional support - students feel emotionally supported and have a sense of belonging
  - Coordination with the lecture professor - create a more cohesive course experience
  - Organize and host meetings with instructor of record and/or other TAs working on the same course - multiple impacts
  - Physical set up of materials - contribute to student safety, equitable access to materials
  - Advocacy - help students feel supported and heard
  - Attending lecture or completing readings, especially if it's newer content - providing a deeper source of content knowledge
  - Advising students - providing extracurricular support for students
  - Give feedback to professor - help facilitate communication with students
  - Sending and receiving emails - multiple impacts
  - Working with your LMS (Learning Management System, e.g. Blackboard, Canvas) - provide a sense of organization
Discussion: Which skills do TAs develop, and how do those skills align with career goals?

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- Science communication - teaching, research, museum, journalism
- Managerial - "Life!" (everywhere, any industry)
- Interpersonal, emotional skills, crisis management
- Presentation skills
- Conflict and time management
- Curriculum development
- Fairness and setting boundaries - including so you can take care of yourself (e.g. managing scope creep)
- Financial stewardship
- Budgeting (including of own finances!)
- Making something out of nothing -- creativity!
- Empathy and humility: you will be asked questions you don't know the answers to
- Listening
- Data analysis
- Flexibility
- Organization

Summary: The work you're doing is valuable to your students, the geoscience community, and you as you personally develop as a geoscientist.

9:15 Results of survey (Anne)

Reflection: Where you are now, where do you want to be? Consider goals/objectives that you can use for action planning.
Action planning worksheet: Make a copy and put in your own Google Drive or download as a Word doc to your own computer.

10:00 Break

10:15 Interactive teaching strategies discussion & breakout groups (Beth)

Participant landing page - select the number your team was given
Example norms before controversial topics: Share talk time. Listen to understand. Everyone has expertise. Be present. Critique ideas, not people. Assume positive intent. Listen respectfully.

11:20 Roadcheck and introduce homework (Katherine)

11:30 Adjourn for the day

Homework

Participants should spend ~20 minutes looking at Unit 2: Kilauea Hawai'i - Monday Morning Meeting at the USGS Hawai'i Volcano Observatory from Monitoring Volcanoes and Communicating Risks. This is a data-rich activity that takes planning to execute well.
As you are looking at the activity, please:

Familiarize yourself with the learning outcomes
Familiarize yourself with the types of data being used.
- If you are not familiar with the types of data being used, what preparation on your part would be necessary to be able to effectively teach this in your class?
How would you structure this activity in your class?
- When in the term would it be best to do this activity? What content and/or skills would be helpful for students to have experience with prior to starting this activity?
- Would you ask students to do any preparation work prior to working on the activity during class?
- How much time would you expect to devote to this activity during class? Would you spread it out over multiple class meetings?
Think about challenges you might face in trying to include this range of data types in a lab. What type of support will students need to complete the exercise?

Friday

8:30 Roadcheck results and overview of the day (Katherine)
8:40 Challenges and benefits of using data-rich activities in your class: Discussion of Kilauea activity (Beth)
- Participant landing page - select the number your team was given
- Discussion: Why use data-rich learning activities?
  - evidence-based reasoning experience
  - direct workforce preparation, working with large data sets
  - digital literacy, use of specific software
  - engage students in their learning, active learning
  - multiple perspectives, integration of multiple data types
  - experience reading the scientific literature
  - data management and analysis
  - relevance to students
  - quantitative skills
  - engagement with the scientific process and knowledge generation
9:30 Break
9:45 Grading activity (Anne)
10:35 Action planning (Katherine)
- Group activity: What are three things you can do to become a better teacher next year?
- Individual reflection: How will you build the skills you need to get where you want to be? What are the resources you can make use of within your own institution and beyond? How will you document your development?
11:20 Workshop evaluation (Katherine)
11:30 Adjourn

Resources

Interactive Teaching

SERC's Engaged Pedagogy collection
- Examples: Cooperative Learning, Using Socratic Questioning, and many more
On-Ramps - quick-start guides to help you get up to speed in widely used strategies for actively engaging students in the classroom to improve learning (specific examples are from Tectonics, but guidance is widely applicable to other subjects)
Structure Matters: Twenty-One Teaching Strategies to Promote Student Engagement and Cultivate Classroom Equity - K. Tanner, Life Sciences Education, 2013