Workshops
The morning workshop program is open for registration. Workshop size is limited based on room capacity, and space is reserved on a first come, first serve basis.
Jump to: Monday-Wednesday | Thursday-Friday
Monday-Wednesday
Preparing for an Academic Career in the Geosciences
Conveners: Brendan Hanger (Colorado School of Mines), Lynsey LeMay (Virginia Peninsula Community College), Christy Visaggi (Georgia State University), and Becki Beadling (Temple University)
This workshop is designed specifically for graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and others who are interested in pursuing academic careers in the geosciences. Workshop leaders from a variety of institution types and career paths will provide guidance and information that will help participants to be stronger candidates for academic positions and to succeed in academic jobs. Workshop format will include presentations, discussions, small group activities such as application materials review and elevator pitch practice, and periods of informal Q & A with co-conveners, alumni of the workshop, and fellow participants. Each participant will develop or revise a plan for the next stage in their career and will cultivate ideas that they can immediately implement.
Innovative Tools for Project Management in Academia
Conveners: Deborah Coyle (iincepta inc.), Amanda Godbold (University of Southern California)
Join our three-day workshop at Earth Educators' Rendezvous 2024, led by project manager Deborah Coyle. Designed for early career faculty and post-doctoral researchers, this course emphasizes proven project management strategies crucial for achieving success in academia. Participants will delve into critical areas such as task management, communication, team dynamics, and industry language. Depart with a personalized toolkit, prepared to navigate intricate academic projects and collaborate seamlessly across disciplines in the early stages of your career.
Improving the Sustainability of Data-rich Activities through the Community Contribution Tool
Conveners: Rachel Teasdale (California State University-Chico), Beth Pratt-Sitaula (EarthScope Consortium), Sean Fox (Carleton College), Ellen Iverson (Carleton College), Sandrine Matiasek (California State University-Chico)
Some data-rich curriculum materials have datasets that can become out of date or unavailable. To address this issue, this workshop will introduce the Community Contribution Tool (CCT), which facilitates updating datasets, graphs and other components of data-rich activities hosted on the Teach the Earth website. Workshop participants will: 1) Collaboratively learn about data-rich online curriculum modules and best practices for creating resources for long-term, sustainable use; 2) Evaluate the sustainability of existing curriculum resources; 3) Learn to use the CCT and practice using the tool to provide updates related to existing InTeGrate and GETSI modules during the workshop. This workshop begins on Sunday, July 14, (9:00 am-4:00 pm) and continues through Monday-Wednesday (8:30 am-11:30 am). Participation is by application only. Please complete the application by April 1.
Teaching with Investigation and Design in the Undergrad Science Classroom
Conveners: Anne Egger (Central Washington University), Angela Daneshmand (Santiago Canyon College), Natalie Bursztyn (The University of Montana-Missoula)
Are you ready to rethink your introductory Earth or physical science course to focus on actively engaging students in investigations and productive discussions? Would you like your course to promote equitable sense-making and highlight diversity in the sciences? In this workshop, you will explore new materials developed, tested, and refined by the Teaching with Investigation and Design in Science (TIDeS) project, learn about how the use of these materials has impacted student success, including their attitudes and beliefs, and work with leaders and other participants to develop a plan for implementing the new materials in your own teaching. A limited number of $500 stipends are available to support participation in the workshop; we will prioritize applicants who can broaden the materials reach, be advocates for change, and may not normally attend the EER. Apply using this stipend application form by April 1.
Designing Activities to Engage Students and Enhance Learning in Mathematically-Intensive Geoscience Courses
Conveners: Casey Davenport (University of North Carolina at Charlotte), Lauren Decker (University of North Carolina at Charlotte), Zachary Handlos (Georgia Institute of Technology), John Knox (University of Georgia)
Across the geosciences, math is used to represent physical processes within the Earth system. However, students routinely struggle to make connections between equations and real-world applications. Thus, the goal of this workshop is to provide participants an opportunity to develop their own hands-on, student-centered (i.e., active learning) activity that participants can then readily use within their own mathematically-intensive geoscience courses (e.g. atmospheric dynamics, oceanography, geophysics, or any related courses with math content) to improve student engagement and understanding. Participants will design, within disciplinary and.or course-specific groups, one active learning exercise or activity designed to tackle a mathematically-intensive topic, then lead the workshop in participation of the designed activity, and finally share the activity within an online repository to become available to the broader community.
Wrapping your Head around Environmental Problems by Leveraging Feedback Loop Thinking
Conveners: Kim Kastens (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory), Logan Brenner (Barnard College), Alexandra Davatzes (Temple University), Tim Shipley (Temple University)
Feedback loops (FL) are a powerful concept for Earth educators in the 21st century, because positive/reinforcing feedback loops underlie many environmental problems, while negative/balancing feedback loops underlie many plausible solutions. This workshop focuses on practices that have life-long value for students and build capacity to use FL thinking in solving environmental problems. On Day 1, participants practice strategies for discerning – in data, in language, and in lived experience – that an Earth- or Earth-human system is driven by feedback. On Day 2, participants use causal language, causal loop diagrams (CLDs), and behavior over time graphs to depict and explain the system of influences by which positive feedback loops cause growth or collapse and negative feedback loops cause stability or oscillation. On Day 3, participants use CLDs and causal language to propose interventions into FL-driven problems. Drawing on insights from Dana Meadows' Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, participants indicate where and how a proposed intervention could disrupt a loop with an undesirable outcome or amplify a loop with a desirable outcome. Each day's work begins with leader-provided activities, rubrics and assessments, and ends with participants adapting these materials to align with their own content focus and learner characteristics. The leaders provide a library of FL narratives and articles from the popular media appropriate for customizing these activities, or participants may bring materials from their own teaching practice.
Thursday-Friday
Getting the Most Out of your Teaching Assistant (TA) Experience
Conveners: Anne Egger (Central Washington University), Karen Viskupic (Boise State University)
Workshop participants will recognize and build their skills as teaching assistants through activities to: --Highlight the various roles that teaching assistants play in supporting undergraduate geoscience students; --Develop strategies for managing time, setting boundaries, and performing duties efficiently and effectively; --Develop skills and confidence for facilitating data-rich learning activities in classes and labs; --Recognize and communicate the important skills developed as a teaching assistant.
Games in Education
Conveners: Angela Daneshmand (Santiago Canyon College), Nancy Chen (Harvard-Westlake School), Ander Sundell (College of Western Idaho)
Building community in the classroom and engaging students in their learning can improve retention of information, increase student motivation, and support a sense of belonging in the classroom. Games are a great way to immerse students in the content by introducing a fun and educational method for learning. During this workshop, facilitators will provide an overview of the benefits of using games in the classroom, offer hands-on experience with a selection of educational games across various Earth Science subjects, and explain how they have been successfully integrated with traditional teaching methods. Additionally, participants will learn how to create an educational game and will have the opportunity to collaborate and start designing a game and/or co-create an assignment for a specific game in small groups based on shared interests. Due to time constraints, the designing of the game may not be fully completed by the end of the workshop; however, we encourage participants to continue their work after the workshop.
Using Online Quizzes to Promote Effective Student Learning Strategies
Conveners: Jason Jones and David McConnell (North Carolina State University)
Instructors can intentionally structure their courses to incorporate online quizzes designed to promote two proven learning strategies: distributed learning and practice testing. This workshop will introduce you to a quizzing system containing more than 2,000 questions that are linked with specific learning objectives appropriate for multiple introductory geoscience courses (e.g., Physical Geology, Oceanography, Earth Science). Quizzes are administered through CLASS (Confidence-based Learning Accuracy Support System; www.classforlearning.com), a web-based system developed through NSF-supported research and road-tested in a range of institution-types. Course quizzes have been used to help students demonstrate their mastery of content and guide them to calibrate their learning against topic-specific learning objectives. CLASS also provides instructors with novel metrics they can then use to develop interventions to improve student outcomes. Please join us as we introduce you to the CLASS resources, provide you with access to question banks, and help you plan to use student-friendly quizzes to enhance learning in your courses.
Using Storylines to Resolve Misconceptions about Climate Change
Conveners: David Amidon (LaFayette Jr/ Sr High School) and Blake Touchet (National Center for Science Education)
This workshop will offer teachers an opportunity to engage in selected activities from two storylines developed by the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) aimed at resolving common misconceptions about Climate Change. Teachers will be introduced to NCSE's misconception-based approach to teaching climate change, learn about and engage with tools and strategies used in these lessons for spotting misinformation and resolving misconceptions in a no-conflict manner. Teachers will work through two of the lessons from the NGSS-integrated storylines - "Understanding Climate Modeling" and "Climate Change in Your Own Backyard." Both lessons feature a suite of activities and have been identified as high-quality educational materials by CLEAN, the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network. After working through the lessons as students and debriefing from the teacher perspective, we will discuss the principles of place-based learning and work in groups to brainstorm local phenomena and outline lesson storylines that could be used to create or adapt lessons for their local communities.
Developing Collaborative Operations Manuals for Research Groups
Conveners: Katherine Ryker (University of South Carolina-Columbia), Laura Lukes (University of British Columbia), Annie Klyce (Vanderbilt University)
Transparent expectations for being involved in a research group benefit trainees and PIs alike and help to elucidate the "hidden curriculum" of research. However, what do these expectations look like, and how can you keep them current? The motivation behind this workshop is that transparency helps everyone, but few of us have experience working from or writing transparent guidelines for operating as part of a research group. In this workshop, we will share resources and models for different documents, work with participants to identify key elements of potential documents, and provide opportunities for creating drafts of research group documents that can be shared with trainees. There will also be opportunities to exchange ideas with peers and the option to receive feedback on working documents.
Understanding Signals in the Soil: Data-centered learning in critical zone science
Conveners: Daniel Hirmas (Texas Tech University), Pamela Sullivan (Oregon State University), Hoori Ajami (University of California-Riverside)
This workshop targets Earth science undergraduate-student educators (graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, lecturers, and faculty) seeking to employ data-centered learning techniques in their courses. Participants will learn and practice the development of backward design of data-centered lesson plans and assignments, methods for data harvesting, teaching data analyses, and assessment of data-centered learning outcomes. Educators will come away from this "hands-on" workshop with a set of practical evidence-based, data-driven approaches to explore the Earth system with students.
Create Engaging and Immersive Earth Science Field Explorations for your Classroom
Conveners: Jessica Swann, Sina Kirk, and Melanie Narish (Arizona State University)
This workshop will provide participants with first-hand experience in designing and building a virtual field trip. Working with provided media, participants will learn how to use Tour It, a free virtual field trip creator available through the NASA Infiniscope project, to create immersive virtual experiences that make the benefits of place-based education more broadly accessible. At the conclusion of this workshop, participants will have a completed virtual field trip along with the tools and experience to create custom virtual field trips that integrate Earth science concepts for their unique classrooms.