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Questions we don't think to ask

Posted: Dec 1 2011 by Kim Kastens

The most interesting thing I learned over Thanksgiving arrived during a pre-dinner walk along a rural Massachusetts road heavily impacted by the Halloween storm. Many tree limbs were shattered, fallen to the ground or dangling from their parent trees. My cousin's daughter's friend Mike pointed out that the broken limbs still had their leaves, browned and stiff but still connected, while the healthy trees had lost all their leaves. The rest of us looked more carefully, and sure enough, his observation was correct, tree after tree. More

Faculty Professional Development by means of Case Based Reasoning

Posted: Nov 22 2011 by Kim Kastens

I've now been to five workshops in the "On the Cutting Edge" series of professional development workshops for college geoscience faculty (this one, and this, and this, and this, and this). I've been amazed and somewhat bemused at how well they work. People show up, they contribute genuinely good teaching ideas, they ask seriously probing questions of the expert speakers, new ideas get generated through small group discussion, and then people go home and actually make use of ideas from the workshop in their teaching practice. I'm not the only person who really likes these workshops: as of about a year and half ago, 1400 geoscience faculty from more than 450 geoscience departments had participated in Cutting Edge workshops (Manduca, et al, 2010).

In contrast, many of my colleagues concerned with the quality of science education in other disciplines moan and groan about how hard it is to get college faculty to pay attention to research on learning or to change their teaching practice. So how--by what mechanism--does the Cutting Edge approach work? Here's an idea. More

Seeking Kosmos

Posted: Nov 18 2011 by Kim Kastens I've been working on a set of concept maps showing major domains of geoscientific thinking as part of the Synthesis of Research on Thinking and Learning in the Geosciences. One tendril of the "Temporal Thinking in Geosciences" concept map branches off to depict "Historical sciences."

As described in an earlier post on temporal thinking, these are fields of science or scholarship that pay careful attention to the timing and sequence of events, and use timing and sequence to provide constraints on causality. Our concept map shows nodes for Cosmology, Geology & Paleontology, Archeology, History, and Developmental Psychology. More

But should we call them "lies"?

Posted: Nov 16 2011 by Kim Kastens Two interesting things have transpired since my previous blog post, "Telling Lies to Children."

First, Dana discovered a fabulous cartoon, the exactly speaks to the topic of the post. Wonderously, the cartoon is published under a creative commons license, so I can reproduce it here for you: More

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"Telling Lies to Children"

Posted: Oct 26 2011 by Kim Kastens & Dana Chayes

(Co-author Dana is Kim's 15-old daughter, a veteran of the New York State Earth Science Regents course, now taking integrated biology and chemistry. She is also an avid reader, currently working her way through the 42 Discworld books of Sir Terry Pratchett.)

In The Science of Discworld, Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen make the case that education necessarily involves telling "lies to children." We realize that telling lies to children is a pretty common part of traditional parenting (Santa Claus, stork, etc.), but in school! in the citadel of learning and truth! How can this be? More

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