Mini-Checkpoint Reporting: San Bernardino

February 22, 2018, 7:51 am CST

Pathway Development

Progress

Please describe the area of pathway development on which you have made the most progress since November 17th (Checkpoint 5).

Between November 2018 and January 2018 I coordinated three brown-bag lunches for participants in the NAGT teaching workshop that we held in September 2017. One of our part-time geology faculty gave an excellent and enthusiastic presentation on how she has incorporated what she learned at the workshop into her large Geol 101 lectures. She has implemented the use of a seating chart that enables her to call on students by name, and also enables students to do group work in class with a consistent set of group members. She has implemented a group activity in almost every class period. She reports that class attendance has improved from 60% in a prior quarter to 90% during Fall 2018. She also introduced us to IF-AT (Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique) "scratchers" and Kahoots (a free student response system). She is also using an online post-test reflection to gain additional learning opportunities from test.

Most participants have now submitted a report to the workshop website on what they implemented from the workshop and the feedback they received from a peer observer during their implementation.

Obstacles

Please describe the area of pathway development in which you have encountered obstacles to progress and would appreciate input from the national and regional alliances.

Gaby has been trying to set up a meeting with the person in charge of San Bernardino County's seismic simulator to discuss our plans for a joint service learning project for high school, community college and CSUSB students focused on their simulator. Unfortunately multiple changes in staff within the past year have made it difficult to move forward.

On the positive side Gaby and I received valuable input from John Taber during a conference call on December 1, 2017. We discussed technical details of how the seismic data collected on Quake Catcher (or other) sensors could be used to calculate magnitude. John's seismological expertise was invaluable as he helped us to think through various options in the process and workflow.

Other pathway development progress to report

1. Sally McGill gave an oral presentation on the San Bernardino Alliance at the American Geophysical Union Meeting in December 2017.
2. CSUSB undergraduate, Katie VonSydow, signed up for service learning credit in Fall 2017. She has been on-call to handle requests from K-12 schools for presentations about Earth Science. In Fall 2017 she led several hikes from our campus to the San Andreas fault for K-12 classes, and she gave a presentation on earthquakes in a middle school classroom. She plans to continue doing this during spring 2018, and will also be creating some video mini-presentations on topics in Geology.
3. One of the high school teachers in our alliance, Bernadette Vargas, asked if one of our CSUSB graduate students, Dylan Terry (whom she had met at the teaching workshop in Sept. 2017), could accompany her class on a field trip to local cinder cones in the Mojave Desert as a volcanology expert. Dylan, who's MS thesis is on the geochemistry of the Mono and Inyo volcanic domes, has agreed and will be paid a small stipend from the San Bernardino Alliance budget.
thinking about expanding to other comm colleges

Tips for pathway development

There are many different approaches that can be taken to pathway development. The approach we took in the San Bernardino Alliance was to think about the types of people and institutions that are involved in geoscience in our region and are interested in promoting the development of a diverse workforce. We take advantage of existing relationships to form our initial core of alliance members and hope to expand out from there.

Learning Opportunities Diagram/Pathway Map

Tips for creating a pathway map

The San Bernardino Alliance pathway primarily connects existing educational institutions in the region and seeks to support students through the transitions between institutions (e.g., high school to community college to university) by creating a collaborative network of geoscience faculty at those institutions and activities that provide students opportunities to network with students and faculty at institutions that represent the next step along the pathway for them. Thus our pathway map lists the institutions that are participating so far and the activities that we have undertaken or plan to undertake to either (1) support students through those transitions, or (2) strengthen the quality of their geoscience education at each institution.