Kaatje Kraft: Using Monitoring Volcanoes and Communicating Risks in Natural Disasters at Whatcom Community College

Unit 1

• Because I teach in 3 hour blocks, I assigned unit 1 & 2 pre-readings together. I posted them on our online learning management system (Canvas) and provided 5 points/submission and mostly looked at them for completion. They were due prior to class time to assure they came into class prepared to discuss the topic of the day. For the pre-reading assignments, I used the separate file for students to fill in answers as many complained it was hard to edit the files with the readings (and for some, the word document was problematic, so I converted it to a pdf [although I provided both options as one of my visually impaired students required a word document for his screen reader]).
• I found it was easier to start with the brainstorm session about ways of monitoring volcanoes based on the pre-reading rather than start with the Mount St Helens history, so I reversed the first few slides.
• I didn't quite trust in the process of the gallery walk in letting them self-correct and I fear I spent too much time on the posters rather than letting them go through the process on their own. I had them printed on 11x17 paper and that was not large enough either, but I did attach the handouts to a white board so they could write larger for their responses. In addition, I used a 5x7 notecard for their summaries in the first stage, but I found that led to some groups taking too much time in writing out more detail than was needed for their summaries. So I would recommend using a 3x5 card. It may encourage more paucity of wards.
• I only used the older hazard map in Part D, but did not emphasize that they should be making predictions from the 2004 data, so some just picked all the possible hazards rather than consider the alert levels they had just picked. I should note that the students were not trained in map reading, but that did not pose any difficulty.
• The video really helped it come together for the students and they were surprised that the alert level would be so dynamic.

Unit 2

• In this activity, I had students number off in groups, but I think in the future I may assign groups for the expert groups. As I had a large number of slower readers/non-native English speakers and because this activity calls for reading in class, it meant there were some great disparities within the groups of completion of content. It made for some challenging group dynamics. In the future, I might try and cluster my slower readers/non-native speakers in either the GPS or seismic group since those were topics already covered in unit 1. In addition, I would put my faster readers in the LiDAR group since that topic had the most questions to answer.
• Which is to say, not all students finished at the same time during both the expert group breakout and then the following jigsaw portion. For those who processed information faster, I asked students to come up with a "25 word summary" (a Reading Apprenticeship strategy of summarizing content) of their particular expert topic (we finished class on this part, so I wanted them to be prepared to jump into the jigsaw for the next class period). For the mixed groups, if a group was done early, I asked them to go online and see what they could find out about current data at Kilauea (and if had even more time, to compare that to MSH).
• Showed the video, and students really enjoyed it, but I think most were on board for not diverting based on the reading anyway, so it didn't really change their minds, but I do think it helped expand their thinking about the diversion.

Unit 3

• For units 3 & 4 I assigned the pre-readings as another grouping and also had separate files for them to hand in/submit rather than answer on the reading itself for the same reasons as above.
• Students struggled with what a swarm was (which came through in my assessment, see below). Based on advice from my colleague, I asked them to only pick out the top 4, but I'm not sure that worked. We've modified the powerpoint slide to add a new slide that walks through an example with them, in the future I would do this with the class as I think it would help with the overall activity.
• Toward the end of the activity, we were running out of time, so I asked them after they looked for correlations, to then determine yes, no or unsure for whether there was likely magmatic activity associated with the seismic swarms. So while there was confusion about swarms, in the end, they still got to the main conclusion that Yellowstone can be active without any significant volcanic activity occurring.

Unit 4

• This was my favorite unit. Students really enjoyed examining the larger picture of how all these individuals pieces come together in this larger societal context.
• Most of the students selected Fuego as their volcano of focus, but at least one group selected the other volcanoes, so we were able to have a solid large class discussion. In the future, I might assign volcanoes to assure a broader range of discussions, but because the overall ideas were still covered across all the volcanoes, I'm not sure it mattered.