Workshop Program

Today's Learning Outcomes...

  • Get to know your colleagues in a new context!
  • Experience how unstructured classroom environments can work against inclusiveness, fairness, and equity.
  • Self-assess current awareness of and use of strategies to promote equity, fairness, and inclusion.
  • Use the 5E model to analyze and modify a class session, identifying opportunities for active learning.
  • Articulate the relationship between innovative teaching and the biological basis for learning.
  • Reflect on the impacts of scientist stereotypes and explore strategies for implementation of Scientist Spotlights in your course
  • Develop and get feedback on an action plan and leave with specific practical strategies to implement in your courses and programs.

8:30 - 9:00 Workshop Interview and Introductions: Getting to Know You...

9:00-11:30 Engaging Students and Making Classrooms Inclusive: Cross-Disciplinary Tools, Insights, and Strategies to Promote Student Success

If science is to address complex problems – such as climate change, environmental issues, and energy management, the culture of science must shift to value divergent thinking and include diverse perspectives. Participants will share a common experience as the basis for discussing how different students may experience classroom and other learning environments differently from one another. Participants will also have the opportunity to self-assess their current awareness of 21 equitable teaching strategies and identify those that could be immediately implemented in their classrooms, lab meetings, conference presentations, and other settings.

BREAK taken during the session

11:30-1:00 LUNCH

1:00-3:00 Order Matters: Becoming Metacognitive about Teaching Choices

What teaching choices are we making as instructors, and why? How do we as instructors decide how to spend time with students? To what extent do our teaching plans align with what is known about how the brain learns? What tools are available to become more analytical about our teaching choices and strategize change? Participants will explore their current approaches to planning and reflecting on their teaching, as well as explore the 5E learning cycle model as an analytical tool for understanding teaching choices. Participants will have the opportunity to analyze a current class session (or conference presentation) and identify changes that could be immediately implemented.

3:00 - 3:15 BREAK

3:15-4:30 Investigating Inclusive Curricula in the Science Classroom: Scientist Spotlight Homework Assignments

From television shows and movies to science classes themselves, students recurrently encounter images of scientists that, more often than not, convey a relatively narrow view of who does science. We might wonder, then; what are the impacts of these messages on students and what, if anything, might faculty do in response to this messaging? Participants will reflect on the impacts of scientist stereotypes in class, examine Scientist Spotlight homework assignments as an intervention to shift students' stereotypes of scientists, and consider implementation strategies for Scientist Spotlights in their courses.

4:30-4:50 Action Planning

4:50-5:00 Closing, reflection, and end-of-workshop evaluation