Designing Effective and Innovative Courses in Mineralogy, Petrology,

and Geochemistry

Audio access: Call in 1-800-704-9804

Access code: 6316214Please mute your phone by pressing *6

Alternate number: 1-404-920-6604 (not toll-free)

Technical problems? Contact John at jmcdaris@carleton.edu

Program begins at 3 pm EDT, Thur. Mar. 29Please bookmark the workshop program at

http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/coursedesign2012/program.html

Introduction

On the Cutting Edge, funded by NSF and supported by NAGT.

Workshop is follow-on to summer 2011 workshop on Teaching Mineralogy, Petrology, and Geochemistry in the 21st Century

Second time Cutting Edge has offered a topic-specific course development workshop

Introduction

Focus on min/pet/geochem course design will allow us to brainstorm topic-specific issuesLeading edge ideas in these fields, and

how we can integrate aspects of these into undergraduate courses

Interesting opportunities to integrate GIS and remote sensing

Making courses relevantDesigning outstanding hybrid courses

Introduction

Builds on 17 years of course design workshops

Emphasis on workshopWill leave you well on your way to

following throughBenefit from everyone’s expertise,

develop a networkAdd to the Cutting Edge collections

of resources for teaching MPG for the benefit of the community

Workshop personnel

John

McD

aris

Dave Mogk

Bar

b T

ewks

bury

David McConnell Rachel Beane

Collaborate nuts and boltsMuting your phone – press *6Optimizing windowsUsing the chat functionRaising your hand; other tipsProblems? Please do not use the chat

function to report problems. Send email toJohn at jmcdaris@carleton.edu

or post a question on the tech thread of the discussion board.

All important links and instructions are on the workshop Program page!

Mineralogy

Your primary specialty

Petrology

OtherGeochemistry

Academic level of students in the course you are working on at this workshop?

First year students First year and sophomores

Juniors and seniors All four years

Which are true in your department?

Only min is required Min and pet are required

We have a hybrid Earth materials course instead of min and pet

Geochem is not taught as a separate course in our department

Min, pet, & geochem are required

None of them are required

Do you have experience in GIS and/or remote sensing?

A. Yes, and I include GIS/RS assignments in courses that I teach

B. Yes, I have extensive experience but I don’t include it in my courses

C. Yes, I have a bit of experience but I don’t include it in my courses

D. No

Workshop overview

Kickoff – goalsApril 12 – designing effective

assignments and activities; making courses relevant; presentation on the role of the affective domain.

May 3 – showcase of best ideas so far; presentation on assessment; discussion of hybrid courses, GIS/RS, and project design.

Summer workOctober 25 online poster session

Making courses more effective

Major theme of On the Cutting Edge has been improving student learning by making courses more effective.

This workshop not only to develop great new assignments and activities but also to address the effectiveness of courses as a whole.

What does it mean to make a course more effective?

Course Audition and Spoken Language at RIT School for the Deaf

For pre-service teachers who will have hearing-impaired students in classInstructor wanted students well-prepared

for future tasks as in-service teachersGoal: students will be able to analyze pupil

characteristics, classroom performance, and learning environments to design, implement, and assess lesson plans that will enhance spoken language learning.

Goal: Analyze pupil characteristics, classroom performance, and learning environments to

design, implement, and assess lesson plans that will enhance spoken language learning

Previous organizationAround topics such as nature and

physiology of hearing loss, interpreting audiograms, troubleshooting hearing aids, designing lesson plans

Final high stakes project – not successful

New organizationModerately hearing-impaired childSeverely hearing-impaired childProfoundly deaf child

Goal: analyze pupil characteristics, classroom performance, and learning environments to

design, implement, and assess lesson plans that will enhance spoken language learning

Same topics revisited with increasing complexity in each course chunk

Enables students to have repeated practice toward goals with increasing independence

Same overall content but goals threaded throughout the course

Students better prepared for future

What does it mean to make a course more effective?

Example from a Mineralogy course designed at a Cutting Edge workshop several years ago

Required course for geo majorsInstructor wanted students to do more than

just “know about” minerals – wanted students to be able to use knowledge to solve geological problems.

Goals: Students will be able to synthesize mineralogical data (visual inspection, petrographic microscopy, XRD and SEM/EDS) to address specific geological problems.

Goals: synthesize mineralogical data (visual inspection, petrographic microscopy, XRD and

SEM/EDS) to address specific geological problems.

Previous organizationAround topics such as crystal chemistry,

Miller indices, systematic mineralogy, lattice structures, space groups, etc.

Final project to “pull it all together”

New organizationCoreMantleCrust

Content in context, increasing complexity of practice in analysis and synthesis

Making a course more effective

Faculty commonly have “application” goals as well as content goals.

Typical course organizationTeach the content background and

techniques for most of the semester.Assign a high stakes final project - can

students apply what they’ve learned and do sophisticated hypothesis-framing, independent data-finding, analysis, and communication on their own?

Success is typically mixed and commonly doesn’t “stick” well

Making a course more effective

If you want students to be good at something, they must practice.

Course is more effective if students have practice toward the “independent analysis” goals threaded throughout the course instead of just in the final project.

Articulation of goals beyond content coverage and technique mastery are important because they drive what kind of practice students need during a course.

Importance of goals to course design

Example from an art history courseSurvey of art from a particular period

Vs.Enabling students to go to an art museum

and evaluate technique of an unfamiliar work or evaluate an unfamiliar work in its historical context or evaluate a work in the context of a particular artistic genre/school/style

Content coverage is not enough to enable students to achieve 2nd set of goals

Importance of goals to course design

Example from a bio courseSurvey of topics in general biology

Vs.Enabling students to evaluate claims

in the popular press or seek out and evaluate information or make informed decisions about issues involving genetically-engineered crops, stem cells, DNA testing, HIV AIDS, etc.

Requires very different kinds of practice to enable students to achieve the 2nd set of goals

Common denominator

What sorts of things do you do simply because you are a professional in your discipline??I use the geologic record to

reconstruct the past and to predict the future.

I look at houses on floodplains, and wonder how people could be so stupid

I hear the latest news from Mars and say, well that must mean that….

What do you do??

Physicist: predict outcomes based on calculations from physics principles

Art historian: assess works of artHistorian: interpret historical

account in light of the source of information

English prof: critical reading of prose/poetry

Approaching it from the standpoint of what you do

Your course should enable your students, at appropriate level, to do what you do in your discipline, not just expose them to what you know.

Start by answering the question In context of min or pet or geochem, what do

you do? What does analyze, evaluate, etc. involve?

Alternatively, what is unique about your world view/the view of min or pet or geochem??

We’ll give you a few minutes to think, and then we’ll hear from everyone.

What we’re going to do

Set goals: what do you want your students to be good at?

Plan the course: how will you cover content plus thread practice on the goals throughout the course?

Develop assignments: what assignments/activities would help students make progress toward the goals?

This is an effective design method; not meant to be the only effective one

An aside on terminology

Design model is goals-focusedTerminology: goals vs. objectives vs.

outcomes vs. learning goals vs. learning objectives vs. learning outcomesGeology faculty at our workshops largely

not fluent in edu-speakSome have encountered terms defined

differently in different venuesOur workshop participants wasted time

and energy coping with the distinctions

An aside on terminology

For our workshops, we collapsed goals, objectives and outcomes into one standard English term “goals”.

Goals for us will be concrete and measurable (“My goal in life is to make a million $$”; “My goal next year is to make the Olympic sock wrestling team.”

Goals: teacher-focused or student-focused?

Teaching is commonly viewed as being teacher-centered.

Reinforced by the teaching evaluation process

Commonly reinforced by how we phrase course goals: “I want to expose my students to….” or “I want to teach my students about…” or “I want to show students that…”

Goals: teacher-focused or student-focused?

“It dawned on me about two weeks into the first year that it was not teaching that was taking place in the classroom, but learning.”

Pop star Sting, reflecting uponhis early career as a teacher

We can’t do a student’s learning for him/her

Exposure does not guarantee learning

Students learn when they are actively engaged in practice, application, and problem-solving (NRC How People Learn) http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=9853

Goals: teacher-focused or student-focused?

Goals: teacher-focused or student-focused?

Focus should be on what the students are able to do as a result of having completed the course

Not just what the instructor will expose them to or show them.

Need to set course goals for the students, not the teacher.

Goals: teacher-focused or student-focused?

We’ll set student-focused goalsWe’ll answer the question what do I

want my students to be able to do??I want my students to use their strong

background in order to ____

rather than justI want my students to have a strong

background in ____

Goals involving lowerorder thinking skills

Knowledge, comprehension, application

explain

describe

paraphrase

list

identify

recognize

calculate

mix

prepare

Examples of goals involving lower order thinking skills

At the end of this course, students will be able to: list the major factors that can lead to slope

failure. identify common rocks and minerals. recognize examples of erosional and

depositional glacial landforms on a topographic map.

cite examples of poor land use practice.know how to read phase diagrams.calculate standard deviation for a set of data.

Examples of goals involving lower order thinking skills

At the end of this course, students will be able to:discuss the major ways that groundwater can

become contaminated.compare and contrast the features of the three

major types of plate boundaries.describe how pressure and temperature

influence the behavior of rocks during deformation, and give an illustrative example.

explain how the greenhouse effect works and explain why burning of fossil fuels increases the greenhouse effect.

While some of these goals involve a deeper level of knowledge and understanding than others, the goals are largely reiterative.

Examples of goals involving lower order thinking skills

Goals involving higherorder thinking skills

Analysis, synthesis, evaluation, some types of application

predict

interpret

evaluate

derive

design

formulate

analyze

synthesize

create

Examples of goals involving higher order thinking skills

At the end of this course, students will be able to:evaluate geologic risk in an unfamiliar area

and make an informed decision about where to live.

identify interconnections in systems and predict how changes in one part/aspect of the system will influence other parts/aspects of the system.

analyze the evolution of a region over time.use data from recent Mars missions to re-

evaluate pre-2004 hypotheses about Mars geologic processes and history/evolution

Examples of goals involving higher order thinking skills

At the end of this course, students will be able to:Make an informed decision about a

controversial topic, other than those covered in class.

Frame a hypothesis and collect appropriate field data to address a research question.

Design models of ___Solve unfamiliar problems in ____ Find and evaluate information/data on ____Predict the outcome of ____

Examples of goals involving higher order thinking skills

What makes these goals different from the previous set is that they are analytical, rather than reiterative.

Focus is on new and different situations.

Emphasis is on transitive nature of skills, abilities, knowledge, and understanding

Why are overarchinggoals important?

If you want students to be good at something, they must practice; therefore goals drive both course design and assessment

What kind of goals to set?

Higher order or lower order thinking skills?

Measurable outcomes or not?Abstract or concrete goals?

We’ll set goals with higherorder thinking skills

Overarching goals involving lower order thinking skills are imbedded in ones involving higher order thinking skills“being able to interpret tectonic

settings based on information on physiography, seismicity, and volcanic activity” has imbedded in it many goals involving lower order thinking skills

Why is it important to articulate higher order goals?

Students learn more when they successfully use their knowledge to do higher order thinking skills tasks.

Higher order goals tasks are hard for students.

If you want students to be successful, they must practice.

Assignments and activities need to give students repeated, relevant practice related to the goals that you value.

Can’t design effective activities if you don’t have the goals in mind.

We’ll set concrete goals withmeasurable outcomes1

Clearer path to designing a course when overarching goals are stated as specific, observable actions that students should be able to perform if they have mastered the content and skills of a course. A: Students will be able to interpret unfamiliar

tectonic settings based on information on physiography, volcanic activity, and seismicity.

Vs. B: Students will understand plate tectonics.

A is measurable; B requires a proxy.

1You can design a task that students can do that will allow you to measure directly whether they have have achieved the goal.

We’ll set concrete rather than abstract goals

Abstract goals are laudable but difficult to assess directly and difficult translate into practical course designStudents will appreciate the complexity

of Earth systems.Students will be able to think like

scientists.

Do these goals meet our criteria?

Students will be exposed to the main concepts in structural geology.

Students will understand that global warming is a complex issue.

Students will be able to identify rocks and minerals.

Students will be able to apply their knowledge of groundwater contamination to analyze reports and claims in the popular press.

Course goals draft

Go to the Participants page on the workshop web site; click on goals next to your name.

Fill in the course information section. Write a draft of your higher order goals and

answer the questions in the first section. Stop before the “grand challenges” section. Save often!!! And keep a Word doc backup

(template available on Program page).Leave Collaborate on; hang up your phone.Post questions to chat.Call back in to 1-800-704-9804 at 4:30,

using access code 6316214.

Feedback on goals draft

Access each participant’s goals page via the Participants page, and provide feedback in the discussion box at the bottom. Do the goals meet our “rules” (student-

focused, higher order, measurable outcomes, concrete rather than abstract)?

What suggestions do you have for improving wording or focus and for threading goals throughout the semester?

What do you particularly like about the goals?

Leave Collaborate on; call back in to 1-800-704-9804 at 5:00, using access code 6316214.

A list of leading edge ideas

Would be useful to have a list of grand challenges, leading edge ideas, and frontiers in MPG that could be incorporated into courses.

During the workshopBrainstorm an initial listAdd to the list over the course of the

workshopDevelop ways to integrate into courses

A list of grand challenges, leading edge ideas, frontiers

Break into small groups - group assignments are on the Program page

Each group makes a list on its workspace page – link on Program page.

Add relevant data sources or references if possible.

We will organize the ideas and make a web page.

Small-group brainstorming sessions

Leave Collaborate on; hang up phone. Go to the Workshop Program page, and call back in

using your group’s code. Group task:

Assign a time keeper and a recorder.Brainstorm a list of the current grand challenges,

leading edge ideas, and frontiers in mineralogy, petrology, and geochemistry.

Post questions to Collaborate chat, if you like. Groups finish by 5:30. Call back in to 1-800-704-9804 at 5:30, using access

code 6316214.

Homework for April 12 HW is also listed on Workshop Program page

and on the Assignment #1 page Complete the daily road check by Fri. noon. Finish goals review by Apr. 5 if not yet done. Read the feedback that the others have provided

on your goals draft and ideas, and revise. Do not overwrite your original goals. Enter your revised goals in the revised goals section

on your own goals page.

Finish your revised goals by midnight April 11. Answer the other questions on your goals

workspace page by midnight April 11. Read and contribute to discussion threads. Resources: online CD tutorial at

http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/coursedesign/tutorial/index.html

Thank you for your hard work today!

We are all looking forward to working with you over the next seven months.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to send an email.