Make Your GER Results More Accessible to Practitioners
Below are recommendations of steps you can take as a geoscience education researcher to make your GER results and teaching innovations more accessible to practitioners and to model best practices. These range from informal conversations about GER to expanding the ways in which you communicate your GER results in publications and workshops.
Talk to your colleagues about GER
Not only does this help make GER more accessible to non-GER colleagues, it also helps them understand the value and importance of what you do. This is especially important for geoscience education researchers who are on the tenure-track.
Provide short jargon-free summaries with practical info about implementation of GER
A good venue for this is In The Trenches (ITT). This is a full color, 16-page hard copy publication by NAGT, designed to provide a forum for geosciences education dialogue targeting educators in the classroom. It is a direct way to convey GER results to a practitioner audience.
Lead/co-lead a workshops on geoscience education topics in your area of expertise in which you incorporate GER results
Be explicit that the curriculum and instructional approaches you are sharing in the workshop are grounded in research and cite those studies. Opportunities exist to teach workshop at conferences and at many institutions. Be prepared to plan early if you are interested in offering a workshop at a national conference (e.g., GSA, AGU) - submission deadlines for workshop proposals at conferences may be as early as 10 months before the conference itself. If you are interested in teaching a workshop on your campus, think about whether topics within it would be of interest to practitioners in other STEM fields as well; this may make it more marketable. In addition, talk with your department head and dean, and if your campus has a center for teaching innovation, it will be important to have their support.
Specifically address the implications of your GER results on teaching and learning in the Research papers you write
All good research papers discuss the implications of their study findings. Don't forget to include a specific discussion on the implications of your GER results on the practice of geoscience teaching and learning (e.g., as required in JGE Research papers). This will help your readers connect your research to practice.
Write a Literature Review
One of the best ways to understand a new field is to read a review papers in that discipline. Literature reviews in GER can serve that purpose for non-GER colleagues interested in geoscience teaching and learning. GER graduate students and post-docs may be particularly suited to writing literature reviews because of their need to review the literature on topics relevant to their dissertation. The Journal of Geoscience Education recently added Literature Reviews as a manuscript category for publication.