Building Stronger Intro and Upper-Divison Courses

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Workshop Description

This theme of the Traveling Workshop Program brings full day workshops, run by national leaders in undergraduate geoscience education, to institutions and events around the country. As a part of the process of hosting a workshop, NAGT members at colleges, universities and other organizations can apply to have one of our facilitators bring a workshop on an important teaching topic to their campus.

Drawing on experiences from the successful Distinguished Speaker Series program and a decade of the On the Cutting Edge project, the goal of the program is to improve geoscience education by providing local opportunities for extended exploration and development of new curricula and pedagogies.

Topics and Sessions

Under the auspices of this program, institutions can bring in an expert to run a workshop in one or more of four important areas of teaching and learning:

• designing effective and engaging courses
• metacognition, motivation, and the affective domain
• active learning
• assessing learning and programs

See Example Programs »

Goals

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to

• use "backward design" to design a course
• identify big ideas ("enduring understandings") and essential questions
• articulate goals for student learning
• articulate learning outcomes and design an assessment
• design a learning activity based on research-based evidence on learning, engagement, motivation, and metacognition
• align learning goals, assessments and instruction