University Park, Pennsylvania – Cada R. and Susan Wynn Grove Center for Excellence in Science Education welcome its spring seminar on March 26 and 27 on the Penn State University Park campus.
The two -day event will showcase a presentation of Kimberly Tanner, professor of biology at the San Francisco State University, entitled “Collective improvement of our scientific education: efforts on the scale of the department in scientific education”, from 3:35 to 4:45 pm on March 26 in 102 Thomas Building.
The event will also include two practical workshops led by Tanner, both on March 27: “Maximizing learning by moving to active learning”, from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. at the Osmond 202 laboratory, and “engaging students and making the classrooms fair and inclusive: interdisciplinary tools, information and strategies to promote student success”, from 2:30 p.m.
Seminar: “Collectively improve our scientific education: efforts on the scale of the department in scientific education”
According to Tanner: numerous efforts to improve the education of science in higher education are focused on a few members of the faculty in an institution at the same time, with published evidence for the attempts to hire teachers in whole departments. We have created a long -term collaborative professional development program on the department’s scale: explorations of biology teachers in scientific education. More than three years of biology, 89% of teachers in the department finished a week -long scientific institute and 83% of eligible instructors participated in additional monitoring programs of an additional semester. A semester after the completion of the Institute, the majority of the former Biology Fest said they added active learning to their prices. These self-assessment of the instructor were corroborated by the audio analysis of noise in class and surveys with students of biology courses on the frequency of active learning techniques used in the classes taught by the alumni of Biology Fest and non-Ancians. Three years after the launch of the Fest of Biology, the participants in the faculty made massively that their teaching was positively affected. Unexpectedly, most of the respondents also thought that they had improved relations with ministerial colleagues and felt a greater sense of belonging to the ministry. Overall, our results indicate that collaboration efforts on the scale of biology to develop scientific teaching skills can indeed attract a large number of teachers, to arouse a general change in teaching practices and improve departmental relations.
The seminar will also be live via Zoom Webinar.
Workshop: “Maximizing learning by progressing towards active learning”
In this interactive workshop, participants will experience several examples of how active learning can work in undergraduate courses, with a particular accent on biology and chemistry. Participants will discover examples of how to integrate active learning into examples to one, five, 10 and 20 minutes that highlight common teaching strategies. In addition, participants will explore how the work of students produced during active learning can be systematically analyzed quickly to guide teaching decisions. Finally, participants will explore how to structure the active learning of students outside the class to prepare students and maximize learning during class activities.
Register for the workshop “Maximize learning by going to active learning”.
Workshop: “Start students and make classrooms fair and inclusive: interdisciplinary tools, ideas and strategies to promote students’ success”
The teaching of various student populations obliges instructors to build inclusive and fair learning environments. Research in psychology and other disciplines suggests that the way students personally experience learning environments strongly influence commitment, motivation, feeling of belonging and conceptual learning. In this interactive workshop, participants will share a common experience as a basis for discussing how students can discover environments in class differently from each other. Individual participants will then have the possibility of self-assessing their current awareness of 21 fair education strategies and identifying those which could immediately be implemented in their classrooms.
Register for the workshop “engaging the students and the creation of fair and inclusive classrooms”.
About Kimberly Tanner
Kimberly Tanner is a full biology professor at the San Francisco State University. His laboratory, The Science Education Partnership and Assessment Laboratory, studies what is difficult to learn in biology, how biologists choose to teach and how to make equity, diversity and inclusion at the heart of the efforts of science teaching. It is engaged in research in education based on discipline, directs several efforts to reform education in biology from kindergarten to the 16th kindergarten and is deeply engaged in the professional development of the faculty. She is a founding member of the editorial committee and chief co -editor of the first newspaper in her field, CBE – Life Sciences Education, and recently completed the service as director of the National Science Foundation American. Trained as a neurobiologist with postdoctoral studies in scientific education, Tanner is a proud first generation student, accustomed to her / her pronouns, and a proud mother of a professional drummer and a budding robotics engineer, both produced in partnership with her university lover and his biochemistry laboratory partner.
More information
Additional information and requests for information can be sent to Kalina Kelley.