Monthly Archives: December 2017

12/7/17

CATL Observation # 6: EOSC 220 Final Lecture

No matter how experienced you are, how much time you have spent working in the field, or how long you have been studying as a student, it is still an extremely rare opportunity to be able to look at and hold literally all of Earth’s history in a single lesson. I am not talking about presenting pictures on lecture slides or timelines, I actually mean having the opportunity to touch the oldest and (~)youngest rocks or minerals on our planet (1944 AD to 4.45 Ga), with one in each hand if you so desire.

Dr James Scoates provided his 2nd-year mineralogy students with this exactly opportunity on November 30th. He constructed the class as a way to motivate his students to practice far transfer with the information and skills they obtained in his course. James started setting up the class in the hour before by putting up posters the students had created in a previous jigsaw lecture, containing each phase of mineral evolution on Earth, he put up pieces of paper around the room indicating all of the geologic time periods, and he hung two geologic timelines up at the front of the room. He also had two trolleys at the front of the room with trays of the hand specimens the students would be using during the activity.

James started the lecture by orienting the students to the room setup and revisiting the ideas of mineral evolution they worked with during the jigsaw. He did some reframing of course material for the students, most notably comparing mineral formulae to a language, calling them the ‘language of geology’. Very cool. He then continued explaining the activity for the class, showing their worksheets on the projector screen and dissecting them for the students. The students were asked to investigate one of the rocks on the trolleys (without knowing what it was), record their observations, and make some interpretations. Once the students finished, James asked them to reveal the information about their rocks, which, unbeknownst to the students, was taped inside the sample trays the whole time! It was a super elegant way to do a reveal. During the activity, James also used two computers (one for each projector in the room), and constantly used them both very effectively. For example, during the activity, he had the sheet they should be working on visible on one screen and a geologic timeline visible on the other.

Once everyone had identified their rocks and found the associated age information on the info sheets, they went to place the specimens around the room in the timeline James setup before class. James then prompted the students to go investigate the other rocks around the room and annotate a worksheet of the geologic timescale with what they learned through their investigations.

With about 10 minutes remaining in the class, James asked everyone to take a seat, and he went through a few slides summarizing their term. He did a fantastic job of showing them their journey through the course and motivating them by highlighting the skills and tasks they accomplished. He put videos of them working on different activities into the presentation, pictures of guest lectures (including my Biomineralization lecture), and highlighted some of the entertaining and well-done assignments he received, including their reports that had ‘field selfies’ on the cover. It was the most successful summary of a mineralogy course, or really any course, that I have ever seen. I learned a lot about the interesting things you can do to motivate your students to transfer what they learned in your course to the rest of their student careers and in the real world!

12/7/17

CATL Practicum Reflection #6 and #7: EOSC 523 Isotopes in Archaeology (second iteration) and Stable Isotopes Jig

This was the second iteration of the isotopes in archaeology lecture, which I ran last year in the same class, EOSC 523: Isotope Geology (grad class). One of the major benefits of this class is, due to its small size, the ability to organize individuals into groups based on their interests and levels of pre-existing knowledge. Since the lesson ran so well last year, we didn’t tweak the lesson plan much. However, the class fell much earlier in the schedule than last year, which led to the students having less of the ‘toolkit’ or background information that would help them in the high-order activity. As such, we modified some of the content delivery to be slightly less dependent on the scaffolding, and designed and implemented a second lecture on stable isotope systematics (the missing piece) and used the information given in the archaeology lecture to support the learning of a new geochemical ‘tool’.
This had a profound impact on the students; it gave them a real reason to learn this part of their toolkit, instead of them just learning something in case it can be eventually used. The archaeology lecture provided the motivation or bridged the stable isotopes frameworks to real-life life examples related to their own human history. It was really fun!
The archaeology lecture has a jigsaw component (a ‘nested’ jigsaw, as described in the reflection of the session from last year). We decided to build on that with the stable isotopes jigsaw to keep a format that the students were already familiar with. The jigsaw went as follows:
  1. All students chose a coloured sticky note as they entered the room.
  2. The each received a booklet of lecture slides that contained all of the content we needed to deliver about all of the different types of isotope fractionation (the ‘pieces’ for this jigsaw activity).
  3. The students grouped themselves by their coloured stickies (wonder where I got that idea ;).
  4. Each of the four groups were given a fractionation type, and all groups received the same set of questions to address related to their type of fractionation.
  5. Each student worked on their own initially to find the answers to the questions in the booklet, and then to make a schematic drawing showing their process in action (this is super valuable when working with processes).
  6. They then compared and contrasted their individual drawings within their group and compiled them into one (synthesis).
  7. The group drawings were then hung up around the room, and we did a gallery walk.
  8. Then, the authors of each drawing explained their responses to the questions and their drawing, answering any questions.
This was a really successful combination of lectures, as it provided the students with a break from the ‘toolkit’ with the archaeology lecture, gave them new information on an interesting affective topic (geochemistry of themselves, basically), which motivated them to learn the next part of the toolkit (stable isotopes). It was very successful, and I now see that the ‘bookend’ approach to designing lectures can also be valuable when planning a course, in that it’s good to break up the teaching style and type of content throughout the term to keep things fresh and students motivated!
12/7/17

CATL Practicum Reflection #5: Hominin Cards and the Lab/Lecture Dichotomy

After my first iteration of this guest lecture, while planning for this year I realized that there simply still was too much content I need to cover in this lesson for a single 50-minute session. Through a few discussions with my mentors about this, Stuart Sutherland (the Professor for the course) and I started to think about the possibility of breaking the lab/lecture dichotomy, a very common course structure in the sciences. As a result, we made a bold choice: we would keep the ‘homing cards’ activity for the 50-minute lecture, where all of the students could participate (essential for the activity), and we moved the latter half of the content delivery (which is examinable) to each of the two lab sections in the course during the same week. We also developed and implemented a new ‘hominids lab’, for which the lecture material was a good primer and served as an introduction.

With this new framework, the extra time provided for the ‘hominin cards’ made a huge difference. I was able to annotate the timeline component much easier and in more detail, and we had the opportunity to discuss more during the large group component of this multi-faceted jigsaw. Saving the second portion of lecture for the lab sections was also an excellent way for students to get the material necessary for higher-order agency literally minutes before applying it in the lab. As Stuart and I teach this class with a bit of a flipped format anyway (i.e., often labs are like lectures and vice versa), this was an excellent example of how removing the dichotomy not only improves student learning, but also facilitates their success when conducting high-order actions based on course content in either the lecture or lab sessions.

That being said, the downside was that I had to give the second half of the lecture two times, once for each of the lab sections. This might be a hindrance to removing the lecture/lab dichotomy for some instructors. However, it provides the opportunity for TAs or guests to teach in multiple formats if the instructor is not willing to commit the extra energy for their students.