Center for Teaching & Learning Tekla Harms (Geology)

ACTIVITIES-START OF SEMESTER:

Fall Course: GEOL 291 - required course for the major

            Students in my fall class will all be Geology majors and will all have already had a class with me. They may know each other less well. Consequently, I see my challenges as (1) getting them comfortable with each other and (2) having them understand how the course will work in a remote mode. 

            In my fall course (Geology majors), I am going to try the “Stories in STEM” idea Alex Purdy posted (as a modified form of “I believe...”) I will ask students to share (Moodle post) a short statement of why they have chosen a Geology major, where they want to be going with that major, and how they think this course (required) will help them. I will share my own post - to model the concept.

 Jan Course: GEOL 104 - general interest course for non-majors

            My January course will be the opposite - non-majors and students who don't know me. My challenge will be to make prospective students comfortable with how the course will be run and with who I am as a professor prior to the registration period but also with each other once the class begins. I will try to meet the former challenges with a video posted to Moodle prior to registration. The latter challenge will require "icebreaking" activities at the start of the January term.

            In my January course, as an “icebreaker”, I am going to ask students to post (1) a short statement outlining their experience (or lack thereof) with Western landscapes (the subject of the course); (2) to explain their motivation for taking the course (to choose from a list including: want to learn some geology; are from the west or have travelled there; know nothing about the west and want to learn; need to take a Jan class and chose this one; not really sure why/no clear purpose in their mind); and (3) a longer statement describing the landscape they grew up in or that has been most formative for them (either built or natural). Again, I will make similar statements to parallel student activities.

ACTIVITIES - THROUGHOUT SEMESTER:

            In both my Fall and January term courses, small group activities and collaborative learning will be an essential component. Active learning and discovery will be used along with straight synchronous and asynchronous lecture-format for the transfer of content. Working together in small break-out groups on these activities is both the end need and the means to the end.

            I do plan to circle back in both courses to re-reflect on the information students shared at the beginning of the course.

Fall Course (GEOL 291): The circle back will be to reflect on whether or not the course is turning out to be what they thought; and if they can (yet) see how it fits with their goals in their Geology major.

Jan Course (GEOL 104): The circle back will be to ask students to consider if their growing knowledge of geology has changed their understanding of the landscape they described at the beginning of the course. Are there things they now want to know about their “home” landscape that hadn’t occurred to them to wonder about in the past? Depending on the enrollment, I may set aside time to share among the students these reflections on their “home” landscapes.

COMMUNITY BUILDING, MODE OF INSTRUCTION, and SUPPORT OF GOALS:

            Both the Fall and January courses will be online instruction only. Activities and assignments that typically would be completed by students sitting together around a lab table will now need to be executed by online meetings between student teams. A sense of student community and of students being accountable to each other will be essential for this.

            Most of these exercises are pre-existing activities that I am confident support my learning goals for these two courses.

            I am also thinking of ways to make office hours fully accessible to all students. I want to ensure that all students feel comfortable meeting with me in the online environment. In general, labs and activities in my courses are intended to expand student learning beyond lecture. They are grounded in material we have discussed but they ask students to move beyond that foundation to a broader array of applications. (Simply put - there is no recipe for completing an exercise.) Typically, I expect students to need to work with me to get guidance. I may start by an early exercise that requires them to Zoom meet with me for a personal session (have yet to figure out a substantive purpose for such a meeting - other than just making sure they know how.....).