STEM Education Scholars Program Motivates New Faculty to Restructure Courses

Katherine Friedrich

Future faculty and new faculty reshaped their teaching goals at the STEM Education Scholars Program on June 2-4 at Vanderbilt University. The facilitators modeled effective methods of course design, evaluation and assessment. The group also discussed how to use technology to streamline teaching activities.

"What was most exciting for me was... the instruction on how to take a class and deconstruct it into the elements that you want to convey," said Doug Weibel, an assistant professor of biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Weibel has redesigned his teaching plans for the coming year based on what he learned during the program.

The program gives a basic theoretical and practical introduction to teaching which is "almost absent in higher education," said biomedical engineering professor Tom Harris, lead organizer of the event. Harris has extensive expertise teaching engineers how to be better instructors; he and his colleagues from Vanderbilt drew on their experience in leading workshops based on the book "How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School."

"A lot of people don't know about the tools for designing and developing classes," said Weibel. He said the program would be valuable for other new instructors and future faculty. "You can either figure it out on your own and... turn many students off from science, or you can use what's available and go from there."

The event was "particularly useful for younger faculty," said Igor Roshchin, an assistant professor of physics at Texas A&M University. The program, Roshchin said, provides new faculty with a head start on discovering "small details that some people get through [teaching]."

During and after the active learning and lively discussions that took place during the program, participants became very interested in continuing the conversation. However, Roshchin said he is not sure whether this sense of community will persist without a deliberate effort to sustain it. "Time will show," he said. "Unless there will be something else organized by CIRTL, the chances of a network to develop are much smaller."

Harris agreed. "Workshops that don't have long-term follow-up are much less effective than those that do." To address this need, the CIRTL Network is currently setting up a Web-based forum which will allow participants to continue networking and discussing what they have learned - and how they are implementing changes in their classrooms.

The CIRTL Network plans to offer the STEM Education Scholars Program at Vanderbilt again in 2009.

September 10, 2008

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