STEM Education Scholars Program Motivates Participants to Teach for Diverse Learning Styles

Katherine Friedrich

The 2007 STEM Education Scholars Program attendees rated the event highly and were excited to apply what they learned to their teaching, said chemistry professor Folahan Ayorinde, who organized the event. The program took place at Howard University on June 12-16. Graduate students Ingar Johnson and Sechaba Khoapa also participated in the planning.

The program is designed to provide new and future faculty with the skills they need to base their teaching methods on educational research. “We want to change the culture of… people coming into the teaching profession,” Ayorinde said.
 
One way that conference presenters accomplished this was by modeling teaching-as-research – using research-based strategies to improve education. Presenters also used teaching methods that work for a diversity of learning styles.

Through participating in interactive workshops, attendees became excited about using the CIRTL Pillars in their own teaching. 86 percent of those who gave feedback rated the conference as “very good” or “outstanding,” Ayorinde said.

Harbinder Dhillon, a biology professor at Delaware State University, said he was impressed with the conference – particularly the section on active learning. “I realized I have been using these techniques unconsciously… at a very diluted level.” 

One workshop that made a strong impression on Dhillon was plant biology professor Diane Ebert-May’s active learning workshop. This workshop integrated various methods of engaging students, exploring a topic, evaluating learning and assessing teaching. The participants “learned by doing,” experimenting with a variety of techniques which they could use in their own classrooms. “I would go in and out of the model to the concepts,” said Ebert-May, whose research links biology education with cognitive science.

Rather than relying on lecturing alone, Ebert-May put the participants “at the center” of the exercise by asking them many questions and involving them in creative thinking. This experience led the faculty and graduate students to think about how their students might feel in an equally engaging environment.

“All of us try to keep the students awake,” Dhillon said. He plans to use what he has learned when he teaches courses in the future. “We get a whole lot of training in how to do science, but not so much in terms of teaching.”

Ayorinde is optimistic that the workshops will lead to innovation in science, technology, engineering and math courses. Some of the changes may be subtle, but they will help to interest and retain students who have a greater variety of learning styles.

Next year’s STEM Education Scholars Program is scheduled to take place at Vanderbilt University. Visit the CIRTL web site in Spring 2008 to apply.  

July 17, 2007

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