SCIENTIFIC PROBLEM SOLVING AND TEAMWORK: ACQUIRING CAREER SKILLS IN A SEDIMENTOLOGY COURSE

Sedimentology courses provide good opportunities to challenge students to extend their skills beyond learning basic terminology and concepts to learning how to work together with a team to solve complex problems. Students need these advanced skills to succeed in scientific and technical jobs, which are increasingly structured around project-based teamwork. Students typically enter sedimentology classes with prerequisite geoscience coursework and enough experience to begin approaching problems like professional scientists. Students in my course work together in teams throughout the semester to identify knowledge they lack, to acquire information they need, to teach each other from their gained expertise, and to develop collaborative solutions.

The semester is structured around a series of large-scale problems that are mostly based on local sites and that demonstrate applications to themes of climate and sea level change, tectonic activity, hydrogeology, and petroleum geology. For example, a local stratigraphic sequence that records climatic and tectonic influences provides the context problem for learning about basic processes. Students first visit the site and, as a group, decide what they need to know to interpret the sequence. They then work together to learn about sediment types, structures, depositional environments, and stratigraphic techniques. Class periods are organized around group activities, with some time dedicated to whole-class wrap-up discussions and mini lectures. For most components, I provide some structure to the group process. For example, a standard “jig-saw” technique is used to help students discover how to identify and classify clastic sediments. Student teams of three assign each member a sediment size range (mud, sand, or gravel) to study. Each student develops a scheme to completely describe and categorize a sample in their size range. Each grain-size expert first meets with their expert group (others who have studied the same size range) to compare and improve their scheme. Students then return to their original group to share their schemes, and to work together to describe and classify actual sediment samples. Over the semester, such three-student groups work on problems of increasing complexity, advancing from single-sample to whole-basin interpretation.