SHARING TEACHING MATERIALS AND MORE: NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLACING DLESE RESOURCES IN CONTEXT

One of the primary goals of DLESE is to enable improvements in teaching practice by sharing exemplary teaching materials. Projects at the Science Education Resource Center are exploring how faculty can share their best ideas in ways that supports their use by other faculty.

On the Cutting Edge emerging theme workshops bring faculty together to share expertise around a specific geoscience topic or pedagogic issue. Materials collected at these workshops are then made available to the broader community via the On the Cutting Edge web site. Tools and templates now enable sharing of web resources, activities and associated materials, and course goals and syllabi. Contributions to these collections are invited from the broad community. On-line discussion with workshop participants is facilitated via discussion lists. Some collections support submission of comments on adaptation of teaching materials and teaching tips. Submissions can be made via the workshop web-sites (serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/).

The Starting Point website provides resources for faculty teaching at the entry level. This newly developed site provides a structure for sharing teaching materials in a pedagogic context. Examples of using specific methods or tools (e.g models, Socratic questioning, Course Performance Systems) to teach about all aspects of the Earth system are linked with information describing what the method is, why/when it is useful, and how it can be implemented. The site can be browsed either by teaching method or by geoscience topic. A template has been developed for contribution of examples and submissions are invited: (serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/).

This work indicates that teaching materials are made more useful by substantial contextual information including: learning goals, classroom context (what do the students need to know, what kinds of settings are appropriate), teaching notes/tips, assessments, and references. We are currently evaluating a variety of formats for presenting and sharing teaching materials.