The Inclusive STEM Teaching Project

The Inclusive STEM Teaching Project is a free, online, six-week course “designed to advance the awareness, self-efficacy, and ability of faculty, postdocs, and doctoral students to cultivate inclusive STEM learning environments for all their students and to develop themselves as reflective, inclusive practitioners.” The course was developed by a team from seven different institutions, and it's running again (for maybe the final time) next week.

On this week's podcast episode, I talk with two of the project team members. Tershia Pinder-Grover is director of the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching in Engineering at the University of Michigan, and Sarah Hokanson is assistant vice president and assistant provost for research development and PhD and postdoc affairs at Boston University. We talk about what makes this online course about inclusive teaching unique, including the use of synchronous learning communities, affinity groups, and a troupe of actors, as well as the challenges of putting together such an impactful course.

On a personal note, I was involved in another free, online course about STEM teaching, where we also supported the use of synchronous learning communities to supplement learner experiences in the asynchronous course. The Inclusive STEM Teaching Project team has taken the use of such learning communities to the next level, and it's quite rewarding to see an open online course like this use that strategy so well.

​You can listen to our conversation about the Inclusive STEM Teaching Project here, or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app. For more information about the project, see the project website. And to register for the March 3rd offering of the course, see the course page on edX.

Intentional Tech Slow Read Week 7

The slow read concludes next week (the week of March 4th) as we read chapter seven ("Authentic Audiences") together. Here's the teaching principle for chapter seven:

Connecting students to authentic audiences for their work can motivate students toward deeper learning.

And here are the discussion questions for chapter seven, adapted from an excellent reading guide developed a few years ago by Charles Logan (and shared under a Creative Commons license):

1. What are examples of authentic audiences in your teaching context? How do you ask your learners to create for and share with an authentic audience?
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2. I write in chapter seven that I sometimes post my students’ work “on the open Web” (with permission). What are the risks of posting our students’ work on the open Web and/or asking students to post their own work on the open Web in 2024? How might those risks be mitigated?
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3. Have you ever partnered with a colleague to facilitate a course exchange? If so, what advice do you have for educators considering a course exchange? If not, can you imagine a course exchange that might work for one of your courses?
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4. Do you match authentic audiences with professionalization opportunities for your learners, and if so, how?
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5. Teaching with Wikipedia has changed a lot over the years, even from the book's publication in 2019. In what ways do you use Wikipedia in your teaching? Were you aware of the resources provided by the Wiki Education group for having students contribute to Wikipedia?

You are invited to discuss these questions wherever you'd like, but especially on the Intentional Teaching Patreon.

Tabletop Top Games, Systems Thinking, and the 1927 Mississippi Flood

On Agile Learning blog (yes, I still blog!), I recently wrote about my experience playing Rising Waters with my colleagues at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Rising Waters is a cooperative board game where players take on the roles of African Americans in the Mississippi Delta in the 1920s facing a flood of epic proportion. As the description says, “You will confront two forces: racism from white landowners and the power of nature.” Rising Waters is designed by Scout Blum, a history professor at Troy University in Alabama, and published by Central Michigan University Press as part of its peer-reviewed games-for-learning series, a partnership with the Center for Learning through Games and Simulations. Yes, peer-reviewed pedagogical games!

In the blog post, I say a little about the box art (a detail from one of Harold Fisk’s Mississippi meander maps from the 1940s), the 100-page curriculum guide that goes with the game, and the very thematic game play in Rising Waters. I also explore a theme I've written about in the past, that analog games like Rising Waters can be very useful for teaching students systems thinking.

​You can read the whole post over on my blog.

Study Skills, Flipped Learning, and More STEM Teaching

Over on the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning blog (blogging is back, baby!), I recently recapped the first two conversations in a series of STEM teaching lunches I've organized on the University of Mississippi campus. As I've gotten to know the campus over the last year and a half, I've learned that there are a lot of faculty and staff invested in student learning and success in the STEM fields, and one of my goals in the lunch series is to cross-pollinate conversations across departments and schools.

On the blog, I share some highlights from the February 8th lunch, which featured assistant professor of biology Sharday Ewell, new to the campus this year as part of a cluster hire of biology and chemistry faculty who conduct discipline-based educational research. She walked us through her research on the study strategies that students use in biology courses and their awareness of the usefulness of the strategies they use, and she suggested a number of strategies for better orienting students toward effective study strategies through course syllabuses.

I also recap the February 20th lunch panel on the flipped classroom, which featured instructors from chemistry, chemical engineering, and electrical engineering. Their approaches to flipped learning varied, but they all described strategies they use to build more active learning into their onsite classes. When I asked the panelists if the flipped approach changed their relationship with students, more than one instructor answered enthusiastically that spending class time circulating among students working problems has meant much more interaction and engagement with their students, as well as a stronger sense of rapport in their courses.

​You can read the full post on the CETL blog.

Classroom Response System Tip of the Week

If you're using a classroom response system for live, in-class polling and you find yourself asking true-false questions, you might be wondering just how strongly your students believe in their true or false answers. After all, if "true" is the correct answer and 75% of your students answer "true," a good portion of them might just be guessing given that there's only two answer choices.

If that sounds familiar, I recommend adding some confidence levels to your true-false questions. Instead of the answer choices "true" and "false" use these:

1. True - High confidence
2. True - Low confidence
3. False - Low confidence
4. False - High confidence

You'll get richer and more actionable information about your students' learning!

Thanks for reading!

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