National Academies Summer Institutes - Almost Done

We are near the end of the week long teaching workshop.  Yesterday we all presented brief (in 25 minutes) teaching units that our six individual groups came up with during the week--designed to use higher level cognitive skills and active learning.  I can say that I saw a few good ideas to use.  I am also impressed with how much we all came up with in such a short time.  I was in the "Evolution" group and we came up with a "Tree Thinking" project where a phylogeny is selected that best represents a set of amino acid sequences.  This is done on both an individual level then on a sub-group level with an increase in confidence in their individual result.  Then the results are compared for the entire "class" and it is shown that the class strongly disagrees (which I think is a valuable scientific lesson in itself).  The subgroups then talk to each other and discover that two different sequences are used and generate two different trees.  Then they brainstorm why this might happen and the function of the proteins is revealed--one is alpha hemoglobin involved in oxygen transport in the blood and the other is prestin which affects high frequency sound perception in the inner ear.  The prestin tree groups echolocating mammals together into a clade...  Then the class votes on a final clicker question with two hypotheses to explain the disagreement--in essence they learn an aspect of tree thinking by creating their own tree and realize echolocation evolved twice, as evidenced by the globin sequence, and is responsible for convergent evolution in the prestin amino acid sequence.  We got lost of positive feedback on our unit.

As I said, there are lost of examples and topics that will likely prove useful to me, but one turnoff aspect of this is we are required to come up with a similar workshop-like activity for our home institution after this workshop.  One of the activities this week was to group by institution and come up with a plan for this.  We had to "agree" to this, and to use a teachable unit from the workshop in our classes in the next year, to sign up for the workshop in the first place (some/many of us had to sign up and didn't really have a choice in the matter).  This feels like a proselytizing pyramid scheme; we have to agree to spread an idea before we even know or are informed of what it is really all about.  I understand they want to get the word out to as many educators as possible to magnify the return for their efforts, but as I said this arm twisting is a real turnoff to me.  I am trying to place that to the side and keep an open mind about the usefulness of the methods they are presenting.  However, in the former vein there are a lot of tricks used in the workshop that remind me of tricks used with kids to encourage compliance (in schools or summer camps) like guided choices, revised terminology to re-frame and reenforce topics, buy-in and identification with effort and activities, and group cohesion mediated acceptance of indoctrination.

Two things that I brought up with the instructors: the group learning activities can be a problem in the classroom for people with hearing disabilities.  The multiple group discussions in the same room create a lot of background noise which makes it hard for a certain minority to participate.  I was told that not everyone could be accommodated by the new classroom format.  (The ADA might have something to say about this?  One way around this is to let groups go to different rooms to discuss then regroup together at a later time.)  I also brought up that I and others would like to see more detail of studies that support the effectiveness of the teaching techniques.  After all, we are scientists and we (should) be naturally inquisitive, questioning and require evidence to make decisions.  This is presented as "scientific teaching" and the results from some studies have been presented that support some of their claims, (and I can intuitively sense some advantages to these methods) but many of us still do not feel satisfied that enough well controlled supporting evidence has been presented.  Also, simply showing the number of studies that are supportive versus the number that are not can be misleading, for example there could be a publication bias in "reformative" findings versus "negative" results and a bias in the results "looked for" in the people doing this kind of educational study in the first place.  (There is also the real possibility of bias from the instructor "trying harder" in classes where new formats and activities are being added.)  What I want is a T. H. Morgan that set out to disprove genes were on chromosomes and ended up proving to the world that they were and accepting the results of his experiments despite his initial beliefs.  In theory I could compare my own results from classes on different years, but as I said in the last post I use many of these methods already and do not want to get rid of this to do a classic lecture only format.

Anyway, I do not want to come across as completely negative.  This workshop has been useful and has also been an opportunity to network with biologists here in Hawai'i, Alaska and the West Coast.

On a final note, it has been a bit fun to be a student again in a classroom-like format after being the educator for so many years.  One thing I noticed is that faculty can make horrible students.  At times I had the people next to me keep whispering to me during presentations or copy my answers to questions.  Several people were looking at their laptops, tablets, phones rather than the presentation.  Some people spoke up and interrupted seemingly for no other reason than to get themselves heard, often with disruptive "joke" comments.  The presenters did a good job of herding the cats and deflecting attempts of derailment to unrelated topics.  I also found myself second guessing some of the questions "there must be a twist so the obvious answer is not right" and watching for cues from the presenter like telegraphing the answer with their hand movements.  For example, they would show an empty graph with two axes and ask us to draw what we thought the relationship would look like, but when they pointed to the graph and made a drawing motion while telling us the instructions they unintentionally drew the correct answer in the air.  These unintentional subconscious actions tend to occur when people are under stress and overloaded with distractions--like when giving presentations in front of a group.  This also gives me things to think about in the context of my own presentations.

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