THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES
Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in Biology
Sunday, July 31 to Friday, August 5, 2005
Overview
2005 Co-Directors:
Jo Handelsman, University of Wisconsin
William B. Wood, University of Colorado
Location:
The Fluno Center for Executive
Education
University of Wisconsin-Madison
601 University Avenue
Madison, WI 53715-1035
Overall Strategy
The goal of the Summer Institute for Undergraduate Biology Education is to
transform biology education at research universities by improving
classroom education and attracting more students to research. We intend
to train a new generation of faculty by introducing them to a scientific
approach to teaching that reflects the way we function as researchers.
The target group is novice and experienced instructors of introductory
biology survey, introductory molecular biology/genetics, and introductory
ecology/evolution courses with high enrollments. We will select from the
applicant pool 18 pairs of faculty from 18 different research
universities. The Institute will include reflective writing, planning,
reading, researching, and talking about teaching methods and philosophy,
and will involve a mixture of presentations by expert teachers and
development of new teaching materials by the participants in small groups.
The outcomes will be a set of teaching materials that all of the
participants will test at their home institution in the ensuing
academic year.
One set of materials that participants obtain from the Summer Institute
will be used in the introductory biology survey, introductory molecular
biology/genetics, and introductory ecology/evolution courses and the other
will form the basis for a seminar in mentoring directed toward graduate
students and postdocs who are supervising undergraduates in the research
lab. The mentoring materials are well-developed and tested, making it
easy to offer with little preparation or time commitment (they were
developed for eight 1-hour sessions with the students). The participants
will be asked to arrange for someone to offer the mentoring seminar (as a
formal course or an informal seminar) at their home institutions to
students of any type – they maybe graduate students and postdocs or
faculty colleagues.
The materials developed for the introductory biology survey, introductory
molecular biology/genetics, and introductory ecology/evolution courses and
the mentoring seminar will be accompanied by assessment tools that the
participants will administer or arrange for our evaluator to administer.
The results of the initiatives from all of the campuses will be shared
with the participants and published. Participants' campuses will provide
fellowships to their teams to facilitate the implementation of these new
teaching initiatives.
Participants are required to:
- Teach introductory biology survey, introductory molecular
biology/genetics, and introductory ecology/evolution courses
- Come in teams that include one junior and one senior member. The
team may be comprised of two faculty members, or one faculty member and
one member of the instructional staff. The faculty member may be either
active in instruction or in an administrative position that will help the
team implement change.
- Write a short teaching philosophy before arriving at the SI
- Implement at least one module developed at the SI into their
introductory biology, molecular biology/genetics, or ecology/evolution
course during the '05-'06 academic year (modules might be a lesson
substituted into an existing syllabus)
- Offer, or recruit a colleague to offer, a seminar in mentoring for
graduate students, postdocs, or faculty
- Administer, or enable our evaluator to administer, assessments of
the introductory biology units and mentoring course
- Stay for the entire SI
Participants' campuses are required to:
- Provide funds for participants to travel to the SI
- A $2500 fellowship to each participant to facilitate his/her
teaching (a minimum of $5000 per team)
- Support and encourage the activities of the participants in their
departments and campus-wide
- Ensure that the activities associated with the Summer Institute are
treated favorably by tenure committees
The National Academies Summer Institute will provide:
- Lodging, food, and all other meeting expenses for participants
- Resources, instructors, and evaluators to help participants develop
and evaluate teaching materials
- One receiver for a wireless audience response system ("clickers")
for each team
- A listserv for all participants to communicate as they implement the
teaching materials
- Internet access for all participants throughout the SI
- Data about the implementation at the end of the academic year
following the SI
Structure of SI:
- Talks on research about learning and various teaching methods will
be presented
- Modules will be developed in small groups
- Inquiry-based learning will be modeled by conference structure:
participants will establish their teaching questions and hypotheses,
design or find active, inquiry-based learning tools, plan their
implementation, and determine how to assess student learning
- Participants will write pre/post teaching philosophy (1-2
paragraphs)
- Participants will write pre/post mentoring statement (1-2
sentences)
- Participants will be accountable for implementing and evaluating
course materials at home institutions and reporting findings to SI for
publication
Participants will work in groups of about 6. Groups will be organized
around large principles of biology (genetics, cell biology, ecology,
evolution, etc). Each member of the group must be able to teach (or
influence the teaching of) this topic in the introductory course and
groups will be assigned before the SI based on syllabi and other
information provided by participants. The groups will tentatively choose
a specific concept (natural selection, genetic drift, energy transduction,
etc) within their broad principle for which they will develop a “teachable
unit, to be implemented in at least one lecture or lab. The materials
they develop may be collected from the Internet, teaching books or
journals, or developed during the workshop. The groups will modify the
materials to fit their courses (incorporating modifications tailored to
each campus), discuss their context in the course, and design assessment
tools to evaluate learning.
Components of the Teachable Unit:
- Teaching objectives
- Summary of biology content
- Course context
- Approach to teaching
- Assessment of learning
After the SI:
- Participants will implement at least one of the teachable units
developed at the SI
- Participants will also coordinate or recruit a colleague to offer
the mentoring seminar (this can be a small-scale process – they might even
do it with their own graduate students who are mentoring undergraduate
researchers or team up with a colleague to do it for two labs of graduate
students)
Group facilitation
The SI facilitators will work with the groups, helping them hone their
teachable units to be feasible units, finding materials, and providing
advice.
Tentative agenda
The agenda will include morning presentations, group work in the
afternoon, reports on group work immediately preceding dinner, and group
work following dinner.
