- Year 2024
- NSF Noyce Award # 2342084
- First Name Paul
- Last Name Heideman
- Institution College of William & Mary
- Role/Position Co-PI
- Proposal Type Workshop
- Workshop Category Track 1: Scholarships and Stipends
- Workshop Disciplines Audience Geosciences, Life Sciences, Physics
- Target Audience Co-PIs, Noyce Master Teachers, Noyce Teaching Fellows, Other Faculty/Staff, Project PIs, Undergraduate and/or Graduate Noyce Scholars
- Topics Lessons learned from developing/implementing a Track 1 project / Track 2 project / Track 3 project / or Track 4 Research project, STEM content and/or convergent skills development
- Additional Presenter(s)
Cindia Romero Araujo, cnromeroaraujo@wm.edu
Goals
(I)For teachers, at least one small change or method they decide, during the session, to test with their students. These could include (1) Change-one-thing problems for reasoning, (2) Eyes-Closed Exercises for focus, (3) Minute sketches and folded lists for learning, (4) One fun thing for me, (5) One-minute presentations, (6) using representational gesturing to build recall and understanding for structures and events, and other topics covered more briefly.(II)For Noyce PIs, Co-PIs, and Staff, potential ideas for Noyce Add-on workshops or courses. In addition to the workshop itself, all of the course materials from ‘How Students Learn’ can be made available to Noyce grantees.
Evidence
Our Noyce Add-on course uses research from STEM education, cognitive psychology, and a small amount of neuroscience for a practical review of how students learn and ways to use an understanding learning for teaching. Major topics are evidence-based. Different approaches to meeting learning goals with students are presented and practiced with discussion of the underlying principles related to learning. The course encourages an attitude of skeptical inquiry and thoughtful classroom assessment even for teaching methods with strong supporting evidence; just because a method is known to be effective does not mean that method will be effective for all teachers in all settings. The course includes both lesser-known and well-known effective practices, including concept/mind mapping, think-pair-share exercises, strategies for student metacognition. In the workshop, the emphasis will be on (1) less-well-known topics that (2) have been frequently reported as successful by our Noyce Alumni.
Proposal
SESSION CONTENT: From 16 years of teaching ‘How Students Learn’, a one-credit Noyce Add-on course, we have abundant feedback from former Noyce Scholars about teaching tips that aid their teaching and their students. After a brief overview of the course, the workshop will cover a subset of less well-known teaching methods that our Noyce Alumni have found most useful. The topics will include: (1) Change-one-thing problems, (2) Eyes-Closed Exercises, (3) Minute sketches and folded lists for learning, (4) One fun thing for me, (5) One-minute presentations, and (6) using representational gesturing to build recall and understanding for structures and events. SESSION LEARNING OUTCOMES: For teachers, at least one small change or method they decide, during the session, to test with their students. For Noyce PIs, Co-PIs, and Staff, potential ideas for Noyce Add-on workshops or courses. Some of these require a small change to initiate, but can lead to greater investment and greater change. ACTIVITIES/TECHNIQUES TO ENGAGE THE AUDIENCE: During the session, attendees will make use of change-one-thing reasoning, eyes, gesturing, sketching, and more.
