Chantal Reid participated in the CIT Biology Faculty Fellowship over this past year to design and prepare to teach Bio 112, Ecology for a Small Planet. She contributed to planning the course for spring 2011, and will be teaching the course with Justin Wright in the fall. She is planning to use several of the techniques that the other fellowship faculty piloted and found successful during the 2010-2011 academic year.
In helping on the design of the new introductory ecology, I was excited to learn from the first cohort of revised courses how well received and effective instant feedback systems (e.g. clickers or PollEverywhere) are as a teaching tool. The range of chosen answers stimulates more in-class discussion about why certain answers were preferred, and helps clear misconceptions students bring in class. Students are increasingly tech savvy and this tool brings us closer to their experience. Overall, the first cohort of revised courses also rated highly the use of pre-class electronic polling (e.g. via reading test on Blackboard) to ask students about the most difficult topic or concept. I will use this technique as well. As students increasingly rely on the Internet to check their information, it is critical that we train them to think and evaluate information presented to them and to do so with technologies that are familiar to them.
Dr. Reid observed that fellowship’s focus on scientific teaching spread beyond the immediate participants:
In retrospect, the workshop permeated through discussions with colleagues afterwards whether they attended or not.