barralopolis

Miss Coco and I

When I was a teen, I spent a couple of vacations horseback riding. It was in Cuba, and there was not much system to it. My brothers and I would rent horses in the morning (it was a big country park called Escaleras de Jaruco) and spend the whole day on horseback. I loved it.

Fast forward a few decades to now. In the time in-between, I may have ridden less than ten times, mainly on designated trails. So when I decided a few months ago to take advantage of a free lesson deal, I did it with trepidation. Learning English riding at my age feels borderline ridiculous. Good thing that at my age I do not really care about ridiculous anymore.

Sara the trainer is young and bubbly, and oozes positivity. During the past months (I take one class per week), she has taken me through the very basics and some bareback riding to practice leading with movement and voice only. Every time I miss a class (or a whole month as recently) she patiently walks me through the process again from square one.

All in all, I love it. I love the connection with the horse, Miss Coco. I enjoy Sara’s approach of trusting the horse and communicating with them. And of course I relish the exercise.

So what this has to do with my usual topic on education?

This morning, as I was painfully two-pointing and getting frustrated by how much I have lost for being off one month, I thought about what a silly client I must be for Sara. She trains people to become competitive riders, and here she is walking me around and tugging at my toes and knees to have them in the right position. We both know that I will never become good at this. But she is encouraging and positive. She gives me feedback and shows little tricks. As a result, I enjoy horseback riding, and want more challenges. I enjoy it even if my muscles burn and my back protests after every class.

In summary, Sara is a great teacher.

It came to me how easily we focus in class on our stellar students, the ones who do well, who want to become scientists and doctors, the ones who perform closer to our level. And how often we lose sight of those who know they will not be A students, but still may enjoy the ride, may still learn a lot and feel a deep sense of accomplishment.

From this year’s courses, I have five students who are coauthors of posters that will be presented at the AAAS conference  student competition next February. They are the typical non-traditional students: all work, and one is an active military.

I am immensely proud of them. They are extremely accomplished students who did very well in my classes.

But after this morning’s exercise, I wonder about the many others. And I promise to myself to look harder after each student. Because there is much happiness and accomplishment that can result even at a “lower” level of knowledge. And as educators, it is our goal to reach the “bliss point” of learning for each of our students.

Somehow this picture of a reflection seemed appropriate for the posting. Taken close to Ballarat ghost town, west from Death Valley NP.

One of my favorite bloggers is the fearless @hormiga Terry McGlynn, with whom I share many challenges related to teaching science and doing research at a mainly teaching institution, serving mostly underrepresented/minority students to boot. I enjoy his no-nonsense postings and practical advice, like today’s list of advice for education faculty to approach science faculty about new teaching strategies.

As I look back to my own journey, I am trying to remember how I became interested and engaged in trying novel educational approaches. I do not really recall any education researcher approaching me about it. It all started with me needing to design an online course, for which I had to take a training. There I heard for the first time about Bloom’s and backward design. Later I took an online teaching certification, which was a great eye-opener and game-changer for me. In my group, the next closest to science was a professor of health and nutrition. For a while I felt quite alone trying to figure out how to apply those approaches to science education, until Twitter put me in contact with bigger names already doing it. In a few years, science education started to appear in Science magazine, Vision and Change popped up in the radar, and research-based courses were all in the rage (for examples see GEP, SeaPhages, Small World Initiative, Genome Solver– disclaimer, I participate in two of those). So in my experience, it have been mainly scientists who ‘converted” to the new approaches and moved from straight lecturing.

However, going back to Terry’s list, I would add one more to the list: express the challenges of education research. In contrast to lab experiments, where it is relatively easy to control for variability, “experiments” with students are studded with confounders. Student randomization is often impossible, resulting in gains without an actual intervention. How to measure student learning is still in the works (collecting references would be part of a thesis, or maybe a separate blog posting). Scientists love challenges, and one way to entice them could be to express how hard it is to design and evaluate such interventions. From my own experience, a science person tends to believe that the only thing that is needed is to compare an experimental and a control group and voila! In the optimal case then, dialogue ensues, where both the practical and the less tangible confounders are evaluated, discussed, and hopefully addressed.

I took this image during a recent trip to Vermont. Somehow the combination of beauty near and far seems like a metaphor for my posting.

A lifetime ago, or so my pre-social media time feels, I asked Michelle Pacansky-Brock which education conferences she recommended. Michelle was and still is a major inspiration in my journey of teaching and learning innovation (check out her blog and her recent keynote at Focus on Teaching and Technology), so I took her recommendation of CUE at heart. “They are mainly K12 folks, she said , so a lot of what is presented does not directly apply to what we do (we both teach at the college level). But they are some of the most passionate, creative, and engaging educators I have met, and I always learn a lot from them.”

So I attended my first CUE a few years ago, and felt slightly out of place, but at the same time she was absolutely right about the energy and the enthusiasm. I also loved that everybody was running around with laptops and tablets, that things presented were immediately accessible real time, and during those 2 days I learned a huge number of tricks and came back full of ideas.

In the past 2 years I have been blessed with a position that allows me not only teaching and education research, but also some bench science research. I have come a whole circle at a higher level, and while biology education research is still my main focus, I enjoy being in the lab streaking microbes and planning experiments.

So why am I presenting at Fall CUE?

Michelle’s reason still stands. I follow through Twitter some of the CUE regulars and I cannot wait to learn hands-on about Google tools, or how to use games in education (another of my pet peeves), or get deeper insights into Project/problem based learning.

But the main reason is that I want to bridge the divide. Most people are aware of the STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education problems in the US: there are not enough qualified graduates, and in spite of a growing number of STEM jobs, there is just not enough qualified candidates to take them. Minorities tend to be a minority in STEM careers too.

I have taught and teach a variety of biology courses. It is fun to teach advanced courses where students are already interested and passionate about science, and want to become researchers. But the course that really touches me, both in the sense of challenge and responsibility, is the Bio101 or similar. Students’ first biology course in college, mainly for non-majors. ALL students are interested in biology, as biology surrounds us. The issue is, how to make them realize that they ARE interested? How can we make them realize that we can all use the scientific method and analyze complex issues with just a handful of tools and concepts? These are some of the issues I discuss in my presentation (still a work in progress).

Thanks to my collaboration and ongoing conversations with education faculty at my college, I am aware much more now about the challenges they face, especially with the new Common Core standards.

One of the most respected journals in science, Science magazine has a collection of materials and published recently a special issue about education. Some of the materials are dedicated to science at the K12 level. Because, let’s face it- most of us love or hate science because of a teacher in middle or high school. I hate physics because a teacher way back when accused me of lying (she told me to stop talking in class and I replied all hurt that I had not- which was true). I love chemistry because of fun labs and inspiring teachers, and I was hooked on biology because of a wonderful teacher in 7th grade who showed me that I could explore chemistry in living systems. By the time I entered college I knew that I liked science.

How can we, K12 and college educators and researchers make this journey smoother for students? Science teachers in K12 can collaborate with researchers to involve their students in real life, applied research. Some biology research requires complex instrumentation, but others may require just computers and internet (think bioinformatics projects, of which there is a number already). College educators can learn how to improve their teaching approaches. We want the same thing: well-rounded individuals who appreciate the beauty of science. They make take that route or not, but we all want adults who understand how science works and are able to make informed decisions on everyday matters. Think healthy nutrition, stem cell research, climate change, use of antibiotics in feedlots, GMOs, cancer treatments, or vaccinations. It is frightening to think how many of our policy makers do not understand science.

Ok off my soapbox for now. If you are at Fall Cue and are involved or interested in science education, please see me, tweet to me, or check out my presentation. I am in Orange County CA, and would love to talk to science teachers in the area and see how can we collaborate. And if you are reading this and have comments, advice, ideas, additional resources, please comment. The more the merrier!