Catching the new wave of teaching

© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org Many graduate students teaching introductory labs find themselves dissatisfied with conventional lessons that fail to ask the student to participate actively in the learning process. Research suggests that students do not use higher-order thinking skills (eg application, analysis, synthesis, and/or evaluation) in many of these introductory courses (Handelsman et al. 2004). As a result, some universities are already switching their science courses to an active-learning approach (Handelsman et al. 2004; Ebert-May and Hodder 2008). By the time current graduate students are job hunting or seeking tenure, they will probably be expected to know how to teach using active-learning strategies. As a graduate student assigned to teach a lab course, you can leverage this opportunity to become a better, more marketable teacher by demonstrating your ability to incorporate activelearning techniques in the classroom. Here, we offer practical advice and resources to graduate students for catching this new wave of teaching. The traditional (passive) teaching model is best described as “teaching by telling” (eg lectures and cookbook-style labs), where the instructor is responsible for giving students the information they need to know and the students are responsible for recalling that information at exam time. Active learning, by contrast, draws on students’ preconceived notions about a subject and places the new materials within their own model of understanding (ie a conceptual framework). Thus, active learning focuses on connecting what the student already knows with what we want them to learn. It improves students’ ability to apply their knowledge in novel situations (Bransford et al. 2000; Handelsman et al. 2004). It can also help foster connections that enrich the students’ college experience, by strengthening relationships with peers and instructors (Smith et al. 2005). As teachers, we may worry that if we replace time spent covering content with reinforcement activities, students will not perform well in upper-level courses and on standardized tests (eg Medical College Admission Test or MCAT). In reality, the questions that students face on the MCAT and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) Subject Test in Biology are primarily applied or analytical questions, as opposed to content-only questions (Zheng et al. 2008). We should therefore view time spent using FRESH PERSPECTIVES FRESH PERSPECTIVES