Tag Archive: grants

Prepping Students for Collaboration

A recent tweet from Dr. Kelly Zvobgo prompted a discussion about how to address interpersonal issues that might come up between students during peer collaboration for a course assignment. When I was a professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), this question was often on my mind, as WPI employs project-based learning across its curriculum, which inherently requires lots of peer collaboration. As someone who hated working in groups for my course grade as an undergrad, I was reluctant to require students to work together. Mostly, I was unsure how to facilitate effective and equitable teamwork in a way that would address the pitfalls of group work that I had experienced as an undergrad (e.g., different expectations, skills, interests, and availability among team members). But…

Battening Down the Hatches

I’m excited to announce that my team’s proposal, “Battening Down the Hatches: Major Storms & Community Resilience,” was accepted by InTeGrate through SERC (the Science Education Research Center at Carleton College). InTeGrate is “a community program, a collaboration between faculty in the sciences and other disciplines, educational specialists, and evaluation experts at a diverse group of institutions,” which focuses on interdisciplinary methods for teaching about the Earth and sustainability. The “Battening Down the Hatches” team is made up of a geoscientist in New Hampshire, an emergency management specialist in New York, and myself – a political scientist in Massachusetts. We will spend the next two years creating, piloting, and revising a teaching module that focuses on the risks and hazards…