One of our main goals is to build a strong community of biology educators through professional development. We believe that this provides a foundation of support, helping instructors navigate and guide their own students to become engaged and impactful scientists.
If you are an educator looking to learn more, check out our professional development initiatives below.
Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) instruction and design
We offer workshops to teach instructors to integrate research into their undergraduate courses.
These one to three-day workshops help instructors think about course design from a research perspective. I work with instructors on how to accomplish both research and teaching goals at the same time and how to ground the course so that desired student outcomes are achieved. We will explore the outcomes you want to prioritize and how to design a CURE program to get there.
I have been studying CURE design and implementation for over a decade. As a postdoc with Dr. Erin Dolan at the University of Georgia, I assisted with professional development efforts surrounding CURE design and implementation, and I continue to do so today. In Fall 2018, I lead a CURE Faculty Learning Community for faculty at CU Boulder who were interested in this topic, and I am always excited to help interested colleagues to refine and assess their CUREs.
Introduction to Biology Education Research
We offer workshops designed to empower scientists and educators as science professionals
There is a paucity of biology education research that is authored by community college (CC) instructors, instructors at MSIs, and those at comprehensive and liberal-arts institutions. Through my work with Jeff Schinske at Foothills Community College, we created the Community College Biology Instructor Network to Support Inquiry into Teaching and Education Scholarship (CC Bio INSITES) to increase opportunities for CC instructors to perform biology education research at their own institutions. Through CC Bio INSITES, we offered a variety of professional development workshops and resources. Though CC Bio INSITES has ended, Jeff and I continue to be available upon-request to offer workshops on how to being in BER, how to frame questions, and how to collect high-quality data. Through this work, we hope to expand representation of the various contexts and populations learning biology across the United States and beyond.
Failure in the Science Classroom - Integrating challenge to promote students' success
We offer workshops to help instructors scaffold challenges in science courses
Sandhya and I offer workshops that help instructors to create structures to support student failures in science learning environments - both lecture and lab settings. We introduce the utility of failure as a learning opportunity, share some evidence-based strategies to support students' coping during failures, and use lessons from our research to support instructors in developing course-specific strategies to scaffold students' learning from failure.
I am happy to talk to your institution about CUREs, Community College Biology Education Research, or how to help students develop resilience as scientists. I am passionate about these topics and want to help students and instructors fulfill their potential. Past presentations have included:
How to get started with your CURE
Failing (in order) to Succeed: Teaching students how to navigate STEM failure
Advocating for Biology Education Research at your Community College
