Workshop B: Enhance Your Field-Based Teaching: Implementing a Practical Teaching Toolkit for Student Success

Presenter: Haider Ali Bhatti (UC Santa Cruz); Lina Arcila Hernandez (UCSC); Lalitha Balachandran (UCSC); Erika Zavaleta (UCSC); Roxanne Beltran (UCSC)

Field-based biology courses can be powerful experiential learning opportunities for undergraduate students, but instructors may struggle to implement evidence-based field teaching techniques due to the lack of centralized guidance for this specialized instructional context. Current field teaching approaches often rely on trial-and-error methods while instructors navigate complex challenges including varying institutional support, safety logistics, diverse student needs, and outdoor learning environments. These challenges create a knowledge-practice gap between the recognized potential of field-based biology education and practical implementation strategies that support student learning (Beltran et al., 2024). Our workshop will address this gap by guiding participants to use our Field Teaching Toolkit (Arcila Hernández et al. in review), a comprehensive framework derived from field-based biology educators that distills five critical practices for effective field-based instruction: 1) providing context, 2) emphasizing community well-being, 3) preparing logistics, 4) developing interpersonal and communication skills, and 5) applying inclusive pedagogy. These five practices are operationalized through ten evidence-based pedagogical tools known to improve student engagement, foster belonging, and enhance learning outcomes across field-based teaching contexts. 

During this workshop, participants will engage in activities that mirror the community-building principles central to effective field-based teaching. Specifically, participants will apply elements from the Field Teaching Toolkit to their own teaching contexts, representing a meaningful step toward closing the knowledge-practice gap mentioned above. Instructors will select one specific field teaching component from their own practice which will then be enhanced using the Field Teaching Toolkit through a series of scaffolded workshop activities. The concrete outcome will be a personalized Field Teaching Action Plan containing 2-3 specific, evidence-based improvements ready for implementation. These improvements may include enhancing the selected teaching component with more inclusive instructional strategies, identifying strategies to proactively address potential challenges when teaching that component in the field, and/or assessment protocols tailored to participants' specific teaching contexts. By developing this Field Teaching Action Plan, participants will learn how to design inclusive experiences that foster student community and belonging, participate in inquiry-driven facilitation techniques, and develop strategies for addressing common field teaching challenges. The workshop will progress instructors through structured group activities and several rounds of peer feedback to enhance participants’ confidence and competence in field-based instruction. Ultimately, participants will progress from a foundational understanding of the Field Teaching Toolkit to hands-on design and implementation planning, culminating in reflection and assessment strategies that ensure efforts to improve their field-based teaching are maintained beyond the workshop.

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Metacognition, the understanding and regulation of one’s own thinking, is a critical factor in helping students think like biologists and learn most effectively (Tanner, 2012). Metacognition is particularly important for learning and performance when students are operating under time restrictions or in open-ended learning environments. Many students face challenges in using metacognition to guide their learning, either in adopting new learning strategies or knowing when and how to employ the most effective strategies for a given task (Stanton et al., 2021). Instructors can assist students in overcoming these challenges and developing metacognitive skills by intentionally building in metacognitive activities into their courses.  This workshop will equip participants with the practical knowledge to incorporate metacognitive activities into their own courses. Through a combination of small group discussions and background information from the literature, participants will develop the knowledge and vocabulary to justify the relevance and importance of incorporating metacognitive activities into their courses. The workshop will leverage examples of metacognitive activities, such as learning reflections, to help participants identify strategies that can be used to develop students’ metacognitive skills and articulate some of the instructional choices involved in implementing metacognitive activities. During the workshop, attendees will be guided through the process of developing a metacognitive activity to implement in one of their own current or future courses. After outlining the specifics of their activities, participants will engage in small group discussions to gain feedback on their proposed activities and examine the strengths and weaknesses of different design and implementation choices (e.g., frequency of metacognitive activities, student accountability, and feedback).

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Workshop E: Letting your teaching work for you: Instructional practices that serve both student learning and your development as an active-learning instructor

Presenter: Alex Waugh (Michigan State University)

Drawing on research highlighting the critical role of teaching knowledge in effective active-learning instruction, this workshop will help attendees establish instructional practices that support the co-development of teaching knowledge and active-learning practice. Attendees will deepen their awareness of the knowledge they bring to teaching, use reflective tools to develop that knowledge further, and refine their instructional strategies by making nuanced adjustments that both enhance student learning and accelerate the development of their active-learning expertise. Attendees will receive tools and concrete strategies to support their developing active-learning knowledge. Working individually and in groups, they will refine activities from their own lessons to align more closely with their developing knowledge of how students learn and adjust them to generate rich, actionable feedback on student thinking and learning, thereby supporting more efficient development of active-learning expertise. 

Attendees will be able to: 

1. Reflect on their teaching knowledge using guided questions to contrast common and more advanced ideas about teaching and learning. 

2. Apply insights from case studies that show how lesson activities can be designed to pay a double dividend: enhanced student learning and accelerated development of the instructor’s active-learning expertise.

3. Build connections between their teaching knowledge and practices and identify instructional moves that support development of active-learning knowledge and practice.

4. Interpret a model that shows how instructors can integrate general knowledge of how students learn with topic-specific insights about student thinking to support their expertise development and student learning.

5. Refine an activity from their course to leverage their general and topic-specific knowledge of student learning while also producing more useful feedback to guide their development as an instructor.

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Workshop F: Discipline-Based Education Research 101

Presenters: Mallory Rice (CSU San Marcos), Mike Wilton (UC Santa Barbara)

The workshop will provide a comprehensive introduction to discipline-based education research (DBER). The workshop will cover key topics and research questions being addressed in the field and discuss potential ways to address these questions using research designs that support both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The workshop will also discuss the role of theoretical frameworks in informing DBER studies. Lastly, the workshop will review different ways to measure student success outcomes using course-level data, student survey data, and focus group/interview data. These discussions will revolve around both academic outcome measures and non-academic outcome measures (e.g., social-psychological measures that capture student experiences and engagement). Participants will be given the opportunity via small group discussions to outline a research design and receive feedback.  

Participant Outcomes:

By the end of this workshop, participants will: 

• Identify research questions relevant to their interests and goals 

• Know when to apply quantitative and qualitative analysis

• List academic and non-academic outcome measures relevant to their study goals 

• Have access to resources to design and implement a research study

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Workshop G: Biology through Art: Student learning and engagement through artistic expression

Presenter: Michael R. Maxwell (National University)

Interdisciplinary instruction promotes many facets of learning, including increased attention, memory, observational skills, and organization and synthesis of ideas.  The Biology through Art project builds on the demonstrated benefits of art-enhanced instruction in biology courses to increase creativity, course engagement, and concept comprehension by students through artwork in biology courses.  Art-enhanced instruction ranges from sketching and diagramming course concepts to illustrating concepts through drawing, painting, and 3D printing.  To date, over 30 biology courses have engaged over 1,000 students in assignments involving artwork at nine universities.  Initial results indicate increased assessment scores with art assignments, greater attentiveness and enthusiasm among students in class, renewed excitement for teaching among faculty, as well as a stronger sense of community through interdisciplinary collaboration.  Biology instructors that are interested in art-enhanced instruction often perceive lack of training in art as an obstacle to implementation.  This workshop seeks to overcome such obstacles.  The workshop introduces simple approaches to drawing and sketching that non-artist instructors can employ in biology courses.  Included are simple drawing exercises in blending, shading, and sketching that can be applied to topics such as morphology and anatomy, biodiversity, and ecology.  No prior experience in art is assumed or required by the presenters.

Participants will:

• Become familiar with basic tools of drawing (e.g., different pencils, erasers, blending stumps).

• Learn fundamental exercises in pencil drawing through which they can guide students.

• Receive one or more lesson plans through which students complete artwork on concepts in biology.

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