99th ESA Annual Meeting (August 10 -- 15, 2014)

WK 20

Teaching Ecology Using Group Work

Science is a collaborative effort, but until recently science was rarely taught in a collaborative manner.  This participant-driven workshop will bring together people who are using group work in their classes and people who would like to use group work in their class to share ideas of how to make group work a successful aspect of their classes.  Participants will divide into topic groups, and after discussion, each topic group will report the results of their discussion to all participants.  Participants will have the opportunity to participate in two topic groups.  Topic groups include:

Formation of groups (including size of group)

What activities do you want students to accomplish?

Evaluation – how instructor counts points for group work

Peer evaluation of the group members

Frequency of group work in the course

Product produced by group work

If possible, please let us know in which two topic groups you would like to participate (david.grise@tamucc.edu and abigail.johnson@tamucc.edu).  If you have suggestions for other topic groups, please send them to us and we will try to incorporate them into the workshop.  Our goal is to provide participants with a working knowledge of how to incorporate group work into their classes.