From Feb 29-March 5, we hosted a visit by both Scott Strobel, Deputy Provost for Teaching and Learning at Yale, and Jennifer Frederick, Director of the Yale Teaching Center. During the visit, both of them visited all three Divisions at Yale-NUS College, and discussed Teaching and Learning at Yale-NUS with a wide cross section of faculty, administrators, and even some students. This post is about Scott and his presentation on “Plastic-Eating Fungi & Other Wonders Discovered by Yale Undergraduates” to the Yale-NUS College Science Division.  The talk centered on a course offered at Yale in which students study endophytes, a variety of fungus, both at New Haven in class, and in the rainforests of Ecuador. During their fieldwork they collect new endophytes, which they bring back to Yale for further study in the laboratory. The program includes a summer program where students spend the rest of the summer characterizing these new organisms, in many cases discovering new species with amazing properties (hence the title of his talk!).

Scott pointed out that the experiential nature of the course, and the type of science it covers, is an “accessible entry point for novice scientists to do original research.”  He is also conscious of the many positive features of the course – it gives students ownership, provides uncertainty about outcomes, is a “vast” area of study with multiple possible directions, has “fundable and publishable observations,” and “seamlessly ties together the teaching and research missions” of Yale College.  The course embodies a very nice mix of active learning, experiential learning, and authentic learning, with assessments that in some cases enable students to develop scientific papers, or even patents!

The subject of endophytes is new to many non-biologists. Scott explained that there are over 1 million plan associated fungi of which about 80% are unknown. The project has been described in the scientific literature (Bascom-Slack and Strobel, 2012; Strobel and Strobel, 2007).

The course begins with students choosing plants to study, and in this pursuit they engage in a bit of ethnobiology. Some plants were known by local people to kill fish, to heal snake bites, and to take care of infections. In collaboration with the Catholic University of Ecuador, Scott and his 18 students forge into the Yasuni National Forest, which has sites which offer the most biodiverse environments in South America.  Once there, after long journeys on roads built for oil exploration, they seek out the plants described by local people with bioactive properties. Many of these properties are endowed upon the plants from the little microbes living on them – the endophytes.

Scott is assisted in this course by Percy Nunez, a local guide who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the plants, and he equips the students with flash cards so they can identify the plants they are seeking. Students take samples, and within these samples are typically 25-150 microbe species – most of them completely unclassified by biology!  Scott told us that over the years, he has had about 126 undergraduates in this course, and not only do they discover new species but in some cases a new genus – averaging about one new genus per student per year!

From the plants they isolate the endophytes, and then from this they extract liquid cultures and chemical compounds. Each year he studies about 500 fungal extracts per student, and from these can come volatile antibiotics (capable of killing bacteria at a distance), also fuel additives, and a species that can degrade plastics. Perhaps this can be a solution to many of the most urgent issues facing our environment and health – all within the context of an undergraduate course!

The audience of 18 Yale-NUS faculty were very interested in the project, and our Foundations of Science course is hoping to build in this same type of discovery-based work at Yale-NUS College, and we hope to introduce students to this type of research in the coming years.

References

Bascom-Slack, CA, Arnold, EA, and Strobel, SA (2012). Student-Directed Discovery of the Plant Microbiome and its Products. Science 338:485-486

Strobel, S. A., & Strobel, G. A. (2007). Plant endophytes as a platform for discovery-based undergraduate science education. Nature chemical biology, 3(7), 356-359).

Readings related to Scott Strobel and his Endophytes course – Plastic-Eating-Fungi-Other-Wonders-Discovered-by-Yale-Undergraduate_Scott-Strobel- (includes Journal articles on the course).

After being a student again for much of Fall semester, I have graduated! This effort was to obtain a postgraduate certificate in the Scholarship of Educational Leadership (SoEL) in Curriculum and Pedagogy from the University of British Columbia (UBC). The program is organized by Harry Hubball, and has been offered across the world to groups of academics in universities in Asia, Africa, North America and Europe. The UBC program is described at this link: http://international.educ.ubc.ca/soel/. At the National University of Singapore they have had two cohorts of SoEL graduates, who are nominated by the Provost of NUS, or in my case by the Yale-NUS College. The experience included writing an SoEL portfolio, that included an educational leadership statement, a review of the SoTL literature in three different theme areas, an internal formative document assessing an area of work that I am doing at Yale-NUS College (in my case interdisciplinary science courses), and an educational research project which is presented in writing and in a presentation. My research project was to assess the Yale-NUS College Foundations of Science course, and whether it provides an authentic learning environment for students. The package of SoEL materials is sent to external reviewers from UBC, and they look over the writing and interview each of the candidates by Skype. At the end, the postgraduate certificate is awarded – a nice prize for all the hard work!  More than the certificate, the program is rewarding from the perspectives it gives on all aspects of academics, and for having a chance to work closely with some of the best academics at the National University of Singapore. Our cohort, or batch, it shown below!  I am also happy to share my Educational Leadership portfolio – the PDF file is available at this link: Bryan.Penprase.SoTL.Dossier.Jan.11.2016. I had a great experience with this course, and I am happy to answer questions for anyone interested in the program.

This was one of the highlights of the Spring Semester 2016!  At long last, gravitational waves were directly observed with the LIGO system. The detection, which was measured on 14 September 2015, was a century after Einstein predicted these waves.  The LIGO facility, run by Caltech and MIT, was over 30 years in the making. It had been through many upgrades – the last of which gave it the precision of measuring the movement of its mirrors by a small fraction of an atomic nucleus!

LIGO spans the North American continent, with a pair of interferometers in Washington State and Louisiana.  LIGO is something of a “cosmic seismograph” capable of detecting the cosmic earthquakes of black holes and neutron stars collapsing and merging together. These cataclysmic events are capable of distorting space and time in such a profound way that the shock to space and time ripples through the billions of light years of space, until every atom of every star, plant, asteroid and moon quiver under its influence!  The profound nature of this discovery cannot be understated. Even though Einstein predicted gravitational radiation back in 1915, and Taylor predicted and verified the existence of these waves through binary pulsar orbit decay in 1974 (winning a Nobel prize in 1993), this is the first time in history that humans have been able to detect this form of radiation directly.

The gravitational waves are “ripples in spacetime” that travel as distortions of space-time at the speed of light. The ripples cause a quadropole distortion in which one axis of space is compressed, while the other expands. This quadropole motion is able to be detected by the Michelson Interferometer – a pair of laser beams at 90 degrees from each other arranged to cause interference. Any displacement of one arm of the interferometer – even by a tiny fraction of the wavelength of light – can cause the interference pattern to shift. This same type of device was used by its namesake, Albert Michelson in 1887 to verify that the Earth is not moving through ether – a hypothesized absolute medium which would cause the speed of light to change in the direction of Earth’s motion. In an ironic twist of science history, this same device which inspired Albert Einstein to develop his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, with some upgrades and modern technology was able to confirm Einstein’s theory of gravitational radiation over a century later! The modern technology includes having laser beams moving through an evacuated pair of tubes at 90 degrees from each other, with a total length of over 4 km. The beams also bounce X times within each path, multiplying the sensitivity of the device by thousands of times over a simpler single pass interferometer. The LIGO device can detect distortions of space and time at a level of precision of 1 part in 10^22 – or to a fraction of 10 billion trillionths of its path length. This level of precision allows LIGO to see motions of its mirrors that are less than one thousandth the size of an atomic nucleus! This refinement is possible through the superb optics, improved electronics that can count individual photons, improved coatings, and acoustic isolation systems. The precision enables LIGO to detect these cosmic quakes throughout the universe. As such, LIGO is a new window with which to view the universe.

Gravitational waves, unlike light, pass through matter unimpeded, and are capable of being seen in all directions – regardless of the presence of mountains, the earth, or the Milky Way galaxy!  This transparency to gravitational radiation extends to the early universe. Gravity waves escape unimpeded from the interior of the Big Bang – and are capable of being detected at epochs before recombination. This means that a more advanced gravitational wave detector in principle could see back in time and directly watch the Big Bang as it happened – to the very first centuries of the universe’s 13.7 billion year history!  For now LIGO will be a premiere instrument for detecting neutron star-neutron star mergers, which also produce Gamma Ray bursts. The gravitational radiation arrives before electromagnetic light, enabling a LIGO detection to predict the eruption of a Gamma Ray Burst. This makes it better than a seismometer as LIGO can predict these quakes of the universe before they can be seen in electromagnetic light! 

Our ZTF (Zwicky Transient Facility) telescopes will be able to detect optical counterparts of many of the LIGO events – both before and after they are detected by LIGO, enabling a powerful supplement to LIGO’s technologies. It makes the ZTF project even more exciting, and having both LIGO and ZTF at Caltech makes Caltech even more of an “epicentre” of astrophysics!

Articles on LIGO and Gravitational Wave Discovery:

http://www.nature.com/news/einstein-s-gravitational-waves-found-at-last-1.19361 – From Nature Magazine – February 2016

http://www.nature.com/news/the-black-hole-collision-that-reshaped-physics-1.19612 – From Nature Magazine – March 2016

http://www.kavlifoundation.org/how-ligo-works – How LIGO Works, From the Kavli Foundation

Scientific Background from Caltech and ZTF collaborators

Caltech LIGO site – https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts

Materials on Gravitational Wave Detection from Varun Bhalero, IUCAA, India – http://www.gw.iucaa.in/press/

Press Conference on LIGO Gravitational Wave Discovery – https://caltech.box.com/s/wnqnbfbd7jnxvngcc3cc7k70c0mnqdeu

Talks about LIGO from Caltech announcement – http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/83643512

Our Yale-NUS College CTL hosted Deb Pires, Director of the Biology Education program at UCLA, to Yale-NUS College for a series of talks and discussions about STEM teaching. Deb is the Administrator of the UCLA Department of Life Sciences Core Education group, which works with the 17 separate departments at UCLA that are teaching some aspect of life science. She was also one of two founders of the Center for Educational Innovation in the Sciences (CEILS) and has worked for nine years at UCLA as a member of the Educational Technology committee. Deb gave two talks to our faculty, on February 4 and 5, 2016, which were well received and well attended!

The first talk was entitled “Results from Technology-Enhanced Teaching at UCLA” and discussed how UCLA has been tracking persistence in STEM fields by various demographic groups of students. They are finding very low retention in some groups, and have been working to improve their teaching and curriculum to reverse this trend. She recommended a book “Talking about Leaving – Why undergraduates leave the sciences” by Elaine Seymour and Nancy Hewitt. To motivate the changes in the UCLA curriculum, she cited institutional research data, as well as articles by Haak et al, “Increased Structure and Active Learning Reduce the Achievement Gap in Introductory Biology” and the one by Freeman et al, “Active Learning Increases Student Performance in Science, Engineering and Math.”  In her talk she also recommended books by Wood, “Student-Centered Teaching Practices,”  and “Leaving the Lectern.”

The reforms that they are making at UCLA are described as “high structure” teaching. In this type of teaching, students from more diverse backgrounds are found to perform better than in a traditional form of teaching. The “high structure” includes a pre-class quiz to be sure students are all working on the material out of class. There are active learning activities in class, and also a post-class quiz.  Some materials from the course are also “flipped” using the Camtasia program to provide online guides to the readings that allow for the instructor to help students understand the material. To assess the learning they are using concept inventories which she called a “million dollar instrument.”  She also did a large number (40-80 hours) of student interviews to allow them to refine the course to overcome confusion within students due to unclear terminology.  An important element of the success of the UCLA program are postdoctoral fellows known as the DBER fellows. These are postodocs in biology education, who can mentor some of the senior faculty and help them prepare flipped materials.  They also can provide guidance to faculty in constructing explicit Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) which then guide the class activities, and assessments.  Getting faculty involved in the project was helped by workshops and with the reminder that contributions for this by faculty would be relevant to their tenure and promotion.

Another very interesting aspect of the UCLA effort was how they were able to incorporate observations of teaching as part of their work. Using an ipad and a program known as the “GORP tool” (which stands for General Observations Reflection Protocol), student associates would be able to catalog in real time what the professor and students are doing in a class. As they observe the class they are able to click on different icons to describe whether the professor is lecturing, asking questions, listening, circulating, or working individually with students. Likewise the students are also observed, and the program records if they are listening, asking questions, writing, discussing, or presenting something. At the end each instructor can see a very nicely produced pie chart of how class time is being used by themselves and by the students.  The combination of the intense effort on reaching students, and modifying curriuclum and pedagogy in measurable ways was very inspiring and sounded quite effective.

The second talk was about backward course design, learning objectives and how to assess students. The talk was based on the summer workshops that Jo Handelsman used to offer at the University of Wisconsin, and provided a great overview of how to develop a course. The lecture slides are available at our CTL site at this link.  Some of the figures below are also from her talk, including the very nice 3D Bloom’s taxonomy figure, developed by the Iowa State University Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching.  It was a very useful session and one that we should over to all of our incoming faculty at Yale-NUS College!

During the beginning of the 2016 Spring semester, I travelled to Borneo with 12 faculty and 20 students, mixed evenly from Yale-NUS College and the Claremont Colleges. The expedition was the culmination of over 18 months of planning and was entitled “Envirolabs Asia.” The project was funded by the Luce Foundation, and was awarded to the Claremont Colleges to facilitate interdisciplinary exploration of environmental issues facing Asia. My role was to foster the connection between Yale-NUS and the Claremont Colleges, and I led many meetings between CIPE and the Claremont Colleges between August of 2014 through January of 2015.  It was incredibly rewarding to study the group of scholars and students assembled on this trip – faculty from all five Claremont Colleges, representing the disciplines of Music, Media Studies, Biology, Environmental studies, History, Religious studies and Politics. Our team from Yale-NUS included myself, Brian McAdoo (a geologist and expert in disasters and human impacts of earthquakes), Tom White (photographer and documentary film maker), Steven Oliver (Political Scientist and expert on global affairs), Bill Piel (Biology professor and expert on spiders), and also a representative from CIPE. The 8 Yale-NUS students were selected from nominations from faculty and were dynamic, energetic, and similarly diverse in their interests. They took to the trip wonderfully and blended nicely with the 12 Claremont students.

Our trip began in Miri, which is in Serawak – on the Malaysian side of Borneo, just to the west of Brunei. Albert Park, the CMC Envirolabs PI, had arranged for a tour of the Baram River from a fellow named Charles, who has led indigenous people on several activist campaigns to stop construction of dams on the river near his home, and a musician from Kuala Lumpur named Ka Hoe Yii who has worked on compositions inspired by the rainforest in Borneo. Our trip included visits to Palm Oil plantations, stays in long houses with indigenous people (including the Baram Dam protest sites), a tour of the river areas on long boats piloted by indigenous people, visits to small villages such as Long Lama along the river threatened by the dam projects, and many chances to learn from the local people about their lifestyle and the ways in which the forest and river create the culture and livelihood that they depend upon.

The four days in the wilderness included torrential rain, heroic 4WD multi-hour drives through logging roads, and very rustic lodgings which sometimes lacked basic amenities..  We were however rewarded with a rare glimpse inside a fascinating, warm, and beautiful culture and to see some of the complexities facing these people as well. The people would like to conserve their rivershed, but also rely on palm oil cultivation and employment at nearby logging operations for a living. The fishing and subsistence ecology of the region has already been devastated by aggressive logging which has turned the river into a chocolate milk color from sediments. Local people were then forced to find employment downstream at oil companies, or palm oil companies, or upstream at logging operations in many cases. Adding to the complication is an ambiguous indigenous claim to the land surrounding the river, based on old British maps, and weakly enforced by an indifferent Malaysian government office.

We found the time outdoors exciting and found interesting lifeforms – birds, spiders, and other insects were well represented. The stars came out on one night – which enabled a dazzling view of the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds from central borneo. We had an amazing time zooming along the rivers, floating and swimming in them, and being propelled at mind-bending speeds by the local pilots with their powerful outboard motors! Many great conversations between students, faculty and local people also revealed the interlocking complexity of the environmental, social and political issues facing the Serawak people. It was a challenging, rewarding, and exciting opportunity, and we look forward to further research and collaboration with the Claremont Colleges as part of the Envirolabs Asia effort!

As part of my Bay Area trip, I had the opportunity to meet with Carl Wieman, Nobel laureate from 2001 in Physics at Stanford University. Carl is a person who has embodied the teacher scholar ideal better than perhaps anyone – with his ground-breaking research in Bose-Einstein condensates, which won the Nobel Prize, and his Wieman Science Education initiatives at University of Colorado, Boulder, and at University of British Columbia. In both universities, he was able to develop dramatically improved learning gains in physics, and to foster dramatic changes in pedagogy. His initiatives are intended to both develop advances in student learning through more active pedagogies, and on-line simulations, and to advance educational research through thorough assessments of teaching practices, and gains in conceptual thinking and proficiency in students.

Carl had visited Pomona College previously, when I was a younger faculty member, as part of an external review team in 2002. At that time he was able to highlight some key areas of strength in our department and some areas that needed improvement. I was grateful to the external review team as they helped us hire some key new people at Pomona, and helped shift our department toward a more responsive form of pedagogy in many of our classes.

My visit to Carl also gave a chance to revisit Stanford where I was a student in the 1980’s. At that time, Stanford was not known for its excellence in teaching, but rather for its research and Carl’s arrival to Stanford comes after decades of discussions about teaching and curriculum that have dramatically improved some aspects of Stanford’s undergraduate experience. The Stanford SUES report on Undergraduate Education from 2012, the development of new programs and positions such as the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education (Harry Elam), and the Vice Provost of Teaching and Learning (John Mitchell), new online education efforts, the Institute of Design or d.school, and the Thinking Matters courses  all have made a big impression on the higher education community. I was very interested in learn more about the state of Stanford in light of these changes, and some of Carl’s ideas for his newest role, as a joint appointment in Physics and Education at Stanford.

From December 14-17 I attended the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco. This meeting was exciting for many reasons – it was a chance for me to learn and immerse in the latest information on global climate change, and space-based observing of earth. It was also a chance for me to see my daughter Shanti (a senior in geology at Carleton College) present her first scientific paper! The meeting was HUGE – with more than 20,000 people in attendance!  This makes it nearly 10 times larger than the usual American Astronomical Society meeting I usually attend.

The meeting opened with a talk by Elon Musk – who outlined some of his new ideas about photovoltaics, making humans a “two planet” species (by colonizing Mars), and even his ideas about higher education. Elon was very keen on having all students study a lot of physics, programming and to become critical thinkers. He had some pretty specific ideas about higher education, and perhaps one day his SpaceX fortune can help found a new university!

My favorite scientist at the meeting, Shanti Penprase, presented her poster. I also studied a number of really amazing visualizations from NASA, NOAA and Google, and plan to use many of them in my Spring 2016 Foundations of Science class at Yale-NUS College. Particularly remarkable was the “hyperwall” – a set of 12 interconnected large flat panel displays on which the NASA imagery could be displayed at full resolution using their fleet of earth observing satellites. On the hyperwall I was able to watch a decade of Earth’s CO2 accumulations, see flashes of aerosols and ozone across the earth from natural sources (deserts and plants), and from humans. It was an amazing perspective. Google also has a new program known as Earth Engine, which allows one to watch a series of Google Earth images in a timelapse movie. I took notes on this program and its inner workings as it seems like an ideal platform for studying earth – and environmental impacts from humans. The time-lapse of Singapore was amazing – it was possible to watch Singapore add new chunks of land to the island, as it expanded its port areas at Jurong and by the East side of the island!

Other astronomical topics were of great interest. My friend and collaborator, Glenn Orton, was there presenting new information on Jupiter, and we discussed the upcoming Juno observing campaign. The solar eclipse of August 2017 was dramatically illustrated and I had a chance to read about the latest results from the Mars rovers and from other studies of Mars that combine orbiter and ground data in clever ways.

There were also a number of very interesting booths where representatives of various international universities were presenting their research programs. I had great talks with geophysics people from France, Australia, and even from a new Ecuadorian university known as Yachay Tech! It was an amazing meeting and I learned quite a bit – which will really help both my teaching and future research.

Elon Musk talk about future technologies and higher education

Images from NASA’s Hyperwall

My favorite scientists at the meeting!

And even more great information on astronomy, earth science, and technology!

During December 7-10, 2015, I represented Yale-NUS as a member of a delegation visiting NYU Abu Dhabi. The group included our Dean of Students, Brian McAdoo, our Dean of CIPE, Trisha Craig, several of our Dean’s Fellows and a group of about 18 students. My role was to represent my Centre for Teaching and Learning and also to inquire more broadly about NYU Abu Dhabi’s development of curriculum and faculty research and teaching. Of course the chance to visit our friend Kyle Farley, NYUAD’s new Dean of Students, and to see the gleaming new campus at Saadiyat Island was also a great reason to join!

The tour was organized by Chris O’Connell, who worked with Victor Lindsay at NYUAD to put together a fantastic overview of their campus, student life, and curriculum. Victor met us at the airport and rode with us from Dubai to Abu Dhabi. We had a great chance to talk in the car, and I was able to tell him about my visit to NYUAD in their old campus back in 2013. During that time, NYUAD had just started up, and was at about the same point in life as Yale-NUS College is now.

We began our tour with a visit to the campus, where we settled into some great accommodations. The campus is really amazing, with shiny new buildings everywhere, and an impressive scale. On the first day we visited the Masdar Institute, and discussed some aspects of the NYUAD approach to diversity and intercultural understanding with Alta Mauro, who gave a great presentation to the students.

Views of the NYU Abu Dhabi Campus – science laboratories

Scenes from the NYU campus – our tour and discussion of intercultural competence, views of the administration building and library, view outside of the campus, and Kyle Farley addressing our students after arriving.

One key person I met with was Bryan Waterman, a professor of English and leader in the NYUAD curriculum restructuring.  The NYUAD program includes 8 courses in their common curriculum, which was implemented several years ago. The faculty discussed during academic year 2014-15 possible alternatives, and then gathered a list of alternatives in Spring 2015. During Fall of 2016 they selected and voted for an alternative structure of the common curriculum, which is now only 6 courses, organized along common themes.

Bryan is eager to develop “plenary moments” in the NYUAD common curriculum to enable these courses to interconnect at key moments. He cited the Stanford “Thinking Matters” courses which sophomores take, and pointed out that many of the NYUAD courses are similarly aligned on deep themes like “Justice” and can take on the topic from a variety of angles. The plenary moments, and other speakers, shared joint lectures, and events can bring the various courses together. He is aiming for more consistency among the different courses, and more cohesion in terms of skills.

He feels students can be excellent at recognising the whole of a course, and he engaged focus groups of students as well as provided  He also convened a session called “Hack the Curriculum” for students to meet in groups to solve some actual curricular challenges. They met for 4 hours, discussed solutions in groups and presented these to each other. Some of their ideas stuck and made it into the actually adopted curriculum. He was really excited by the energy and thoughtfulness of these students – 45 of them who took the time in the middle of the semester to do this work!

In addition to meeting with Bryan Waterman, we were able to visit Timothy Dore, a remarkable chemist at NYUAD. Tim took us on a tour of his labs, which were a sprawling complex of rooms filled with advanced instrumentation. It was clear that NYUAD was making a substantial investment in his scholarship, and having such resources placed Tim and scientists like him at a competitive advantage compared with others at smaller institutions.

Our academic discussions also included a conversation with Charles Grim, Vice Provost for Academic Administration. Charles gave us a great overview of the process of hiring and developing the NYUAD faculty, and his work there began in 2010, right at the beginning of NYUAD. The dynamics of managing faculty in a “startup,” the shifting expectations of new faculty as they arrive and build an institution, and the change in the scale and research component at NYUAD all caused some interesting dynamics as the different faculty cohorts worked together to build NYUAD into its current state.

We also had a great discussion with Ken Nielsen, who is the Director of the NYUAD writing center. We discussed how Ken has set up training programs for the Global Academic Fellows (like our Dean’s Fellows), and for peer tutors within the center. Ken had a number of great ideas about supporting students.

The pictures below show many of the scenes of the campus, our expedition to the desert for an amazing dinner at the dunes (including dune boarding, camels and hawks!), a visit to Saadiyat Beach, a visit to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, and some great times exploring Abu Dhabi with a very friendly and welcoming group of faculty, staff and students. I was grateful for the experience and look forward to working more with NYUAD in the future, as Yale-NUS and NYUAD have a lot that they can share with each other and many common experiences building new models of higher education in a startup environment.

Visit to the Desert for Dinner and Dune-boarding:

Visit to the Grand Mosque!

The Masdar Institute – between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, where a lot of advanced energy research is being conducted

Views of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Saadiyat Island beaches!

At the end of our Foundations of Science course at Yale-NUS, students had a chance to apply their knowledge of science (developed in two disciplinary mini-courses) toward a “Grand Challenge” facing the planet. Our 170 students all take Foundations of Science, which is a sophomore common curriculum course at Yale-NUS College. Unlike many of the other common curriculum courses, students choose 5-week disciplinary case studies based on their interests. They hone those interests by taking two of these small case study mini-courses, and then come together in groups of four to form an interdisciplinary team to work on the Grand Challenge, which is a final project for the course. The Grand Challenge teams are intentionally composed to mix student expertise, and the goal is for students to apply their knowledge toward a relevant and urgent problem facing the planet. As subject experts, the students are empowered within their team and can teach their teammates aspects of their subject that the team can use for the projects.

This Fall we tried this Grand Challenge format for the first time, and had an amazing showing of student expertise, energy and excitement at our Poster Fair. The teams of students were divided into two groups – the “Evolution” students were to design a study to assess “How are organisms and communities adapting to the anthropocene?”  and the “Revolution” students were to “Develop a disruptive technology to help humans adapt to the effects of the anthropocene.” These teams of four students then went to work and came up with a research proposal that cited research literature, included experiments designed by students, with a timeline of completion for three years. Before the poster fair, these ideas were vetted by the teaching team of four instructors in a series of short consultations during class times. The Evolution students studied many different indicator species – snails, jellyfish, and bees among others. They proposed schemes for tracking animals, measuring their numbers and ranges, and even for assessing biodiversity.  The Revolution students worked on a variety of interesting technologies – wireless transmitters for finding people in disasters, new smart materials for generating energy, and very ingenious applications of electronics, nanotechnology, and photovoltaics. The projects were impressive!

It was exciting to see our students rise to this Challenge, and we are hoping this form of authentic assessment in our Foundations of Science course will give the students a chance for integrating and applying their knowledge in a meaningful way. We have begun our second semester of the course, and we are looking forward to seeing how the second batch of posters turn out!

You can read more about Foundations of Science at our two class web sites:

http://fos1aug2015.courses.yale-nus.edu.sg/  (Fall 2015) and http://fos2jan2016.courses.yale-nus.edu.sg/ (Spring 2016).

Toward the end of the Semester, our CTL invited Darryl Yong from Harvey Mudd College to visit Yale-NUS. Darryl is an old friend from Claremont, and his work as an Associate Dean, Diversity Officer, and irrepressible Math teacher has been an inspiration for me. Darryl spent a year of sabbatical teaching math in an inner city Los Angeles Public School, and has conducted a rigorously controlled study of flipped classrooms, among other things. His two talks for us at Yale-NUS College were “Flip++” – a discussion of how to optimize the flipped classroom environment, and “Is Inclusive Teaching the Same as Good Teaching?”  Darryl also met with several of our faculty and had a number of great discussions about teaching, technology and creating an inclusive and interdependent classroom.

The first talk discussed “Why Flip?” and listed some benefits of flipping – more content, more student engagement, deeper learning, and more classroom community. Darryl also pointed out that the research is showing that lecturing is definitely invalidated as a teaching approach. He cited an article which mentioned that for further educational research studies, lecture would no longer be considered a comparison, as it has been shown to have such lower learning gains.

Darryl’s work provided a “Quasi-Experimental Study” of the flipped environment, and was a tightly controlled experiment in which three instructors gave exactly the same materials both in the flipped and traditional classrooms. The three instructors included two math professors and an engineering professor. Students would watch online lectures in the flipped format and work homework problems in class. Homework was designed to be authentic engineering challenges in the engineering class, to provide a richer experience for the “synchronous” time in the flipped format. The “traditional” students would do exactly the same exercises, and watch exactly the same lecture in the opposite order, with the synchronous component of the class given to short lectures with questions.

Already you can see that the “traditional” part of the experiment is hardly a traditional lecture; the instructors worked closely together to craft a compelling and interactive class for both groups of students. Likewise the “flipped” group was not doing what typically happens in a flipped class – the requirement for a controlled experiment meant that the class time was not optimized for active learning but instead was required to work the same homework problems as the “traditional” group.

Darryl Yong and Nancy Lappe found statistical differences in learning gains between the two groups. This is not to say there is no benefit from flipped classes, but instead that the flipped format alone will not provide gains in learning. Below are some figures from Darryl’s talk – giving examples of different learning gains from the two groups, and the response by students to students to the “affective” component of the class experience. The headline of “Flipped classrooms may not have any impact on learning” comes from USA Today, but oversimplifies the conclusions of Darryl’s study.

Darryl also gave a wonderful talk on Inclusive Teaching and Diversity, entitled, “Is Inclusive Teaching the Same as Good Teaching?” This talk was very timely given the nature of the debate in the U.S. about diversity. Our Yale-NUS College has a wonderful form of diversity all its own – hosting students from over 40 nations together with a mix of cultures from across the earth, representing all the major religions and language groups, in which Singaporeans comprise about 60% of the students, and other nations in blocks of 5-10% from the US, India, various European countries, Australia, Malaysia, Korea, New Zealand and several African nations.

Within the US, Darryl mentioned that there is a wide diversity of experience in students who come to study math and engineering subjects.  He showed a wide range of percentage degrees awarded to women students in STEM fields. Darryl points out that “even if you bring a group of relatively diverse people together in a space, that does not magically make the problems go away.. the question of diversity hinges on a broad representation of people as the starting point. That is step one of the process. Once the people have been assembled together, then the hard work begins.”  He then discussed how experiences within classrooms vary for different groups of students. He also showed educational research results that gives data to support the idea that “increased structure and active learning reduces the achievement gap in introductory biology.” (A study by Haak, HilleRisLambers, Pitre, and Freeman, Science, 2011). He also showed how Inquiry-based learning in college mathematics helped women to learn better (Laursen, Hassi, Kogan, and Weston, Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 2014).

One of the key parts of the talk was Darryl’s reinterpretation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1943). The pyramid of needs includes urgent and base needs (Physiological, Safety, Love/Belonging), then higher needs like Esteem and Self-Actualization. He pointed out that unless the needs from the lower levels are met, you can’t begin to access the higher levels of need. Darryl cleverly applied this hierarchy to classrooms. In this context the needs become slightly different. Generally physiological needs are met (air conditioning, etc in Singapore!). However some students are feeling stress from family situations which can block their ability to learn – financial problems at home, other crises can bring physiological stress to prevent learning. Awareness of the diversity of student life circumstances can help our students learn. The Safety level can be interpreted as “emotional safety” – students need to feel that they will not be ridiculed and humiliated in classes. “Safe Spaces” – so popular in the US – is referring not to a need from students in the US to be physically safe or coddled, but instead to have a place where students feel understood and free from aggressions. Darryl points out both obvious and subtle forms of humiliation that students can feel in classes. The students really need to know they will not be made fun of for lack of knowledge, and if they do they will be prevented from learning or continuing. Even a professor using in a talk to students “it is obvious” can provide a sense of inadequacy in students, and block further learning. Addressing student questions with respect and kindness is crucial for helping the students along.

The other thing Darryl point out is that a classroom needs to build a sense of belonging, which can be built into a classroom. By bringing students together in collaborative projects, and setting up a classroom culture that fosters interdependence among the students, they are able to learn better. Darryl notes that we can actually underestimate the power of student connections in classrooms – and learning names of students – can have more of an impact than we realize. Other methods of fostering belonging include humor, and welcoming attitudes within the class. He cited a professor who even gave students an initial handshake when they came into a class, which a study showed increased the sense of belonging in the students.