Students teaching teachers and rethinking education at the college level

Linda Colon

I just watched a group from Science After School squeeze in one last practice session before their presentation, What We Want Science Teachers to Know. These Manhattan students seem very eager to share the student perspective on learning science. It’s a bit a role reversal with students teaching the teachers.

I also spoke with Linda Colon, program manager with Educational Equity Center at AED in New York, New York. She’ll be presenting two sessions on informal science education this weekend. “We want to communicate to the science community how important it is for children to have opportunities after school, to do fun, engaging, hands-on activities that really make the connection between what they’re doing during the day and what they can do after school,” she says. “Just finding the fun.”

I moved from elementary/middle school to college with just a few steps. Next door to the Science After School group, the SCST Marjorie Gardner Lecture posed a question to college educators and offered a possible solution: Too Much Content to Cover? Teach Using Competencies Instead. Dee Silverthorn, who teaches integrative biology at the University of Texas–Austin, noted some disciplines, such as nursing, have a history of using outcome-driven competency based education.

Silverthorn says chemists are the best at competency-based teaching, due in part to the American Chemist Society’s guidelines for undergraduate programs. Those guidelines include

• In-depth content coverage
• Laboratory experience
• Student research is encouraged
• Skills
• Problem solving
• Chemical literature
• Safety
• Communication
• Team work
• Ethics

She outlined some goals for implementing competency-based education for biology problem and offered suggestions for how to do it.

Related posts:

1. Seeking inventive college students
2. Talking to teachers
3. Request for resources for guiding teachers to become more inquiry based in their teaching
4. Peering into students’ “private universe”
5. Teaching several subjects