Education
Interact with Dr. Partin and the Teaching and Learning Professor community at:https://www.facebook.com/theteachingandlearningprofessor/_______________________The purpose of this podcast is to explore best practices in teaching and learning in higher education. Keeping students focused and engaged can be challenging and often times frustrating. Sitting through long boring lectures can be difficult to follow and unlikely to leave you enthusiastic about the class or the discipline. With more engaging pedagogy from our professors and improved study habits from our students, far more knowledge will be transferred and everyone will be happier.Hi and welcome to The Teaching & Learning professor. My name is Dr. Matthew L. Partin. I am a Teaching Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. I have been faculty and the Director of the BGSU Marine Lab since 1999. I teach large lectures of marine biology for non-majors, a small upper-level aquarium husbandry course that incorporates undergraduate research, 2 service-learning courses, a marine biology freshman orientation course, and a study abroad field experience in Curacao (Southern Caribbean).The BGSU Marine Lab is a 1,500 sq. ft. facility which contains over 4,000 gallons of seawater in over 60 aquaria. Some of the larger systems include a 500-gallon touch tank, a 1,000-gallon shark system, and two coral research systems totaling 1,000 gallons. In the lab, eight major phyla are represented in over 66 genera of marine life including sea anemones, corals, starfish, sea urchins, snails, crabs, octopus, and algae as well as a wide variety of freshwater and marine fish.Outreach is a large part of the marine biology program at BGSU. The animals in the Marine Lab are maintained by students for class study and research projects but are also present for the appreciation of 2,000 visitors each year. The Marine Lab is free to visit, open to the public, and hosts local school groups every Thursday morning during the academic year.Undergraduate research is another focus of the marine biology program at BGSU. The BGSU Aquatic Research Laboratory (ARL) is a 1,450 sq. ft. facility dedicated to fresh and saltwater aquatic research for undergraduates. The ARL was recently built in response to BGSU’s strong support of undergraduate research and the prodigious growth of the Marine Biology program. The ARL is strictly for undergraduates not open to the public.The BGSU Marine Lab has been in existence since 1963 and as an undergraduate student in the early 1990s, I took courses in the marine lab and maintained the lab's first corals. After graduating with my bachelor’s degree, I became a professional aquarist in Manteo, North Carolina for a couple years. I eventually returned to BGSU for graduate school and I’ve been here ever since. When I took over the Marine lab, there were about 20 students each year who considered themselves “Marine Biology” students. Today, we have about 200 in the program. Throughout this series, I’ll talk about how I grew the program through action research and data-driven decision making. What I did can be easily duplicated at about any college or university and with about any program.Although I am a non-tenure track faculty member, I have several publications on teaching and learning. My research interests include attitudes, motivation, metacognition, and learning environments. My interests span both formal and informal education and I typically look for relationships between psychosocial and motivational variables. These variables are usually tested with multiple regression or path-analysis and I have created a model that I have been testing. It works informal learning environments (such as large and small lecture halls), informal learning environments (like the marine lab), and entire programs (like our marine biology program). For this series, I have invited faculty, staff, and students to talk about the variables I feel are most important to teaching and learning.So why start a podcast? Well... After about 10 years of giving the same marine biology lectures over and over, I started coming back to my office and realizing that I couldn’t remember what I just told my lecture hall. I was completely on auto-pilot and I knew something had to change. My teaching evaluations were good, but I was bored and my students had to be bored too. I started updating my lectures every semester and I began incorporating more “constructivist active learning” into my large lectures and undergraduate research into my small upper-level classes. Constructivism is a teaching philosophy I’ll describe throughout this series and active learning refers to any learning activity in which the student participates or interacts with the learning process. Undergraduate research will be a reoccurring theme throughout this series.Over the years, I have tried many teaching styles and techniques. Some have worked and many have not worked so well. Teaching and learning has always been a passion of mine and I believe the best way to truly learn something is to teach it. To help myself learn, I began to facilitate Faculty Learning Communities focused on Teaching and Learning. I also conducted workshops for our Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, and I began to formally mentor new faculty. Those efforts rekindled my love of teaching and learning. This podcast is my newest effort to teach myself how to teach by interviewing highly skilled professors, by hearing what students want, and how various pedagogy (or teaching techniques) are received.The target audience for this series is my Marine Biology Freshman orientation class (called BIOL 2000), but any student, faculty, staff, or college administrator will benefit from listening to the series. I am interviewing students on topics such as attitudes, motivation, metacognition, active learning, how to study, and math literacy. I am interviewing staff on topics such as undergraduate research, internships, scholarships, career services, and the learning commons. Faculty are being interviewed on topics such as preparing for tenure, managing graduate students, non-tenure-track faculty, writing grants, publishing, and faculty service. Ultimately, I want my students to understand the best ways to study, services available to them, and the demands of faculty outside of teaching. Hopefully, some faculty, staff, and administrators will listen to the series as well and gain a better understanding of our students.I hope you enjoy the series... and remember ... Teaching is a challenge, Learning is forever!!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-teaching-and-learning-professor/donations