This is a tough and thankless job, but science depends on it! Here are a few principles I keep in mind when suggesting (to journals that ask for them) or soliciting (when I'm an editor) peer reviewers. 

When identifying reviewers for a particular paper, I try to find a balance of: 

• expertise (all reviewers need appropriate expertise, but this can range between e.g., specific topic/research question, methods, theory, implications, study region, ...)
  
• regional location of institution (e.g., Global North/South)
• gender balance
  
• career stage (I find that earlier careers, PhDs through postdocs, often write the best reviews, and getting started with peer reviews is helpful). 

Where to find reviewers? 

• It's often good to try to find someone who has published in your target journal (or a journal with similar reach). 
  
• The Journal/Author Name Editor, JANE, can be a good resource for finding reviewers (leans towards medicine). You enter title and/or abstract and it finds similar papers, authors. 

(Along those lines- if you’re publishing make sure you’re giving back to the community by serving as a peer reviewer and/or editor yourself! Read my guide to writing a solid peer review  or how to get started, and register as a potential reviewer with journals in your field). 

Ethics: 

• Suggested reviewers must avoid conflicts of interest, that is, they should not have a personal or professional relationship with any authors that would prevent impartial scientific judgment. Definite conflicts of interest are co-published authors, people at the same institution, former or current academic mentors/advisees.  
  
• I avoid suggesting personal friends even if they have relevant expertise. (I try to put myself in the reverse situation and think, if I were asked to review them, do I start with a positive predisposition just because I know they're a nice person/ in general I think well of them/ it would be awkward to reject them/etc? My goal is to have reviewers who are able to focus on the quality of the work alone, independent from the qualities of the people who produced it, insofar as this is possible in a small community of human beings!) 
• Technically the editors should also screen for conflicts, but this is a time-consuming and imperfectly accurate process done by busy volunteers, so when authors are asked to provide reviewers it's our responsibility to meet all the guidelines.)
  
• Some specific guidelines on conflict of interest below. 

See guidelines for picking reviewers: https://methodsblog.wordpress.com/2015/10/15/preferred-reviewers/ 


For the PNAS guidelines see here: http://m.pnas.org/site/authors/coi.xhtml
Springer, Conflict of Interest: http://www.springer.com/authors/manuscript+guidelines?SGWID=0-40162-6-795522-0 
Article on COI in medicine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2246405/ 

Here’s a short summary I co-wrote with Céline Fernandez compiling the highlights of our November meeting for the LuPOD professional development program. ​

Best practices for films for educational purposes:

• Max length: 5 min
• Availability: no more than 2 clicks to access
• Sound quality is important to the viewer
• Think about the voice melody of the speakers (no monotonous tone)
• Lifetime: since the film will most probably remain on the web for a long time, use a layout that is likely to age well   

 
Issue regarding available learning material online: often no quality control. Therefore, make sure to review material before assigning, point out to students to be critical when using information online, and consider making your own material.
 
 
Teaching portfolios

• Why you need one: it helps you document and reflect on your teaching, and may be required for application to positions (e.g., lecturer or docent) or for merits like the Pedagogical Academy/Excellent Teaching Practitioner.
• Get a model: Applications for positions (such as Docent) at Lund University are public documents and should be available on request. These are valuable to study when working on your own application. Also ask colleagues to share their successful applications for inspiration.
• Pedagogical philosophy: Get beyond buzzwords from LATHE courses and show how you expressed pedagogical ideas in practice.
• Pedagogical reflection: Give both good and bad examples from your teaching practice to demonstrate your own reflection and development.

• Scholarship of teaching and learning: taking an investigative approach to teaching and learning, applying an iterative cycle of reflection and improvement.

 
References and further reading:

• Application for Excellent Teaching Practitioner at Lund University, including instructions for the teaching portfolio required, are listed by faculty. Here are links to the Social Science Faculty and LTH, which were easy to find in English on the Lund website. :) 

Science should be open. Duh. 

Easier said than done.

There are many reasons why this fails.

​Personally, I think mostly it's well-intentioned, busy people who don't follow best practices from the beginning, then don't want to spend the time cleaning up their Rube Goldberg-esque Excel sheets later.

I've definitely been there. But I'm trying to get better, and trying to help those in my lab establish good habits. 

For my last lab meeting, we discussed best practices in open data, based on this paper by my friend and colleague Lizzie Wolkovich. 

Everyone in my lab is now working on curating our own data for a current project, including making a diagram of our workflow, and organizing our data cleanly, with good meta-data. 

This is a work in progress, but here are a few resources I've found helpful: 

1. Lizzie's paper, "Advances in global change research require open science by individual researchers," gives a great motivation for why open data matters, what stands in its way, and how to design research to be open. 

2. Ten simple tips for how to design a clean spreadsheet, by @robinhouston and @SeanClarke (hint: commas, asterisks, and color-coding don't belong). 

3. Thirteen more elaborate but still simple and important tips for effective data management (what you wish you knew at the beginning of your research career, instead of learning the hard way, like always using full, consistent format for dates). 

4.  Lizzie's "Ze Template" for organizing project meta-data (what the study is about, what files it involves, where they're located), under Creative Commons license. Yay open science, and yay Lizzie! 


We're going to keep talking about this in my lab, including issues with open data in qualitative research (confidentiality, subjectivity of observations)- if you have any references on this, please let me know! 

This week was the first teaching retreat for teachers in USV, Lund University's division for faculty-free centers ranging from the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies to my own department of LUCSUS, the centre for sustainability studies. About 25 teachers stayed at a former church in the town of Höör, 25 minutes by train from Lund. 

Over two days, we learned new tools and approaches for teaching, and had time to share our ideas and learn from each other. Some of the main tools I learned about: 

1. Live voting using smartphones in class to check student understanding
   
   The Swedish company Mentimeter has designed a simple, free interface where teachers can set up questions (multiple choice or open answer), and students vote online or with their smartphones. You can see the anonymous votes accumulate in real time. Useful to check student understanding after discussion, keep engagement high, correct misconceptions. 
   ​
2. The "flipped" classroom 
   
   "Flipped" classrooms use student time at home to read, watch video lectures, and do quizzes; and then use class time for active tasks like discussion and group activities (rather than passive absorption of lecture material). This model changes the role of the teacher from "sage on the stage" to "guide on the side".  We were encouraged to try this model and shown some data on how effective it can be for student learning. 
   
   
3. Filming lectures for online & MOOCs 
   
   Online lectures are increasingly popular for MOOCs (massive online open courses), or as part of a traditional or flipped classroom. We were advised that a good video lecture for student learning is short (5-9 minutes), where the teacher addresses students directly (not students in another classroom), shows passion, and underlines important ideas. The video/audio quality isn't critical for student learning (as long as you can be clearly seen and heard), so don't worry about fancy technology- the webcam on your computer is good enough! 
   
   Lund University has a new tool, LU Play, for recording screencasts of lectures. We played around with it a bit- quite easy to use to film slides and your presentation, and you can include interactive quizzes. One disadvantage though is that it's only available internally to LU students logged in with a Stil-account, and not easy to upload directly to YouTube or other public platforms (you have to download to your own computer first), which made me wonder about archiving and long-term access. 
   
   I found a good video from UBC professor Rosie Redfield on why and how she records her lectures herself, with encouraging tips and helpful explanation of the technology she uses. Also it seems that the free open-source Open Broadcaster Software is a good option for recording screencasts (though a little less intuitive than LU Play at first). 
   
   
4. Syllabus design 
   We discussed the purpose and role of a course syllabus with Katarina Mårtensson Lund University Division for Higher Education Development (AHU). She pointed out all the different roles that a syllabus can play, including: forcing the teacher to focus and prioritize, making the learning outcomes visible, as a communication tool between teachers and students, between teachers to focus on overall program coherency, and to help new teachers who inherit a course, or have to take over on short notice. 
   
   We reviewed a syllabus from a colleague from another department and gave feedback on questions we would have as a student. This made me realize the importance of being familiar with similar courses to highlight what distinguishes my course (so I should do a syllabus review when designing a course, similar to a literature review for writing an academic paper).

I have come to believe that one of the biggest impediments to scientific advancement is writing. This is true in at least two ways. First, writing is often the critical bottleneck standing between the mountains of good ideas on whiteboards, hard drives, and inside people's heads that have not yet found a way to be communicated to a wider audience (both scientific and public). Second, the writing in published papers often does not help (and may actively hinder) the reader's understanding of the research and its implications. 

Nicholas Kristof was more blunt about this in his recent New York Times Op-Ed (with which I largely agree), asserting that PhD programs have "fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience" (ouch!). He cites a related piece by Jill Lepore in the Chronicle of Higher Education, where she describes academia as a "great, heaping mountain of exquisite knowledge surrounded by a vast moat of dreadful prose" (double ouch!).  

I think a fundamental problem here is that, although writing is a skill that can be taught and requires practice to master, writing is rarely taught. I never took a writing course in graduate school. I had professors who spent time correcting and commenting on papers (which I appreciate all the more now that I'm on the other side of the red pen), but I'm not sure I was able to take their specific comments and generalize them into principles of better writing. (I also think I didn't realize how important writing was until after I started editing and reading more papers than I wrote.) 

One way I've tried to teach writing is to develop templates, outlines, and rubrics that spell out a paper's structure, so that students can concentrate on developing and communicating their ideas in a way that will be clear to the reader. 
(I've had interesting discussions with my colleague Ladaea Rylander of the Lund University Academic Support Centre about the risks of templates suppressing creativity, some of which we address in our forthcoming book chapter; my basic conclusion is that I'm very happy for students to ignore these templates and do something creative if they are inspired to do so, but that many seem to benefit from and appreciate them). 

Without further ado, here are some of the resources I've made so far. I hope they're useful, and welcome feedback! 

Writing an academic abstract: a MadLibs (fill-in-the-blank) template adventure.

The Thesis Toolbox- slides from a workshop I gave for 40 master's students from across Lund University to get them started on designing their thesis. 

Template for writing a master's thesis research proposal - use this to structure your ideas, and eventually as the basis for writing your thesis. 

Generic Paper Outline, Or, What Goes Where in a Scientific Paper? Start here when you have to write up a thesis or journal article and fill it out as you go along. 

Finally, here's a long and somewhat cheeky guide to common problems I see in student writing, and suggested ways to overcome them. 

As Diana Liverman wrote in the Washington Post, focusing on only the grim projections along our current trajectory overwhelms and depresses students, and makes them feel powerless to act. Rather than rallying them to unite against a negative future, this approach actually decreases the motivation that drove many of them to study the environment in the first place. Surely this is not why professors want to teach, to extinguish rather than fuel their student's fires. 

Fortunately, there are solutions to turn the tide on climate change. As the world gears up for a UN conference in Paris in December 2015, where all countries are supposed to reach an agreement about greenhouse gas emissions, there has been a recent flurry of climate action and proposals, from the US-China climate deal to limit carbon emissions to grassroots campaigns to divest- moving financial investments away from fossil fuels. 

I've designed a teaching activity for master's students in my Earth Systems Science course to discuss and debate a range of climate change solutions. It fits within the framework I've used to design my teaching on climate change, which consists of five points that I first heard articulated in a lecture by Jon Krosnick at Stanford, based on his research with colleagues: it's warming, it's us, we're sure, it's bad, and we can fix it. People need to understand all of these points to get the whole picture of what climate change is, why it matters, and to be motivated to address it. It's essential to include the last point to leave students inspired rather than depressed. 

What if the secret to writing successful research proposals were to go back to the basic lessons your fourth grade teacher taught you about writing? It can't possibly be that simple, can it? 

I just had a lovely dinner with my smart & wise friend Harriet Bulkeley. One of many good pieces of advice she gave me (this one picked up by joining a conversation she overheard on a train!) is to think over the answer to four things before beginning a research proposal or project: 

1. What do I want to do?
2. Who do I want to do it with? 
3. Where do I want to do it?  
4. Why do I want to do it? 

I said this sounded like a great way to teach research design to students, but as we discussed more, I realized researchers at every level could probably benefit from this advice, myself included. She noted that many people can only answer one of these questions when they approach a university research office or a funding agency with a research idea. They might hope that the answers will get clarified in working through the project, but this is rarely the case. In projects that haven't clarified these key points at the outstart are likely to get bogged down in these issues through the course of research. A great reminder to think through the basics before committing your precious and limited time. 

I just read a New York Times article (posted by @eric_mazur*) that inspired me to post last year's final exam for my new students on the first day of our Earth Systems Science class. I have always shared last year's final as a teaching tool in the weeks before the exam, because I think it's the best study guide for students to work through it on their own or in small groups as they prepare. (Plus, it removes any possibility for cheating, which could be a temptation if last year's students are expected to keep old exams private after getting them returned.) I post just the exam for a week or so, and then post a compilation of the best student answers from the previous year to give an idea of what an excellent exam would look like. My reasoning is that I want all students who work hard to do well on the exam, and they will do their best if they have a realistic model to work with. After all, the most important thing I'm trying to teach is not facts, but a way of thinking, in particular, using data to support claims; the more exposure students get to this, the better.  

However, this article by Benedict Carey just made me think about exams in a new way- as "learning devices" that can be "the key to studying, rather than the other way around." Psychological research has shown that pretesting can change the way we think, helping to prepare our brains to better receive, process, and hold on to relevant information when it appears. Testing, it turns out, is a powerful way to overcome the "fluency illusion"- thinking that we know something better than we do, because we study it in a vacuum where no competing plausible ideas exist. When presented with challenging competing ideas on a test, we're forced to reason our way through them to show we've really learned. 

The article describes initial research by Elizabeth Ligon Bjork (who heads the fantastically named "Learning and Forgetting Lab" at UCLA) and Nicholas Soderstrom, who presented psychology students with pretests. They found that pretesting increased their final exam scores by 10% (which can be a difference between a grade of C and B in the American grading system, for example). The researchers didn't give their students the final exam on the first day, because they didn't want them to be overwhelmed. I'm not asking my students to sit down and take a 3 hour exam - just posting it for them as a study resource. I hope they find it useful- stay tuned! 

* Walk down memory lane: The first time I learned anything about teaching (the horribly pedagogic-sounding but very important field of pedagogy) was as a "Kindergarten Through Infinity" fellow as a master's student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This was an NSF K-12 program that matched STEM grad students (who brought science content knowledge) with primary and secondary school teachers (who were expert teachers) to design learning activities for students ages 5 through 18. It was here that I first heard about and was inspired by Eric Mazur, the Harvard physics professor who turned his teaching upside-down when he realized his traditional lectures weren't producing deep learning, even for extremely bright students. His solution was the Peer Instruction method. This was the first time I heard about Think-Pair-Share and other teaching techniques I'm still using.