Kim Nicholas
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Finding peer reviewers

10/10/2019

 
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/ 


Tips and tools for digital teaching and creating teaching portfolios

11/29/2016

 
Here’s a short summary I co-wrote with Céline Fernandez compiling the highlights of our November meeting for the LuPOD professional development program. ​
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Image from https://www.roberthalf.com/creativegroup/blog/how-to-put-together-your-first-professional-portfolio
Tools for digital learning:
  • Voto.se: to create quiz and have participants voting in real time
  • Kahoot: to create learning games​
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. :) 

Open Data, Part 1 

4/26/2016

 
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Photo credit: justgrimes on Flickr
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! 

Teaching retreat: realtime surveys, online lectures & more

3/4/2016

 
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).

Advice on applying to grad school 

8/28/2015

 
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Image from Flickr user waverleo under Creative Commons
    Fall is graduate school application time! Many of my former students are interested in pursuing a PhD, and are asking me for my advice on applying to grad school. Great!

    Here are some of my top tips, and a suggested template of a letter to contact a potential advisor at the end: 
    1. Clarify your motivation for getting a PhD. The more clearly you can articulate this, the more convincing you'll be as an applicant. While there are many important components of graduate training, the basic point of getting a PhD is to train you to do independent research, so you need to explain why this is something you want to do.

      Your motivation might be because you love research, you are inspired by a particular topic or question you want to answer, you want to teach at the university level (which nearly always requires a PhD), you think it sounds fun to spend half a decade pursuing the scholarly life, your dream job (in or outside academia) will require or benefit greatly if you have a PhD. Being good at school or not knowing what else to do are not great reasons here. 

      One example: Years after reviewing a graduate fellowship application, I still remember a woman whose dream was to run a tropical rainforest research station for undergraduates to study abroad, like one where she had studied. Her passion for the experience of both research and teaching was clear throughout her application, and totally convinced me that she should pursue a PhD. 

    2. Formulate your research vision. This is hard, but critical. You'll have to write a full proposal for your application, but initially a core question is enough to contact a potential advisor.

      Imagine what you would be excited to have answered five years down the line, when you can put those three magical letters after your name. Try to get beyond a topic (climate change, ecosystem services) into a puzzle or question or case study that you want to investigate.

      The more specific you can be, the more focused and serious you look to potential advisors. Don’t forget to think about what impact you want to have with your research (are you trying to advance basic knowledge, inform management, change policy?) to design your question accordingly.

      Don’t worry about being too tied down to the project you propose, and don’t emphasize that everything is subject to change. In my experience, this is just assumed in research in general, and for a PhD project in particular. The more clearly you can articulate an exciting but doable project, the more convincing you are as a potential researcher. It’s really common for PhD projects to change dramatically in response to opportunities, evolving interests, or other changing conditions (in my case, from thinking I would study tropical forests to actually studying vineyards in California). So sound confident! 

      This piece of advice links closely with #3, because it’s important that you find potential advisors who are doing work that is closely enough related to what you want to do that they will be excited to work with you.

    3. Identify potential PhD advisors. The amount of interaction you have with your supervisor varies by field (in my experience, more in natural sciences and less in social sciences and humanities), but in my opinion this is critical to your future success in science (and data supports this). You want to find someone who meets two criteria (which my mentor Pam Matson summed up as "brilliant, and nice"): 

      - S/he is a good researcher (working with questions, methods, projects that you find interesting, and can help you learn in these areas). You can identify this from their track record- their papers, website, CV. This should be done before contacting them. 

      -S/he is a good person (someone whose integrity you respect, and whose personality you will get along with over many years in sometimes stressful situations). After you find someone who meets the first criteria above and have established your research compatibility, be sure to assess this second criteria before accepting a position in their lab. Assessing this requires talking to people who know them personally (be sure to directly ask their current and former grad students "Would you recommend joining Dr. X's lab?") and forming your own impression from meeting them in person.

      I suggest you at least skim one paper of theirs before writing them, so that you can mention something specific that stands out to you in their work. Don’t worry if you don’t understand all the details and methods. Hopefully they write clearly enough that you can understand the research question and their answer to it, and determine if it’s something that interests you. 

    4. Identify funding sources. Science is supported by convincing people with money that you have a good idea that is worth pursuing. PhD students (at least in most sciences) are generally paid a stipend that covers tuition and enough salary to live on. This can come from two basic sources: a scholarship or fellowship granted to you personally by a funder or your department, or a grant for a research project granted to your advisor.

      In the first scenario, you will be in a great position to pursue the questions that most interest you if you are able to secure your own funding. Further, a lot of success in a research career depends on writing successful grants, so it’s good to start practicing now. These sources are usually national, so it depends where you are applying, and will require some digging around to find them. I'm most familiar with the US funding system, which includes federal agencies like the NSF Graduate Fellow Research Program, scholarships from NASA and the EPA, and university fellowships (which often are specific to your department, and may or may not require a separate application).

      In the second scenario, if your potential advisor has a grant to pursue a line of research you’re excited about, that’s great. You will hopefully be part of a team that can make your research more collaborative and fun, as well as probably progress faster than starting from scratch. Your advisor may be more invested in your research, and better able to mentor you in research design and analysis, if it’s more closely aligned with her own interests. Still, be cautious about joining established projects with set deadlines and deliverables – you want to make sure you will have space to develop your own ideas, not only implement out someone else's. 

      Mentioning that you are applying for your own funding to a potential advisor shows that you are serious and well-informed. Some lucky departments guarantee graduate student funding- this is great, but you’ll still be expected (or at least strongly encouraged) to apply for your own money. And generally advisors appreciate if you apply for your own money as well. If you get it, they’ll still have funding to hire another qualified student, plus get extra-smart you as a bonus.

    5. Contact your potential advisor. I recommend a succinct email that expresses your interest, highlights your strengths, and clearly asks them to get back to you. Keep it snappy- professors get an insane amount of email.

      Here’s my suggestion for a rough template to get you started:

      Dear Dr. X, 

      I came across your work through X (conference/paper/my professor X’s recommendation). I am very interested in your approach to (topic) using (method/specific thing they do that interests you). 

      I’m writing to inquire if you are accepting PhD students in your lab for fall 2016? 

      I am aiming to pursue a PhD dissertation focusing on X topic, specifically looking at the question of X puzzle in X case for X purpose. 

      My background is in X bachelors from X university/Y masters from Y university. My research to date has focused on X, which I investigated most recently in my master’s thesis on X topic in X place, finding that X key highlight (please see attached thesis FYI). I have written about this work in a popular science blog here (link) and am currently preparing the manuscript for submission to the journal of X with my supervisor X. 

      I also have experience in X business/NGO/policy/government, where I accomplished X. For more details, please see my attached CV. 

      Regarding funding, I am currently applying for funding from X, X and X scholarship agencies to support the project I’ve outlined above. If there are any additional funding sources that you think might be a good fit to support this work, I would really appreciate any tips. And of course, if you have any currently funded projects that could support a PhD student, I would love to hear about them. 

      Thank you very much for your time and I look forward to hearing from you. 

      Best regards, 

      You

      ----

      If you don’t hear back from them in 2 weeks, resend your message with a polite note at the top: “Dear Dr. X, I thought my earlier message may have caught you at a busy time. I’m still very keen to pursue a PhD in your lab, and hoping you can let me know if you are accepting new students next fall. Thank you, X” 

      If there’s someone you’re really excited about who hasn’t gotten back to you, consider picking up the phone to call them. Bold move, but it just might work! People get a bajillion emails, but few phone calls nowadays. Practice a shortened version of the text above to ask them.

      6. Contact several advisors! When you are first contacting advisors, your goal should be to identify several people who you would be excited to work with, in departments that look good, in cities where you would like to live. 

      It’s smart to apply to at least several schools (I just checked and I applied to seven PhD programs, which now seems excessive- but at least three is good). You don’t know where you’ll get in, and you’ll have to consider personal factors about where you want to live, so it’s good to have options.

      Most advisors will be contacted by many students and will have many applicants for each open position in their lab. So, you both are on the lookout for the person who will be the best fit! Most advisors will understand this (some may even ask where else you are applying).

      That said, if you apply for external fellowships, you may have to specify your top choice for where you want to go and who you want to work with (depending on the fellowship). In this case, it’s important to share your plans with your potential advisor and get their agreement to support your application. In any case, if you really click with a potential advisor, consider asking them to give you feedback on your external fellowship application (for something like NSF GRFP, not for their own university applications where they would have a conflict of interest). Hopefully their comments can help you strengthen your proposal. 

      In any case, good communication with a potential advisor is important, so ask them questions to clarify expectations or any points of confusion. 

      Hope this helps- let me know if you have any comments! 



Cheat Sheets for Writing scientific papers

2/23/2015

 
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. 



Teaching climate Solutions at the “We Can Fix It World Café”

11/27/2014

 
Teaching climate change at university is essential to educate scientifically literate citizens who can make informed choices. Today’s college students were born into a world warmer than the 20th century average; they have never experienced a “normal” climate, and they will live their lives in an era of climate change. 

But, news flash: climate change is depressing! There is abundant evidence showing in increasingly stark relief that a +4°C world is a scary place- one we all have an interest in avoiding. We are in a critical time for climate policy, where we have a narrow but decisive window of time to change course, find new opportunities and avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
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LUMES students analyzing the Deep Decarbonization report as part of the "We Can Fix It World Cafe".

Link to lesson plan for the We Can Fix It World Café

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. 
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Students comparing proposed solutions at the poster session.
The "We Can Fix It World Cafe" is a three-hour teaching activity where students critically engage with a dozen proposals for climate change solutions, from sources ranging from the World Bank to student ideas crowdsourced by the MIT ClimateCo Lab. The students first discuss a proposal that they've read in small groups and summarize it on a poster, then share their findings between groups, then share with the whole class in a poster session. I was introduced to the World Cafe method ("a simple, effective, and flexible format for hosting large group dialogue") by my former student Chad Boda. I used this activity to end my Earth Systems Science course this year, and it was satisfying to conclude with a lot of buzz and positive energy from the students. 

As Chris Field, IPCC Co-Chair and my PhD advisor, recently said at Stanford about climate solutions: "The longer you wait, the more it costs, the more complicated solutions get to be, and the more ... impacts you deal with. There's no reason to wait, because there are smart, effective, low-cost things we could be doing today." In addition to addressing the essential first four points, I think professors really need to include "we can fix it" on the syllabus, to prepare our students to be leaders in the world they are inheriting and shaping. 

Going Back To Fourth Grade To Write Successful Research Proposals

9/17/2014

 
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. 

Why I Posted Last Year's Final Exam on the first day of class

9/8/2014

 
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.   

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Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies 


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