Sharing best practices allows for innovation

September 23, 2024

The days of 50-minute college lectures and note-taking are a thing of the past.

"Active learning is essential for this generation," said Dr. Andrew Sathoff, assistant professor of biology at Dakota State University.

"At DSU, I ask a lot of questions. We do a lot of group work, board work, and games like Pharmageddon, a medical educational card game featuring bugs versus drugs," he said.

Bringing these practices to professional development conferences is a way to share successful experiences so all can become better teachers and researchers, Sathoff explained.

"It shifts the way you think, and it allows for innovation in the classroom and the research lab," he said. It also demonstrates DSU can be a thought leader in teaching innovation.

Becca Hall and Andrew Sathoff organized a session on teaching activities for Gen Z students at the annual Plant Health Conference.

This summer, he and Rebecca Hall, a senior teaching specialist and outreach coordinator at the University of Minnesota, organized and led a special session titled, "Hands-on Approaches for Teaching Plant Pathology to Undergraduates in Generation Z," at the 2024 Plant Health Conference in Memphis.

The duo invited three fellow educators to join in giving presentations about hands-on engagement approaches. Ruth Dill-Macky, a professor at the University of Minnesota, kicked off the special session with an icebreaker activity that introduces students to microbes by using everyday objects like tennis balls and bowling balls for comparison and observation. Alma Laney, an assistant professor at Utah Valley University, shared about CURE, an active learning strategy intended to teach specific concepts through a series of guided research experiments.

Dr. Robert Hirsch, from the University of Kentucky, introduced attendees to cooking with fungi. He often visits breweries and libraries to give live cooking demonstrations with fungi or fungal-derived products, while talking about plant pathology and mushrooms. Hirsch even cooks with corn smut, a fungal disease that creates tumor-like galls on the corn, that is eaten as a delicacy in Mexico.

The 80 to 100 attendees at the session also became part of the dialogue, sharing what works in their classrooms with others. "I think people really appreciated that they could get up, move around, interact with each other, and form new networks," he said.

When he returns from conferences, Sathoff tries to share new ideas with the community, and he hopes to do an educational mushroom cooking demonstration at the local library.

He can also bring those ideas back to his colleagues. For example, Sathoff attended a 3D printing training in Milwaukee over the summer.

"Two of our faculty, Dr. Alex Dececchi, and Dr. Jeff Elbert, are working together on a computational modeling project, so they could print off biomolecules and have physical models the students can touch and interact with," Sathoff said.

In addition to bringing back new ideas to try in the classroom, professional development events create opportunities to form professional connections and find research collaborators.

"It's a small enough community that you see the same people every year, and you form these relationships over time that are really powerful," he said.

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