Research is a collaborative endeavor, and humans learn best from other humans. I offer on-site workshops and masterclasses tuned to your needs so that your group can grow together. Whether you are building institutional capacity, embarking on a new project together, or just looking to learn as a group, I’m here for you.
I love travel and I love meeting with people at other institutions to chat about their work. During my visit, I’m happy to meet 1:1 for design consults with your participants, chat with your Dean or Provost about why education research is good for everyone, or meet with your students (and/or campus groups like Women in STEM) about life as an academic.
Workshop logistics
My workshops are interactive, high-energy, and dynamic. Be prepared to work.
Most of these workshops are naturally 2-3h long, though some of them can be squeezed to 90 minutes and some do better at 4h. If you’re looking to build a day-long workshop, you’re looking at about 3 topics from this list. If you’re looking to build a multi-day bootcamp or a full-week field school, the PEER Institute has what you need.
Your group can be as small as 4-6 people or as large as a full auditorium. Generally, though, the “sweet spot” for workshops is 15-30 people, masterclasses are great for up to about 6-8, and colloquia can be whatever you want. You could be all emerging education researchers or a mix of brand-new and experienced people. You could be all faculty, all students & postdocs, or a mix of researchers from all career stages. You could be all in one department, a mix of STEM departments, or from across your whole university or geographic region. Tell me who you are and what you need, and I’ll write a workshop that fits your needs.
The calendar is complicated, but I love to travel. You should generally plan that I need 3 months of lead time for a half- or full-day workshop, and 6-8 months for a long weekend or a full week. However, sometimes there’s a weird gap in my calendar. Contact me early to chat about what you’re looking for.
Workshop topics
Fundamentals of education research
These workshops require that participants have a research or development project in mind, and they work best for emerging education researchers or SoTLers.
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Getting started with research design | How do you know if your students are learning? What changes are you contemplating for next year? In this workshop, we’ll clarify your ideas about teaching problems to solve or new things to try. Your ideas will form the nucleus of a new SoTL project. You will leave this workshop with a reasonable and possible research question, as well as initial ideas towards a research design. |
| Doing research with human subjects: what faculty need to know | Faculty often make changes in their teaching to improve student understanding and engagement. To assess these changes – either at the course level or the departmental level – requires careful measurements. In this interactive workshop, I discuss some of the challenges with collecting, analyzing, and presenting student data from the perspective of the care of human subjects. We discuss how to choose appropriate measurements, what do to if you have historical data, and how to plan for the future. I will walk you through privacy concerns for work with human subjects, including applying for approval from the human subjects protection board (IRB). This is an introductory level workshop for people just getting started with the scholarship of teaching and learning. |
Working with data
These topics are great alone, or you can couple them with Getting started with research design for a more robust learning experience. They’re appropriate for emerging education researchers or SoTLers.
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Sharpening your “researcher eyes” with classroom observations | New researchers often struggle to make careful observations of student interactions, translate those observations into research questions, and then refine their research questions through close analysis of video-based data. In this workshop, we practice looking for subtlety in classroom video and building viable research projects within the constraints of classroom observations. This workshop is for people who are experienced in the classroom and new to video-based research. |
| Getting started in interview-based research | Interviews are a powerful way to learn from and with other people, and it turns out they’re also great for research. If you’re thinking about a research project that collects or analyzes interview data, this workshop will get you started. We’ll cover finding your interview voice, developing an initial protocol, and powerful phrases during an interview. We’ll practice analyzing real interview data, and discuss practical data collection and management techniques. |
| Common data types in education research | New education researchers are often curious about how much data they need, or whether their small classes are big enough to collect enough data. This workshop outlines common data types and quantities in education research, and how to match your data types to your research questions. |
Topics in education research
These topics are deeply important to education research, whether you’re just getting started or an experienced researcher. Experienced researchers can engage with them as standalone workshops, but emerging researchers should couple them with fundamental topics.
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Research and evaluation | Evaluation is how you know if you are meeting your goals and serving human needs. All projects, even research projects, are better with explicit and varied evaluation. In this workshop, we’ll practice choosing different kinds of evaluation for your projects, and work on the best ways to learn what you need to proceed. |
| Theory in education research | Theory tells you why: why your results are significant, why your methods are appropriate, and why your research questions are valid. You need theory to build a coherent research project, but how should you choose which theory to use? In this workshop, we’ll talk about an organizing framework for theories in education research, and practice matching research questions to theories. |
| Iterative design | Iteration is core feature of successful research project designs. This is true in education research as well as engineering, bench science, product design & testing, and software development. If you want to discover new things or develop new products, you iterate. In this workshop, we’ll focus on two common iteration strategies in education research and development, and work to integrate interation into your project designs. |
Research communication
These workshops are appropriate for researchers of any level and any field, as long as their research projects are well-developed.
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Making beautiful posters | Let’s be honest: there are a lot of really ugly posters out there, and scientists aren’t trained on how to beautifully present their work. In this hands-on, practical workshop, we focus on making your posters better: more readable, more clear, more memorable, and more accessible. You should bring an abstract for a poster you plan to present or a draft poster that needs help. This workshop is primarily aimed at graduate students, but undergrads and postdocs are also welcome. |
| Elevator pitches | You’re in an elevator a conference and potential collaborator asks about your research. You run into your dean in the hallway and they ask what you’re working on. You need to solicit new participants into your research study. What do you say? Let’s work on encapsulating your projects, communicating with non-researchers, and asking for what you need. This workshop is best if you’ve already got a clear project in mind, whether it’s new or nearly complete. |
Improving university teaching
Education research improves student learning, so let’s use some research results to improve our teaching. These workshops are appropriate for a broad audience of STEM instructors, even if they don’t want to do education research themselves.
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Intersecting AI and AI | Generative AI (AI) opens thorny issues for students and faculty grappling with academic integrity (AI). How can faculty promote student learning when generative AI makes it easy to shortcut? Let’s talk through some use cases from an academic integrity perspective. I’ll address common sources of confusion for students as well as practical methods to reduce cheating and promote learning. |
| Fostering inclusivity and equity in the classroom | What classroom practices support everyone in the classroom? How can we tell when a learning environment is equitable? How can we adjust our policies and teaching methods to better support diverse learners? In this workshop, we blend results from education research with practice: active listening, equitable policies, having difficult conversations with students, and supporting diverse learners. This workshop is aimed at faculty and classroom instructors. |
Colloquia for physics departments
Looking for something a little more passive? These topics are more appropriate for a departmental colloquium: 50 minutes of slide-based entertainment, aimed at faculty and students in the department, plus faculty in other department across the college.
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Helping students learn more | How do students learn, and how can we help? This is a great introduction to key results from education research around student learning. It’s best for STEM audiences or physics department colloquia which occasionally bring in scientists from other disciplines. |
| Physics learning at large and small scales | How do we know how people learn physics? This is a fundamental question of measurement which requires both large-scale quantitative and small-scale qualitative studies to build a full picture of student learning in physics. In this talk, I discuss efforts to measure student learning using quantitive and qualitative data of physics students across the undergraduate curriculum and across institutions. |
| Who can do this? Discrimination in professional science | From overt sexism to more mundane structural discrimination, women in science face many challenges; these challenges compound intersectionally for women with multiple historically excluded identities. In this talk, I’ll briefly go over the state of sexist and racist discrimination and harassment in science, focusing on physics and astronomy. I will outline some things we can do as individuals and collectively to combat pervasive sexism and racism. |
| Consequences of asset-based models for physics education | Historically, physics education research (PER) has used deficit models for students, focusing on how students don’t understand diverse topics in physics and developing instructional tools to fix students’ difficulties. In contrast, an asset-based model of students focuses on how students put together different ideas to solve problems, accounting for both processes of problem solving and deeper structure to students’ thinking. This talk takes up the consequences (both instructional and in research) for an asset-based view of students, and applies them to faculty development models as well. |