We’ve finished the third week of classes, I need to pause and think about my eco-devo class. You know, teachers do this: a class isn’t a set of railroad tracks taking us to a destination, and sometimes it’s worthwhile to reassess.
My goals with the course are clear. We’re studying a fairly new interdisciplinary science, we’ve got a good solid textbook, I’ve got a dozen smart students, let’s explore. I explicitly want to avoid turning it into a lecture course, where I just stand up and tell them what they need to know, so I constrained myself with some serious guardrails. I only lecture once a week, on Monday, and I don’t just tell them the answers, but give them a lot of questions that they have to answer as a group on Wednesday. I also give them a primary research paper to take apart on Friday.
Does it all work? Yes, mostly.
It wrecks my weekend, though. My Monday lectures have to cover some complex material while focusing the students on relevant questions. I can’t sink comfortably into a flurry of detail, as would be easy to do, I have to bring out the broader issues while simultaneously fleshing out examples with an appropriate amount of detail. This week we’re discussing developmental plasticity, for instance, and while the textbook sings a siren song of numerous examples that I could just recite, I have to provide context and ideas and questions that will motivate discussion on Wednesdays. I think this part of the class is going OK.
I think the students are doing the actual learning part of the course on Wednesdays. This is the day I do things like put them into groups, put stuff on the whiteboards, show that they are actually engaging with the material they’re being exposed to. It’s all on the students, and these are all smart students, so I’d really have to be bad at my job to screw this part up. I prime them with a few ideas that they get at the start of the week, and then let them go.
Fridays…I’ve got to work on my Friday class. I’ve got two problems here. One is that I appoint two students to lead the discussion of a research paper, which is fine, except that these danged ambitious students charge in to do all the work. I tell them to split it up, delegate, and put the rest of the class to work figuring out what is going on in the paper, but no, they try to do it all, and then the whole class sits quietly listening along. I may have to change how I organize those days.
The second problem is me. For instance, last week the theme was about the importance of integrating multiple perspectives to answer complex question, going beyond reductionism. And then I picked what I thought was a good paper that did exactly that, trying to identify the ecological factors behind snake evolution. It was too much. It started with a phylogenetic analysis, then applied a principal component analysis to skull morphology (uh-oh, bio students don’t get much experience with PCA here), added a bit of development/heterochrony work, and then tied all of those approaches together in a nice bit of synthesis. Cool, but too much for some undergrads to handle all at once. I am challenging them, at least, but I think I’d better take next week’s paper down a notch. While my goal was to make them read primary research, maybe I’ll have to ease them in with some review papers for a while, and give their brains a chance to release some pressure.
When I say it all mostly works, that’s entirely from my perspective. Maybe the students hate it, but because they’re all polite Midwestern people, they’re too nice to say it. I’m going to have to put together some kind of student evaluation form to hand out next week so I can find out if I’ve gone off the rails.
This is where I’m at on a Saturday morning at the end of the third week of classes, and now it’s time to immerse myself in background reading and lecture prep. One source I’m finding extremely useful for this course is Mary Jane West-Eberhard’s Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, which is a wonderfully rich source of ideas…but also would have undergraduate brains melting out their ears if I tried making this their textbook. One of my aspirations for this course is that they should be able to emerge from it at the end of the semester and be prepared to read West-Eberhard’s book without having a nervous breakdown.
That would be a fun graduate-level class to teach. Also about ten times more work than this one.
Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.
Going on stuff that happened decades ago now, ecology is a quite difficult, comprehensive, everything and the kitchen sink topic in itself. Developmental biology is challenging. Through some evolution in there and damn. Hard to keep such a combo grounded upon digestible basics.
From reading Adam Grant my takeaway is that active learning, which you seem to be mostly doing here, is better than lectures and focussing entirely on a course text. I briefly looked at that snake development article and my head hurt. I guess this course will be a learning curve for you in what works and doesn’t. I enjoy reading your takes on how the course unfolds in the classroom environment so to speak.
One topic that fascinated me was cyclomorphosis or seasonal polyphenism, which may not be entirely the same thing.
Aha, I found reference to seasonal polymorphs in the moth Nemoria arizonaria in Brian Hall’s Evolutionary Developmental Biology which led me on a Google hunt:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemoria_arizonaria
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17834231/
That had captivated me years ago.
Here’s a bit more investigation on that:
https://academic.oup.com/biolinnean/article/58/3/277/2662863
I was able to find the previously posted Erick Greene article online though don’t know if posting that link is permissible. The second Erick Greene article PDF is readily accessible on the OUP page itself if so incline. Not sure if PZ would find these ancient articles still useful to his class. Seems relevant though.
The Nemoria story is in the first chapter of the textbook, so it’s not too old for Gilbert.
I am finding the textbook a bit weak on neuronal remodeling in response to the visual environment, so I’ll probably leave the guidebook path in week 5 to talk about horrifying experiments on kittens. Gilbert is jam-packed with all kinds of surprising phenomena, but he has a few blind spots (heh).
If you really want to make students undergo brain melt, have them try reading The Neoproterozoic Biosphere (yes, I know, geology not biology, but the era laid the ground for the ‘Cambrian explosion’).
“The ecological origins of snakes as revealed by skull evolution” (2018)? That’s the one I read, anyway. I liked it. But it is a lot. You must have some bright students! I don’t think I knew of PCA, but was pleased to learn that it’s basically the same as factor analysis, which I love. It’s a great tool for what they’re doing, and their research seems like a good introduction to this type of analysis because it deals with shapes and so helps with visualization.
I thought their figures were super helpful. Obviously the authors of a scientific paper aren’t going to do it, but if I were studying it I would write like “lizardy face” at the positive end of the PC1 axis and “snakey face” at the negative end. (I know it’s about skull shape and not face shape, but I can picture it better as faces; also, looking up pictures of snakes was the stuff of nightmares.) The figures conveyed information really well, and I loved their use of color, but I think drawing or writing out one’s own pared-down versions of each figure might be helpful.
It seems like if people aren’t scared off by it, as the course progresses they’ll be able to think back on it and understand it better, so in that sense it’s a good choice. And phylomorphospace is a fun word.
Horrible kitten experiments is something I learned about forty odd years ago, though I am making the assumption you are talking about the ones where the kittens were made to wear various goggles?
Um, Jazzlet, PZ has mentioned that stuff before.
It’s a bit more invasive than that; you probably don’t want to know.
Maybe do the paper thing on Thursday. Ask the students to try and map out all the pieces and note what they know about already and what they don’t know about. Then get the students to self organise into following up on the unknowns and present on Friday afternoon.
Learning how to lead a discussion rather than lecture on a topic is a big leap! It’s still difficult as a graduate student, and it’s much easier to fall back into “let me tell you what I know” than figure out how to draw out what other people might have gleaned. I find it goes a lot better if I center the discussion around the figures than the text because good figures are basically just entry points into into the results and how that tells the story of the Discussion, and bad figures are good tools on “what not to do”!