Join us on 4/27 at 4pm EASTERN TIME for a Codon Convo with Justin Shaffer! Justin is a teaching professor at the Colorado School of Mines and has taught 8000+ students in a variety of STEM disciplines using a high-structure course design over the past 10+ years. Justin also researches and publishes on the efficacy of high-structure course design components, especially relating to student success in large, first year STEM courses.
High-structure design involves students being actively engaged in the learning process via pre-class content acquisition and assessment, in-class active learning, after-class review and assessment, and frequent summative assessments. We as instructors often give advice to students on how to succeed in class, but what do students tell each other? Justin will present his research on student advice for success in high-structure courses which involved qualitative analysis of 838 students’ responses across four STEM disciplines and two universities.
We’ll discuss how this research informs strategies that instructors can use to best support student learning and how it can impact the design of the Codon Learning platform. We’ll demonstrate how to (1) build a high-structure course that includes pre-class, in-class, and after-class components, and (2) align all of these items to course learning objectives to support student’s metacognitive skills and study habits. By the end of this Convo, you’ll have the resources and knowledge to implement high-structure practices into your own courses and help your students achieve positive outcomes.
Dr. Justin Shaffer is a teaching professor in Chemical and Biological Engineering and Quantitative Biosciences and Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. He has taught anatomy and physiology, human anatomy, comparative anatomy, and introductory biology courses to thousands of pre-health and biology students using evidence-based teaching methods at a wide variety of universities, including the University of California, Irvine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina A&T State University. Dr. Shaffer is the anatomy and physiology editor for CourseSource, is a former editor for the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society Educator Journal, and is the founder of Recombinant Education.