The National Association of Biology Teachers is holding a Professional Development Summit meeting for two-year and four-year college faculty at its annual Professional Development Conference in Dallas in November, 2012. The topic will be propagating the "change" implicit in the document Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action. The day-long Summit features plenary sessions with noted speakers and leaders in education reform. It includes an interactive workshop on "Classroom Integration in the Introductory Biology Classroom," demonstrating practical management of this new approach to science education. Interested participants then constitute a corps of faculty activated to transform aspects of their teaching during the following year, assisted by mentors from among the speakers. This process gives visibility to the Vision and Change movement and a ripe audience to disseminate its mandates.
The purpose of this project was to support the professional development of college and university biology faculty. A 2011 report prepared by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), "Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action" proposed a number of goals for biology education to best prepare students for the complex, science- and technology-driven society of the 21st century. Biology education must be relevant to student's everyday experiences, utilize active learning strategies to engage all students, promote scientific literacy, instill an understanding of the scientific method, and provide students with critical thinking and analysis skills. Implementing this vision requires that every biology educator nationwide have the opportunity to learn these principles, and receive training in teaching methods that allow these principles to be fulfilled. This project aimed to educate biology faculty from 2- and 4-year colleges and universities nationwide about the Vision and Change project, and further provide models for implementing Vision and Change strategies in their own classroom. To reach a nationwide audience, project investigators developed two intensive Vision and Change seminars (called "Summits") in 2012 and 2013, at the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) Annual Professional Development Conference. NABT is a preeminent national organization of biology teachers at all educational levels, and the annual conference draws hundreds of educators from high school, 2 year colleges, and 4 year colleges and universities interested in innovative teaching approaches. For the 2012 conference, this project organized a conference-wide keynote speech by Dr. Shirley Malcom, Head of Education and Human Resources at AAAS. Dr. Malcom is a nationally recognized advocate for public science literacy, student engagement in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers, and access for girls and women into STEM fields. Her keynote reached 300 or more conference attendees, including high school and college teachers and higher education administrators. The 2012 conference also included a day-long summit focused on introductory biology coursework at 2- and 4-year colleges, attended by approximately 100 educators. the summit explained aspects of the Vision and Change report in greater detail, and featured speakers at the forefront of the Vision and Change project. The speakers included Dr. Susan Singer, one of the authors involved in the Vision and Change report, Dr. Jay Labov, National Research Council Senior Advisor for Education and Communications, Dr. Gordon Uno, head of the NSF-funded Introductory Biology Project (IRB), an effort to improve and standardize competencies and skills taught in introductory college biology courses, and Dr. Melissa McCartney, Outreach Manager for Science in the Classroom, an initiative of the AAAS flagship journal, Science, to make research articles accessible to science students. The 2013 conference featured a day-long follow up summit where faculty who had attended the first summit were invited to present on Vision and Change innovations that they had implemented since reading the Vision and Change report. Presentation proposals were peer reviewed and a total of 12 projects were chosen for presentation at the 2013 summit (11 accepted and presented, 6 as oral presentations and 5 as posters). The projects were varied in scope, from faculty-driven reinvention of entire major curricula, to ways to make laboratory courses more student-driven and research based, but all were chosen for their portability - that is, the usefulness of each as a model for implementation of a similar strategy at a different college or university. Each presenter came with handouts to help audience members get started on implementing that strategy at their own school. This seminar was also attended by approximately 100 educators from institutions nationwide. Surveys from the 2012 Keynote and Summit indicated that only about 50% of college educators, and 30% of high school and middle school educators had good or excellent knowledge of the Vision and Change report prior to attending the conference, suggesting that even "getting the word out" is an ongoing process. On a positive note, when asked about teaching practice, a majority of instructors (75%) reported making changes in their teaching career towards more active (student engaging) teaching methods, and about one-third of instructors reported having made teaching changes in keeping with Vision and Change principles in the last two years. These data suggest that, even for the most engaged teachers (those willing and able to attend a teacher's professional development conference), understanding of, belief in, and implementation of the recommendations outlined in Vision and Change is uneven. To conclude this project, the investigators have submitted several manuscripts for publication in American Biology Teacher, NABT's educator journal for advanced high school, and college and university biology faculty, that will call attention to the Vision and Change report, and describe the model implementation strategies featured at the 2013 summit. These articles will reach a national audience to further disseminate Vision and Change ideals nationally.
