John Dawson
Math/Science Assistant Professor

Teaching

GENERAL PHILOSOPHY While at Colby College, I developed a strong love for small classes and the close interaction between students and faculty.  For me, it was that close interaction that drove me to continue my education.  As a graduate student, I have seen the disadvantages placed on students at large research universities such as the University of Iowa and the University of Massachusetts where students are subjected to large classes and are seldom offered the opportunity to work closely with a faculty member on a independent project.  It is very important for students to have independent projects.  My defining moment as a scientist dates back to my senior honors project at Colby.  Through these independent projects students blossom into earth scientists.  It is the ability to work on every aspect of a project from start to finish that every scientist needs to learn about.  It is the scientific process that you cannot teach in a lecture.  I feel as though I grew so much as a person and researcher during my last year at Colby.  I now want to be there to witness countless undergraduates go through that process themselves.   My general teaching philosophy has two central facets: approachability and effort.  Teachers must harvest an atmosphere in which students feel comfortable in learning, and many times this cannot happen when a teacher lacks patience and is unresponsive to the needs of individual students.  Many times we forget that students learn in different manners (visual, audio haptic [i.e., those that learn best by doing]) and at different paces.  I’ve developed the view that a multifaceted teaching approach (see below) is the best way to handle the different needs of the students.  In addition, a good teacher needs to be entertaining and funny to further foster a good learning environment.  My jokes might not be very funny, but they always pull the students attention back to the lecture and makes them more at ease to ask any questions (even the occasional odd one). Good teaching requires a lot of time and effort, so every lecture or laboratory needs to be well prepared.  I’ve seen many instructors that put minimal effort into their teaching.  Somehow they believe that they are only there to dictate geology facts to the student and it is the students responsibility to learn them.  My courses are always underdevelopment, since there are always lectures or labs that could be improved.  As such, I believe that a teacher needs to keep up with the latest developments in geology.  If I ever come to the point in my teaching career that I can no longer improve or add something new to my course (i.e., the course is perfect), then I will know it is time to retire and prepare for the big vacation in the sky.  Overall, it takes blood, sweat, and tears to develop a good geology course.  If you are not willing to do this, then you are unlikely to develop into good teacher.   As a teacher, I can only be as good as that which I strive for.  In this regard, I constantly work on the mechanical aspects of teaching.  In order to accomplish this, I first keep notes about how the lecture or laboratory went.  Did the students have difficulty with a particular question or concept?  I also solicit student criticisms of my teaching.  Their opinions are always important to me, so I take their class evaluations seriously.  Overall, I constantly try to improve my teaching, since there is always room for improvement.    TEACHING APPROACH   Today is an exciting time to teach geology.  Traditionally, geology education has centered itself on specimen based and field oriented approaches.  However, with increasing technological advances and information gathering (in the form of databases), we must start developing our students quantitative and computer skills in order to make them more competitive in the job market and more valuable to society.  Our students will be left behind if we don’t prepare them for the upcoming age of geoinformatics.  Obviously, we cannot ignore the field-based roots of geology, but students that can perform well in the field as well as the laboratory will be the epitome of the future geologist.     I’m very quantitative in my approach to geologic and biologic problems and feel strongly that geology students should develop excellent statistical and computer skills.  As such, I try to incorporate my quantitative perspective as well as the traditional specimen and field based perspectives into my courses.  One of the most important aspects of teaching is that many of my students will not become paleontologists like myself.  With that in mind, I have developed the philosophy that students should learn skills and ideas that they can apply to other disciplines.  In order to develop critical thinking skills, I constantly expose students to figures or diagrams from major scientific publications in the lecture or laboratory.  Critical thinking skills will remain with the student even though they might have forgotten the geologic time scale or the definition of synapomorphy.  Moreover, it is important for non-science majors to develop critical thinking skills as well as science majors, since it helps them make decisions in this age of information and technology. In any geology course that I teach, I try to utilize a multifaceted approach.  Students need to spend time looking at fossils and rocks in the laboratory as well as in the field, but they also need to have laboratories that require them to do more than that.  Geology is a holistic science that also requires students to know something about biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics.  I expose them to the techniques and principles of modern geology.  In lecture, I try to introduce the students to some concepts by presenting examples first and allow them to work out the relationships before I start giving them the definitions and facts.  In my lab courses, I make students collect their own data and use simple statistics or mathematical models to analyze their data.  I make them work on realistic problems with the hope that they get a sense of the complexity of the scientific process.  Overall, I use different teaching methods so that students with different learning styles find it easier to learn in my courses.

See also: Current and Past Courses

E-mail: john.dawson@kirkwood.edu

Last updated: May 23, 2003

  Kirkwood Community College, Iowa City Campus, 1816 Lower Muscatine Road,  Iowa City, IA 52240
319-887-3658,  fax 319-887-3606     For more information: info@kirkwood.cc.ia.us