Having been a project manager for over a decade—and having taught hundreds of classes and workshops on project management—I wanted a textbook that would be:Designed for a “flipped” classroom structure. A textbook with short and concise readings with appropriate videos embedded. A student workbook for taking notes while reading so students are ready to work on exercises in class, instead of listening to a lecture that repeats, or tries to clarify, a complicated textbook.Accessible to my students, and not bogged down with academic language or irrelevant research. Something that would provide students with a good introduction to basic vocabulary and concepts without using a lot of technical language.Granular, so that each section would focus on one topic and just that topic. This way, instructors can assign just the sections or chapters they want and not be worried that students will get sidetracked with material that the instructor doesn’t want to focus on in their course.Focused on the essentials of project management. There is a lot to learn in project management, but with a good understanding of the essentials, students can learn advanced concepts and the “exceptions to the rules” on their own.

Syllabus and reading list of openly licensed materials.

Course Description
Applies psychological principles to relationships in both personal and professional environments. Includes an overview of basic personality and social psychology concepts, as well as specific skill development in the areas of communication, listening, and conflict resolution.

Learning Outcomes
Apply an understanding of psychological and social influences on human behavior to objectively analyze one’s own interpersonal experiences and relationships.
Utilize intra- and interpersonal management skills to increase effectiveness in personal and professional relationships.
Use knowledge of culturally diverse practices to increase sensitivity and competence in a variety of social and cultural interactions.
Communicate, listen, and manage conflict more effectively in personal and professional relationships.

Students can be motivated to improve classroom behaviors if they have both a clear roadmap of the teacher's behavioral expectations and incentives to work toward those behavioral goals. This modified version of Check-In/Check-Out (CI/CO) is a simple behavioral intervention package designed for use during a single 30- to 90-minute classroom period (Dart, Cook, Collins, Gresham & Chenier, 2012). The teacher checks in with the student to set behavioral goals at the start of the period, then checks out with the student at the close of the period to rate that student's conduct and award points or other incentives earned for attaining behavioral goal(s).

The Color Wheel is one solution that enforces uniform group expectations for conduct while also responding flexibly to the differing behavioral demands of diverse learning activities. This classwide intervention divides all activities into 3 categories and links each category to a color: green for free time/ low-structure activities; yellow for large- or small-group instruction/independent work; and red for brief transitions between activities. The student learns a short list of behavioral rules for each category and, when given a color cue, can switch quickly from one set of rules to another.

SYNOPSIS: This lesson introduces the idea of reduce, reuse, recycle and has students create a classroom waste management plan.

SCIENTIST NOTES: This lesson introduces students to the sustainable waste management principles of reduce, reuse, and recycle. They would be engaged in sorting waste and disposing of it into appropriate recycling bins. They would also be able to explain the implications of waste recycling on the environment. All materials are thoroughly sourced and written. Accordingly, this lesson has passed our science review.

POSITIVES:
-Students participate in a hands-on and physically active learning activity.
-Students collaborate and develop long-term plans together.
-Students get a sense of ownership from developing a classroom waste management plan.

ADDITIONAL PREREQUISITES:
-Teacher needs to either:
-Bring in materials to sort for The Great Reduce Reuse Recycle Relay.
-Print the alternate materials in advance.
-Some sort of large poster needs to be available to hang in an easily viewed space for students to have easy access to the classroom waste management plan.

DIFFERENTIATION:
-Students could work in groups to complete the cut and sort in the Investigate stage if time is limited.
-Students with physical limitations may do The Great Reduce Reuse Recycle Relay at their desk with the alternate materials or be the “bin monitor” to help ensure each relay team is sorting their materials correctly.

This lesson introduces the idea of reduce, reuse, recycle and has students create a classroom waste management plan.

Step 1 - Inquire: Students are introduced to the idea of reduce, reuse, recycle through an engaging video and cut and match sorting activity.

Step 2 - Investigate: Students practice RRR by sorting recyclables in The Great Reuse Reduce Recycle Relay!

Step 3 - Inspire: Students make a classroom waste management plan using the information they have gained throughout the lesson.

ABSTRACT: Backward course design is a compelling strategy for achieving results-based, student-centered learning. The backward course-design approach is first to identify student-learning outcomes, then the means of assessing the outcomes, and lastly the classroom activities that would support the learning outcomes. With demonstrated success at improving teaching and learning at K–12 levels, this design approach is receiving increasing attention at the college level. Yet college faculty, who receive comparatively little instruction in course design, may find it challenging to enact the principles of backward course design into day-to-day lecture planning. To help address this challenge, we developed a backward design-inspired lesson planner to assist in restructuring college course periods for more active, learner-centered activities that align with course goals. We describe the planner and its application to a non-majors college biology class, and we share student and instructor perceptions of classroom structure and use of classroom time before and after implementation. Benefits of implementing the backward design planner included enhanced ability to prioritize content delivery to students, better time management in and out of the classroom, improved experience of lecture preparation, more engaged students, and more frequent feedback on student comprehension.

This version of this teaching module was published in Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology:

Jim McNeil and Megan A. Jones. April 2018, posting date. Data Management using National Ecological Observatory Network’s (NEON) Small Mammal Data with Accompanying Lesson on Mark Recapture Analysis. Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology, Vol. 13: Practice #9 [online]. http://tiee.esa.org/vol/v13/issues/data_sets/mcneil/abstract.html

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Undergraduate STEM students are graduating into professions that require them to manage and work with data at many points of a data management life cycle. Within ecology, students are presented not only with many opportunities to collect data themselves, but increasingly to access and use public data collected by others. This activity introduces the basic concept of data management from the field through to data analysis. The accompanying presentation materials mention the importance of considering long-term data storage and data analysis using public data.

This data set is a subset of small mammal trapping data from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). The accompanying lesson introduces students to proper data management practices including how data moves from collection to analysis. Students perform basic spreadsheet tasks to complete a Lincoln-Peterson mark-recapture calculation to estimate population size for a species of small mammal. Pairs of students will work on different sections of the datasets allowing for comparison between seasons or, if instructors download additional data, between sites and years. Data from six months at NEON’s Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) field site are included in the materials download. Data from other years or locations can be downloaded directly from the NEON data portal to tailor the activity to a specific location or ecological topic.

In this activity, students will:

- discuss data management practices with the faculty. Presentation slides are provided to guide this discussion.
- view field collection data sheets to understand how organized data sheets can be constructed.
- design a spreadsheet data table for transcription of field collected data using good data management practices.
- view NEON small mammal trapping data to a) see a standardized spreadsheet data table and b) see what data are collected during NEON small mammal trapping.
- use Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets to conduct a simple Lincoln-Peterson Mark-Recapture analysis to estimate plot level species population abundance.

Please note that this lesson was developed while the NEON project was still in construction. There may be future changes to the format of collected and downloaded data. If using data directly from the NEON Data Portal instead of using the data sets accompanying this lesson, we recommend testing out the data each year prior to implementing this lesson in the classroom.

This module was originally taught starting with a field component where students accompanied NEON technicians during the small mammal trapping. As this is not a possibility for most courses, the initial part of the lesson has been modified to include optional videos that instructors can use to show how small mammal trapping is conducted. Instructors are also encouraged to bring small mammal traps and small mammal specimens into the classroom where available.

The Data Sets

The National Ecological Observatory Network is a program sponsored by the National Science Foundation and operated under cooperative agreement by Battelle Memorial Institute. This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation through the NEON Program.

The following datasets are posted for educational purposes only. Data for research purposes should be obtained directly from the National Ecological Observatory Network (www.neonscience.org).

Data Citation: National Ecological Observatory Network. 2017. Data Product: NEON.DP1.10072.001. Provisional data downloaded from http://data.neonscience.org. Battelle, Boulder, CO, USA

Notes
Version 2.1: Includes correct Lincoln-Peterson Index formula in PPT, faculty, and student notes.

Version 2.0: This version of the teaching module was published in Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology. McNeil and Jones 2018. This version reflects updates based on comments from reviewers.

Version 1.0: This version of the teaching module was prepared as part of the 2017 DIG FMN. It was submitted for publication as part of the DIG Special Issue of TIEE.

Cite this work
Researchers should cite this work as follows:

Jim McNeil, Megan A. Jones (2018). Data Management using National Ecological Observatory Network's (NEON) Small Mammal Data with Accompanying Lesson on Mark Recapture Analysis. NEON - National Ecological Observatory Network, (Version 2.1). QUBES Educational Resources. doi:10.25334/Q4M121

The laboratory notebook is the cornerstone of any laboratory course. Students develop critical thinking, documentation, and communication skills while mastering scientific concepts. Furthermore, the use of electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) for documentation has become the standard for data management in industry and academic labs.

Replacing paper with an interactive research notebook provides students with authentic data management skills. It also offers a medium for easily incorporating quantitative reasoning into the curriculum to address real. Instructors using digital notebooks in their courses reported a significant increase in student engagement and assessment scores.

In this workshop, we will explore the current ELNs landscape and best practices for moving from paper to digital.

Cite this work
Researchers should cite this work as follows:

Stringer, N. (2019). Electronic Lab Notebooks: Options for Building Data Management and Quantitative Reasoning Skills. Evolution of Data in the Classroom: From Data to Data Science (SW 2019), QUBES Educational Resources. doi:10.25334/B1NP-B249

Description
This lesson introduces students to working with metadata, which can be broadly thought of as the data ABOUT existing data. Data isn’t complete without metadata, and this lesson will help students understand both how to work with metadata and how to create their own.

Data used: NEON aquatic macroinvertebrate datasets from multiple stations. It could be adapted to use any data sets or taxonomic groups though.

Activities: The lesson involves three major activities. 1) Querying and downloading datasets and corresponding products from NEON. 2) Reading and answering comprehension questions about metadata files that correspond with data files 3) Combining two datasets based off understanding the metadata in exercise 2 (e.g. understanding which columns indicate sampling dates and in which formats will allow them to appropriately combine multiple data sets).

Programs: No specific programming skills or language is required for this lesson. This lesson is designed to be done entirely in common office/student software programs (e.g. Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office) and could be done using online programs (e.g. my university has student licenses for Google Spreadsheets and Google Docs).

Learning objectives:

1 – Students will be able to define ‘metadata’ and understand how metadata is critical for reproducible research.

2 – Students will be able to correctly answer comprehension questions about a metadata file.

3 – Students will be able to apply their understanding of the metadata file to create a new data file from two data sets.

4 – Students will understand the importance of creating and understanding metadata to go along with datasets.

Timing: This lesson was designed to take place in two – 75 minute class periods that are in a workshop format. This lesson could easily be part of a longer lab, homework, or a remote / online / asynchronous assignment.

Notes
This version is current as of Spring 2019 and was classroom taught. I encourage folks to adapt, modify, and make new versions.

Cite this work
Researchers should cite this work as follows:

Whitney, K. S. (2019). Introduction to Data Management and Metadata using NEON aquatic macroinvertebrate data. NEON Faculty Mentoring Network, QUBES Educational Resources. doi:10.25334/SJX1-F373

ResponDog (by ChemVantage LLC) is an LTI app that works with your learning management system to create in-class audience response polls for posing quiz questions or gauging participants' opinions. Polls are useful for showing participants how their answers compare to their peers. They're also handy for taking attendance and discouraging tardiness. Scores on ResponDog polls are returned to your LMS grade book automatically, saving you work. ResponDog is free for educational use by non-profit schools and universities.

As a behavior-management tool, response effort seems like simple common sense: We engage less in behaviors that we find hard to accomplish. Teachers often forget, however, that response effort can be a useful part of a larger intervention plan. To put it simply, teachers can boost the chances that a student will take part in desired behaviors (e.g., completing homework or interacting appropriately with peers) by making these behaviors easy and convenient to take part in. However, if teachers want to reduce the frequency of a behavior (e.g., a child's running from the classroom), they can accomplish this by making the behavior more difficult to achieve (e.g., seating the child at the rear of the room, far from the classroom door).

Across the country, educators are beginning to expand RTI to secondary schools. Middle, junior, and high schools are very different places from elementary schools and, in fact, different from each other. Whether or not your school is presently implementing RTI, you will want to be prepared to ask and answer key questions regarding the opportunities RTI presents in high school settings.

Informational resources and tools available to guide those who wish to establish or strengthen an Response to Intervention program in grades K-5.

Across the country, educators are beginning to expand RTI to secondary schools. Middle, junior, and high schools are very different places from elementary schools and, in fact, different from each other. Whether or not your school is presently implementing RTI, you will want to be prepared to ask and answer key questions regarding the opportunities RTI presents in high school settings.

Student pairs reverse engineer objects of their choice, learning what it takes to be an engineer. Groups each make a proposal, create a team work contract, use tools to disassemble a device, and sketch and document their full understanding of how it works. They compile what they learned into a manual and write-up that summarizes the object's purpose, bill of materials and operation procedure with orthographic and isometric sketches. Then they apply some of the steps of the engineering design process to come up with ideas for how the product or device could be improved for the benefit of the end user, manufacturer and/or environment. They describe and sketch their ideas for re-imagined designs (no prototyping or testing is done). To conclude, teams compile full reports and then recap their reverse engineering projects and investigation discoveries in brief class presentations. A PowerPoint(TM) presentation, written report and oral presentation rubrics, and peer evaluation form are provided.

This book is intended for the Risk Management and Insurance course where Risk Management is emphasized.

When we think of large risks, we often think in terms of natural hazards such as hurricanes, earthquakes or tornados. Perhaps man-made disasters come to mind such as the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. Typically we have overlooked financial crises, such as the credit crisis of 2008. However, these types of man-made disasters have the potential to devastate the global marketplace. Losses in multiple trillions of dollars and in much human suffering and insecurity are already being totaled, and the global financial markets are collapsing as never before seen.

We can attribute the 2008 collapse to financially risky behavior of a magnitude never before experienced. The 2008 U.S. credit markets were a financial house of cards. A basic lack of risk management (and regulators' inattention or inability to control these overt failures) lay at the heart of the global credit crisis. This crisis started with lack of improperly underwritten mortgages and excessive debt. Companies depend on loans and lines of credit to conduct their routine business. If such credit lines dry up, production slows down and brings the global economy to the brink of deep recession—or even depression. The snowballing effect of this failure to manage the risk associated with providing mortgage loans to unqualified home buyers have been profound, indeed. When the mortgages failed because of greater risk- taking on the Street, the entire house of cards collapsed. Probably no other risk-related event has had, and will continue to have, as profound an impact world wide as this risk management failure.

How was risk in this situation so badly managed? What could firms and individuals have done to protect themselves? How can government measure such risks (beforehand) to regulate and control them? These and other questions come to mind when we contemplate the consequences of this risk management fiasco.

Standard risk management practice would have identified sub-prime mortgages and their bundling into mortgage-backed-securities as high risk. People would have avoided these investments or would have put enough money into reserve to be able to withstand defaults. This did not happen. Accordingly, this book may represent one of the most critical topics of study that the student of the 21st century could ever undertake.

Risk management will be a major focal point of business and societal decision—making in the 21st century. A separate focused field of study, it draws on core knowledge bases from law, engineering, finance, economics, medicine, psychology, accounting, mathematics, statistics and other fields to create a holistic decision-making framework that is sustainable and value- enhancing. This is the subject of this book.

Teachers often find it difficult to monitor the frequency of problem student behaviors. In this clever behavior-management strategy, the teacher uses keeps track of student behaviors using rubber-bands placed around the wrist.

Learn how classroom teachers, artists and arts organizations are using the arts to teach social and emotional learning (SEL). Social and emotional learning gives students strategies on how to manage their emotions and how to collaborate and empathize with others. These are important skills that help students succeed at school, work, and life. SEL can be incorporated into any subject matter and any grade level, but incorporating the arts can be an especially effective way to learn and practice SEL.

Students who are defiant or non-compliant can be among the most challenging to teach. They can frequently interrupt instruction, often do poorly academically, and may show little motivation to learn. There are no magic strategies for managing the behaviors of defiant students. However, research shows that certain techniques tend to work best with these children and youth: (1) Give the student positive teacher recognition. Even actions as simple as greeting the student daily at the classroom door or stopping by the student’s desk to ask ‘How are you doing?’ can over time turn strained relationships into positive ones. (2) Monitor the classroom frequently and intervene proactively to redirect off-task students before their mild misbehaviors escalate into more serious problems. (3) Avoid saying or doing things that are likely to anger or set off a student. Speak calmly and respectfully, for example, rather than raising your voice or using sarcasm. (4) When you must intervene with a misbehaving student, convey the message to the student that you will not tolerate the problem behavior—but that you continue to value and accept the student. (5) Remember that the ultimate goal of any disciplinary measure is to teach the student more positive ways of behaving. Punishment generally does not improve student behaviors over the long term and can have significant and lasting negative effects on school performance and motivation. (6) Develop a classroom ‘crisis response plan’ to be implemented in the event that one or more students display aggressive behaviors that threaten their own safety or the safety of others. Be sure that your administrator approves this classroom crisis plan and that everyone who has a part in the plan knows his or her role. One final thought: While you can never predict what behaviors your students might bring into your classroom, you will usually achieve the best outcomes by remaining calm, following pre-planned intervention strategies for misbehavior, and acting with consistency and fairness when intervening with or disciplining students.