WIMS Teacher-Scholar Cohort

This page seeks to organize the notes/thoughts/suggestions of our WIMS teacher-scholar cohort. The original proposal

• make STEM more relevant and accessible for women and non-majors
• generate ideas on how to leverage the IQ Center to improve our pedagogy and research

While WIMS faculty understand the continuing–sometimes masked–challenges for women in science (who doesn't have a good story about that?), our students tend to be blissfully unaware. There are general issues on campus with women's hesitation to take on leadership positions or be associated with anything for “women”. (The dreaded “f-word”.)

• How can we make positive change across the campus?

• How to teach persistence/following through? There is a lot of failure and negative results in STEM. How do we teach that that is okay?

• Show examples of women in the field
  • act as role models
  • show there are different ways to be/do a scientist/mathematician
  • how questions change with women's involvement
  • more speakers - finding female speakers

• Rethink the problems we assign
  • not the stereotypical “think pink” and make the problems more feminine, but …
  • questions that are more interesting/relevant to a general audience, perhaps social implications …

• Change how participation happens in class
  • allow more time for students to formulate an answer first before calling on someone or asking for volunteers to answer
  • encourage female students to keep talking if they are cut off

• Involve male colleagues with these ideas/changes

• Use both one-on-one mentoring and group encouragement
  • during one-on-one mentoring let students know that they're not alone in how they feel – give personal examples
  • fight the “imposter syndrome”

• The HHMI grant has funds for course development and supplies for a new course or module that relates to STEM
• Emphasize transferable skills

There are cues in W&L culture that help suppress women's leadership. How can we address them in our courses?

• Use of the term “girls” rather than “women”
  • “guys” seems to be the male alternative that doesn't have an age implied
• General anti-feminism culture
  • hesitation to use the word “women” in the name of a women's student leadership group

• Discussion leader: Lynn Chin, Sociology – November 6
• Starting discussion:
  • Should you assign roles to team members? How should you create roles? What should the roles be?
  • What are the tradeoffs when choosing the size of teams?
  • How do we encourage leadership within the team?
  • How do we encourage a sense of ownership to a team project?
  • How do we define expectations of team work?

• Invite panelists: Shana Levine, Nicolaas Rupke, Megan Schneider, and Jeffrey Shay
• Invite participants: students and faculty, with a (slight?) WIMS emphasis

• Starting questions:
  • what is leadership?
  • how do you develop leadership skills?
  • how do you find leadership opportunities?
  • how do faculty/upperclassmen help encourage/nurture leadership skills in students?

Action Item: Bring Lynny back in the winter term

• work as motivation to step up
• intermediate deadlines for evaluations
• Lynny's teamwork evaluation:
  • rank order for contributions
  • how well prepared – 5-pt scale
  • how much contributed
  • how cooperative

• learning how to navigate difficult team decisions
• how much should I (as faculty) intervene?

• why do people contribute?
• when things are uncertain and we don't know who can contribute best to the group goal, we rely on some social status characteristic, not necessarily who is the most competent
  • no relationship between dominance and competence
  • status is a way of coordinating people's actions – don't speak up because this is the way we're organizing the group
  • how do you break the typical social status organization?
    • competence is higher than status
    • every part is important but different
    • can't necessarily assign a leader with adults
    • valuing different types, culture
      • bring people in

• working on different parts is harder to coordinate
• jigsaw method
  • break up students into teams
  • each assigned a role within that team
  • all in that role talk together
• rotating jobs? is that possible?
• easier to manipulate first-year students

-Frame suggestion so that they are listened to

1. are you willing to sacrifice for the group? “I think it's going to be better for the group …”; “is the best solution for the group?”

- give off aura of leadership - same responsibility – assign extra questions – research this extra thing – shows that they have extra competence - they have this knowledge – go listen to them – stack in their favor – maybe from a previous course? - from office hours help session – experts for the problem, moment - if you get every person to say something the first day of class (if they don't say something the first day of the class they are unlikely to say something the rest ofthe class) -allowing “pass” answers - pass the marker to students - group rewards, individual rewards, combination - i had to take over everything

1. - to let go
2. - bring bossy kids together
3. - tell them about how not working together fails
4. - didn't trust–put in an effort

- tell anecdotes, frame