NCEP is designed to be a global community, where individual educators around the world with Internet access may participate by simply registering on our Web site and downloading NCEP materials free of charge.  However, in several countries, we have chosen to offer a variety of in-person support through workshops, short courses, and training events.  To date, we have worked more intensively to support local implementation strategies in Bolivia, Lao PDR, Madagascar, Mexico, Peru, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, the United States, and Vietnam.  Since 2001, we have held over 80 workshops in 15 countries.

NCEP workshops and other training events bring educators and conservation practitioners together for a variety of purposes:

1. to review and adapt existing modules to the context of a particular country;
   

   Biologist Claudia Cortéz, and Bolivian NCEP country coordinator, discusses module adaptation with two NCEP authors, Elvira Salinas and Fernando Ghersi, at a module writing workshop in Pachacamac, Peru, in November 2007

2. to facilitate the production of new modules, or present new modules for discussion and evaluation by faculty peers; and
3. how modules can be used, particularly how the principles of active teaching and learning embedded in NCEP modules can be effectively used in the classroom to improve how we teach about conservation.

Over the years, we have been placing greater emphasis on applying the principles of scientific teaching in our workshops to measure and improve their efficacy.  In this effort, we not only expanded our evaluation strategy to measure student learning gains, but we also improved and tested our assessment instruments and developed assessment rubrics.  As firm believers in the power of evaluation, we would now like to make our workshop evaluation tools available to the NCEP community in the hope that our experiences will be useful in your own endeavors.  We hope that these tools can be tailored to suit a diverse array of workshop topics and contexts, and more generally, that they will inspire new ideas on evaluating the impact of workshops and adaptively managing teaching styles.  You can find these resources on the “Other Conservation Teaching Resources” page, in the folder marked “Resources for Workshops.”

To start thinking about scientific teaching and evaluation, we also recommend the following resources:

Angelo, T.A. and K.P. Cross.  2005.  Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers.  Jossey Bass Inc., USA.

Connolly, M.R. and S.B. Millar.  2006.  Using Workshops to Improve Instruction in STEM Courses.  Metropolitan Universities Journal 17(4): 53-65.

Handelsman, J., S. Miller, and C. Pfund.  2007.  Scientific Teaching.  The Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching, W.H. Freeman & Co., New York, NY, USA.

Finally, if you have any specific questions about NCEP workshops, please do not hesitate to contact us at: ncep.amnh.org.

Tags: NCEP, workshop

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