Eighty-seven middle school, high school, and college science educators from all over the United States pre-registered for a four-hour Short Course presented at the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) National Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by Dr. Bonnie Wood, University of Maine at Presque Isle Professor of Biology.

For this hands-on course, each participant received a copy of Wood’s book Lecture-Free Teaching: A Learning Partnership between Science Educators and their Students (NSTA Press, 2009). The first half of the course was a simulation of a typical lecture-free class during which Wood demonstrated the interplay of student preparation before class, cooperative learning, and classroom assessment techniques to achieve course content identical to that of a lecture-based course. During the second half, participants discussed and followed the steps to lecture-free teaching to plan their own course revisions or to design a new course.

Wood participated in several other events during the four-day conference including her election to the Board of the Society for College Science Teachers (SCST), on which she will serve as a Councilor-At-Large for two years; a book-signing organized by her publisher, NSTA Press; and an evening reception for NSTA authors. She also gave a presentation at one of the SCST sessions titled Serendipity: Student-Led Teaching Models and was a speaker for a symposium titled Inquiry: The Key to Exemplary Science at which she discussed a chapter she contributed to a book of the same title.

Dr. Wood next traveled to New York City and from there to Newark, New Jersey, as an invited speaker at a one-hour presentation on Lecture-Free Teaching to Biology Department faculty and graduate students at Rutgers University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

For more information about her book and her workshops, email Dr. Bonnie Wood at bonnie.s.wood@maine.edu or call her at 768-9446.