literature – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Preparing my course “Teaching for Sustainability” with the support of Noah (2025)’s brilliant book

mglessmer — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 15:21:20 +0000

In preparation for this fall’s online course on “Teaching for Sustainability“, I was looking into what kind of methods I want to model. And then — perfect timing — I started reading of Noah (2025)’s brilliant book on “Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality: A Guide to Crafting Engaging Professional Learning Experiences in Higher Education” […]

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Currently reading about cooperative & collaborative learning (Oakley et al., 2004; Møgelvang, 2023; Wieman et al., 2014)

mglessmer — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 05:35:42 +0000

iEarth’s current journal club paper deals with collaborative exams as learning opportunities, and this fits perfectly with Anja Møgelvang’s recent article on cooperative learning, where we can find inspiration for how to make this work in practice. So here are my thoughts! How can we expect students to be skilled in collaborating with diverse stakeholders […]

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Derivatives and Concept Images — a guest post by Kirsty Dunnett

mglessmer — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 12:32:44 +0000

Another guest post by Kirsty Dunnett about the difficulty of applying skills from a maths course in the context of geoscience courses, and what can be done to make it easier. Thanks for writing, Kirsty :-) A not uncommon complaint of university teachers in at least physics and geosciences is that students cannot apply what […]

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Currently reading “Bicycle model on climate change education: Presenting and evaluating a model.” by Cantell et al., 2019

mglessmer — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 09:47:26 +0000

Came across this model, had to share! You know I love me a good visualization of a model, and I think this one is brilliant to help support thinking about sustainability teaching in a holistic way! Cantell et al. (2019) evaluate the “bicycle model for climate change action” (see my rendition of their figure above/below), […]

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Currently reading: “Beyond open book versus closed book: a taxonomy of restrictions in online examinations.” by Dawson, Nicola-Richmond, & Partridge (2023)

mglessmer — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 12:07:05 +0000

If we want to do a valid assessment of what a specific student can do, we need to know what information they had available when producing the artifact we are evaluating, who they could communicate with, and what tools they had access to. And we might want to restrict access to some or all of […]

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“Supporting students in higher education: proposal for a theoretical framework” Kirsty Dunnett summarizes De Ketele (2014)

mglessmer — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 12:27:51 +0000

Who are you travelling with? A guest post by Kirsty Dunnett. A summary and some thoughts on: Supporting students in higher education: proposal for a theoretical framework By J.-M. De Ketele (Université de Louvain, Belgium) Over a decade ago, I made a very deliberate choice to try to not completely forget all the French I’d learnt […]

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Currently reading: Relationship-rich education (Felten & Lambert, 2020)

mglessmer — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 06:28:07 +0000

I read the book “Relationship-rich education. How human connections drive success in college” by Felten & Lambert (2020) almost a year ago and found it super inspiring, but also very hard to summarize. You should check it out yourself, of course, but here are my key take-aways. A feeling of belonging and “mattering” is really […]

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Teaching sustainability: Reading about how to turn frustration into action

mglessmer — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 17:45:32 +0000

One reoccurring topic in all discussions around how to teach sustainability is how we can turn frustration into constructive action. I haven’t found a comprehensive answer, but I’ve been reading! Almers (2013) looked at narratives of life stories of three young Swedish activists to distil which circumstances led them to not only reduce their own […]

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Currently reading: The impact of content co-creation on academic achievement (Doyle et al., 2021)

mglessmer — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 10:40:32 +0000

One part of co-creation — letting students create learning content for each other — has always been fascinating to me. The idea is that in order to create meaningful materials for others, they have to develop a good grasp of the material themselves, figure out a sequence, fill any gaps in prior knowledge, etc.. Also […]

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Currently reading Flett et al. (2022) on “anti-mattering”

mglessmer — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 07:19:02 +0000

As we are continuing working on our “sense of belonging” project at UiB (read more about my thoughts on students’ sense of belonging and what we can do about it here; and the general idea behind this project is to first get a baseline of student experiences, and then figure out how to make all students […]

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