On Thursday 7th of October, Ståle Ellingsen and I were invited to talk about our work with cooperative learning in the weekly seminar at the Department of Chemistry, UiB.
The Department of Chemistry has recently formulated some common general guidelines for laboratory reports at the bachelor level. The different laboratory courses have been assigned different roles and responsibilities in the training of scientific writing and implementation of different learning strategies has been suggested for their bachelor-level chemistry laboratory courses, among these cooperative learning. Therefore, Bengt Erik Haug who is a chemistry professor reached out to us to learn about our experiences with cooperative learning in BIO103. Based on our experiences, he and his colleague Matthias Staddler, an Associate Professor in chemistry didactics, implemented select cooperative methods in one of their courses.
In an attempt to synthesize the experiences at both BIO and Chemistry, all four of us (Bengt Erik, Matthias, Ståle and I) gave a presentation on cooperative learning and its uses in BIO103 and KJEM131 in this week’s lunch seminar at the Department of Chemistry. The lunch seminar was the first physical gathering post-COVID and so the turn-out was very good and the atmosphere likewise. The faculty seemed to find cooperative learning approaches interesting and had many questions. Sharing teaching methods and practices across disciplines is both fruitful and fun!
Anja