NOTES TO FACULTY

For suggestions on doing a jigsaw see the Jigsaw tutorial in the Teaching section.

In my experience students are truly amazed by the Pfiesteria — the ecology, history, and politics — and are quite interested to learn more about the relevant ecological concepts. Therefore via Pfiesteria you can engage students in topics such as N and P cycling, autotrophy vs. heterotrophy, marine plankton, estuarine ecology, and plant nutrition. More applied issues are nutrient loading and eutrophication, management of human sewage and animal waste, environmental problems in the Chesapeake Bay, and the politics of "big" agriculture and environmental contamination.

For this jigsaw you can divide up the figures for the 3 groups as you wish. One possibility is Figure 4A & Figure 4B for Group A, Figure 4C for Group B, and Figure 4D and Figure 4E for Group C.

You can use class time for both groupings of the jigsaw or ask students to meet with their first group outside of class as a homework assignment. In either case, allow the students enough time (5 minutes per group) for the mixed group component (A, B, & C students explain the figures to each other). After this you can project the figures to the class and ask for interpretations and questions.

Discussion question for the cognitive skill "evaluation": Lead a discussion about how the ecology and biology of Pfiesteria contributes to the controversy over management of hog waste. There are several ecological/biological (as opposed to political) reasons why the Pfiesteria debates have been so heated. The Pfiesteria smoking gun is especially difficult to find during the massive fish kills that Burkholder and others have studied. Burkholder named Pfiesteria a 'phantom' in the Nature paper for good reason. The dinoflagellate has many forms that are quite different in appearance. Therefore, while the toxic zoospore may have been the lethal agent on day one, by day two when researchers take water samples Pfiesteria has likely morphed into an amoeba (or other) shape. In addition, swine waste can enter a river far upstream from the fish kill site, and hog farmers can safely then claim that someone else (e.g. a sewage treatment plant) is responsible. Finally, the very complicated life cycle and versatile nutritional metabolism makes Pfiesteria a challenge to study, even in the lab; this has allowed people opposed to regulation of animal wastes into NC/MD estuaries to claim that "we don't know enough yet".

Students can easily get background information about Pfiesteria using the websites in the Resources section of this Issue. If you ask them to do the first grouping on their own outside of class time, they can also learn more about Pfiesteria on the web and bring that information to class.

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Student Assessment: Newspaper article.

      Write an approximately 300 word article for a newspaper audience about Pfiesteria. In the article, describe/explain these points: what Pfiesteria is, hypotheses concerning factors leading to Pfiesteria blooms, why people are so concerned about Pfiesteria, and what is known and not known about Pfiesteria blooms. Your audience is the general public, but for people who do not live in the Chesapeake Bay region.


EVALUATING AN ISSUE: How do you know whether it is working?

      On-going (also called formative) evaluation of the approaches your are using is critical to the success of student-active teaching. Why try out new ideas if you don't know whether or not they are working? This is a brief overview of formative evaluation. For more information, go to the Formative Evaluation essay in the Teaching Section.

Course Goals:

      Formative evaluation only works if you have clearly described your course goals - because the purpose of the evaluation is to assess whether a particular technique is helping students reach these goals. For instance, most of us have "learn important ecological concepts and information" as a course goal. If I reviewed the nitrogen cycle in a class, for evaluation I might ask students to sketch out a nitrogen cycle for a particular habitat or system. Each student could work alone in class. Alternatively, I might ask students to work in groups of 3 and give each group a different situation (e.g. a pond receiving nitrate from septic systems, an organic agricultural field, an agricultural field receiving synthetic fertilizer). The students could draw their flows on a large sheet of paper (or an overhead transparency) and present this to the rest of the class.

The Minute Paper:

      Minute papers are very useful evaluative tools. If done well they give you good feedback quickly. Minute papers are done at the end of a class. The students are asked to respond anonymously to a short question that you ask. They take a minute or so to write their response in a 3x5 card or a piece of paper. You collect these and learn from common themes. In the next class it is important that you refer to one or two of these points so that students recognize that their input matters to you. The UW - FLAG site (www.wcer.wisc.edu/nise/cl1/flag/) gives a good deal of information about using minute papers including their limitations, how to phrase your question, step-by-step instructions, modifications, and the theory and research behind their use.