Being a Hydrology Coach: Some Ideas for Teaching College Hydrology Classes

JP Gannon in one of his classes, original published here

Teaching the next generation of scientists, engineers, and planners hydrology may sometimes feel like a chore, but it might be the most impactful thing we do! So, I think it is always worth taking a look to see if we can optimize our approaches. What follows are some ideas that have shaped my teaching strategies over the last decade. I don’t pretend to be an authority on this stuff, but I’ve curated these ideas through my experiences in the classroom and poking around the world of the science of teaching and learning and hope that you might find them interesting or helpful!

Think like a coach

I think there is a big difference between what students see as their relationship with a college instructor and what an athlete sees as their relationship with a coach. Ideally, an athlete knows that a coach is doing what they do to help the athlete succeed. They may prescribe difficult workouts, but the athlete knows this is in service of their success. Many students perceive an instructor as someone who is there to challenge them without any stake in their success or failure. If students have this perception, they may have difficulty seeing challenges presented to them as an instructor trying to best help them learn, and instead see them simply as obstacles for the sake of having obstacles. When students have this perception, it may be harder for them to be motivated to try, and it may make strategies like cheating seem more justified.

There are a lot of strategies for being more like coaches in our classrooms, many of which aim to make the learning environment less adversarial. These are detailed in the book College Science Teaching. I think the quickest way to be more of a coach in your teaching, however, is a small adjustment. Tell your students why you are doing what you are doing. What is the purpose of an assignment? What skills does it build? The purpose of activities, homework, quizzes, readings, et cetera in our classes may seem obvious to us, but it often is not to students, especially if they view you as someone trying to be difficult solely to give them a worse grade!

Use active learning techniques

Sometimes it can seem like the only way to do “active learning” is if your classes work solely on their own, whether from flipped teaching strategies or project-based courses, where you never lecture and only guide students through. Active learning CAN be that, but the definition is much broader! Having a short quiz in the middle of your class, asking students to write a few sentences about what they learned in the last five minutes … these are active learning! If students are engaged in something other than listening to you talk, even for a short time, that is active learning. And active learning has been shown again and again to help students learn. So, use active learning, sprinkle some here or there, you don’t need to completely reinvent your class.

Remind students to have a growth mindset

A person with a growth mindset believes their abilities can improve with practice and time. A person with a fixed mindset is more likely to believe they are “just not good” at certain things. To help students stay engaged, it can be helpful to say/do things to foster a growth mindset. While this sounds like a big idea, in practice it can be simple! Let’s say you are starting a topic you know is challenging for many students. You can foster a growth mindset by explaining to students that because this is a new skill, they may find it very difficult at first, but with practice they will get better. In class, I often use the analogy of riding a skateboard. No one would expect to jump on a skateboard and “just be good at it”. Likewise, with new academic skills, there will be a period where it may feel impossible, but with practice it’ll get better.

Use tools to help students with complex ideas

In hydrology, there are several concepts that, while important for students to learn, require so much background or specialized skills that they are difficult to address effectively. For example, for students to be able to really grasp how water is moved and stored in a water balance, it is common to build a spreadsheet-based model that students can manipulate to get a concrete idea of how the concept works (active learning!). However, these activities can become mired in technical issues if students are not proficient with spreadsheets. If learning how to run a spreadsheet model is not a learning objective in your class, this can be frustrating and may deter you from using this active learning strategy.

I have found that either finding or developing your own web-application that addresses the learning outcomes you desire can be an effective strategy in these instances. Take for example this water balance app. Students can see how changes in rainfall change yearly fluxes and storages, and more, without a spreadsheet or coding. Another example is a tool I built for exploring hydrologic modeling. If you want to expose students to the processes and pitfalls of modeling, but do not want to teach them to code, tools like these can be a great option.

Keep learning!

Teaching is a skill that we can practice, learn more about, and improve (growth mindset)! My last tip is to take that to heart and try to engage in materials that will give you ideas to try and keep you abreast of new findings and ideas in the field of pedagogy. Some suggestions are below!