Exploring Geology / Изучая геологию

We wrote Exploring Geology so that students could learn from the book on their own, freeing up instructors to teach the class in any way they want. I (Steve Reynolds) first identified the need for this book while I was a National Association of Geoscience Teachers’ (NAGT) distinguished speaker. As part of my NAGT activities, I traveled around the country conducting workshops on how to infuse active learning and scientific inquiry into introductory college geology courses, including those with upwards of 200 students. In the first part of the workshop, I asked the faculty participants to list the main goals of an introductory geology college course, especially for nonmajors. At every school I visited, the main goals were similar and are consistent with the conclusions of the National Research Council (see box below):

• to engage students in the process of scientific inquiry so that they learn what science is and how it is conducted,
• to teach students how to observe and interpret landscapes and other aspects of their surroundings,
• to enable students to learn and apply important geologic concepts,
• to help students understand the relevance of geology to their lives, and
• to enable students to use their new knowledge, skills, and ways of thinking to become more informed citizens.
I then asked faculty members to rank these goals and estimate how much time they spent on each goal in class. At this point, many instructors recognized that their activities in class were not consistent with their own goals. Most instructors were spending nearly all of class time teaching content. Although this was one of their main goals, it commonly was not their top goal. <...>