Community of Astronomy Teaching Scholars (CATS) - National Implementation Program for Learner-Centered Astronomy Teaching

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Astronomy (11) The Community of Astronomy Teaching Scholars (CATS) Program is a far-reaching, community-building effort focused on creating and mobilizing a community of teaching scholars created through stimulating, disseminating, and institutionalizing innovative and effective approaches to teaching and learning in the context of undergraduate astronomy courses. This project employs best practices and established evaluation results from several mature phase I-like and phase II-like projects that have developed powerful instructional approaches and resources shown through research to engage students intellectually and to improve student understanding. These projects have generated scholarly publications, conference presentations, multi-day teaching workshops, and a rapidly-growing community of enthusiastic faculty and students. The goals for the CATS Program are to: (1) Increase the number of faculty who embrace and successfully implement learner-centered astronomy teaching strategies; (2) Increase the number of faculty who treat their teaching as a scholarly endeavor by enabling and engaging them as a community of classroom researchers systematically studying teaching and learning in their own classrooms and beyond; and (3) Expand the literature on teaching and learning by engaging CATS participants in conducting and publishing community-wide, national-level, collaborative research projects. The underlying strategy to meet these goals is to create a national series of awareness building and implementation professional development workshops; hosting both virtual and face-to-face conferences on how to approach teaching as a scholarly endeavor that is guided by research; leading and coordinating collaborative research projects on teaching and learning; and thorough formative and summative evaluation efforts. These activities will purposefully engage astronomy faculty as a community of classroom researchers who model best teaching practices, use research as a guide to improving instruction, and collaboratively conduct systematic investigations on the effectiveness of innovative teaching. The intellectual merit of this program surrounds building a sustainable infrastructure to increase the scholarly knowledge base on teaching and learning by engaging teaching faculty in conducting and publishing classroom research. The broader impacts are to dramatically improve undergraduate courses that are part of the STEM workforce pipeline and national teacher preparation agenda.