A Gem of a Contribution
A precious, gem-like event occurred near the beginning of a pre-conference workshop Arshad Ahmad and I ran for postsecondary educators on large group teaching...
Hardy-Weinberg Simulation Model
Models represent reality. Models constructed for different purposes represent different aspects of reality but no model represents every aspect. All models simplify ...
It’s not just a matter of technique
In The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer argued that teaching is not merely a matter of technique. His argument is clear, strong, and simple, and so clearly linked to ...
The Most Important Silences Have Been My Own
The most important silences of my teaching career have generally been my own, especially when students are working with each other in breakout groups. I suppose it s...
Secrets of Silence in the Classroom
Interviewing me for my first teaching job, at a high school, Ernie Wutzke, the Principal, took me to visit the room of Art, the biology teacher I would replace if I ...
A Letter to Martha Piper
For several years around the turn of the century, atmospheric physicist Douw Steyn and I co-taught a course in UBC’s Integrated Sciences Program called The Sizes o...
Assumptions, Points of View, and Fundamental Operating Principles
I created this assignment in 1985 for a course in Human Ecology for third and fourth-year non-scientists. The assignment refers to an important new book about sus...
Some Remarks on Documentation
Many students are unprepared to do high quality work when they come to us, and for many reasons. Documenting sources in their writing is particularly difficult for...
Five questions to change your life
This assignment is completely optional. It is the most powerfully effective way I have discovered to empower intellectual growth but worthless if taken lightly. It ...
First and Last Words from the Trip Director
A Handout for every student in every course I taught. In this course we approach learning in a way that is new to some of you. Rather than studying isolated facts, o...
Two Stories about Des Deroche
Des Deroche at Happy Hour, 2016. Photo by Craig Thom from next door. Des Deroche and the the Fundamentals of Teaching and Learning I’ve lived across the st...
Frank Spear and the Pea Seeds
In late August 1967 I was a brand-new high school biology teacher in the suburbs of San Francisco, east of Berkeley in Concord. That part of California and ...
Story about Barry Mcbride
I walked into the Zoology mailroom and our head secretary Kathy Gorkoff asked me if I'd met the new Dean, who was standing right there. McBride wasn’t on the job ...
Architects of Their Own Education: Stories about Three Students
Relatively late in my career, about when we realized Science One would be successful, several ideas about teaching and learning came together for my colleague...
Two Stories about Roger Donaldson
Interdisciplinary undergraduate programs, especially highly interactive ones like UBC's Science One, invite students to live near the edges of their experience, where...
Teaching for Creativity in Science
In my first year of teaching high school biology, 1966, I found a large pile of scientific magazines in my prep room. I hired work-study students to examine,...
Thoughts for the Camosun Community
I submitted a version of this report to the Camosun College faculty after giving two talks there in Fall 2006. Thank you very much for welcoming me into your community...
An Exercise in Thinking, Writing, and Rewriting
Science teachers often complain about students’ thinking and writing but don’t know what to do to improve them. As I've said in talks like Stories about S...
Report on the Special Programme in Science
June 1998 Last summer, early in discussions about my returning to Singapore for an extended stay, the Singaporean Ministry of Education announced national po...
Let me tell you a story about my Grandpa Gass
Let me tell you a story about my Grandpa Gass He was really neat. The end of one of his fingers was all twisted up. The fingernail didn't line up with the knuckle...
What is there about Risk?
What is there about risk? What is there about risk and uncertainty that fire the sources of creativity and call upon us to perform our best? There is something ...
Engagement is visceral
The Council of 3M National Teaching Fellows produces a range of materials to help teachers improve their teaching. Among them is a DVD-production project in which 18 ...
Stories about stories
Lee Gass doing what he's been doing for about 75 years: telling a story. Photo by David Shackleton. After winning national university teaching awards in ...
A letter to my fifth grade teacher
Harriet Alto. Photo by Shery Larson. April 5, 1997 I want to comment on Harriet Alto’s contribution to my development as a teacher, a biologist, and a pers...
The birth of a sculptor
The image shows Lee Gass at two stages in his sculpting career; when he was learning to carve Ivory soap and sanding Red Recursion. Photos by David Shackleton and a...
A decade of innovation in science education
Lee Gass Photo by Lucretia Schanfarber At the Vancouver Institute at UBC in spring 2003 I spoke about interdiscip- linary undergraduate programs we were d...
Integration, interaction, and community
For a Special Feature of the scientific journal Ecology and Society, which anyone can read, Julyet Benbasat and I wrote about creating, teaching in, and administering...
Making Magic Together
In the terrible title of a talk I gave at McMaster University in 2014, I talked about something I thought worth thinking about when anyone thinks about help...
Educating for sustainability
Sometime in the late '90s, after a talk I gave at the University of Florida about experiments we were doing with interdisciplinary undergraduate science programs at ...
Think & Eat Green
Elena Orrego and Alejandro Rojas. In summer 2009 my old friend Alejandro Rojas contacted me about an exciting project. Based on a decade of work with UBC students to...