Leaving the Lectern: Cooperative Learning and the Critical First Days of Students Working in Groups

DEAN A. MCMANUS is professor emeritus in the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington. He received his B.S. degree in geology from the Southern Methodist University in 1954 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in geology from the University of Kansas in 1957 and 1959, respectively. His marine geological research has dealt mainly with sediments on the floor of the Chukchi and Bering seas and off Washington State. He was co-chief scientist on the first cruise in the Pacific Ocean of the drilling vessel Glomar Challenger of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Deep-Sea Drilling Project. He has been honored by the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration for his marine geological research by having an underwater mountain in the North Pacific Ocean names after him, McManus Seamount. For 23 years he was editor of the research journal Marine Geology.
After years of undergraduate teaching in lecture and examination, he changed his teaching method to cooperative learning and project evaluation and by so doing pioneered the use of cooperative learning in the teaching of undergraduate oceanography. As a Distinguished Speaker for the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, he, with one of his students, led workshops on cooperative learning in geoscience departments at several colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. He has also been co-leader of NSF-funded workshops on innovative teaching in the geosciences during summers and at national meetings of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the Geological Society of America, and at the Ocean Science Meeting of the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography and the AGU.
Dr. McManus has also organized and participated in sessions on innovative geoscience education for these and other scientific societies, especially while serving as a member of the Committee on Education and Human Resources of the AGU. He has often been an invited speaker on geoscience education and has published in the Journal of Geoscience Education, the Journal of College Society Teaching, and Geotimes. He also wrote a column "In the Oceanography Classroom," for Oceanography magazine, the journal of The Oceanography Society. In 2000, he was co-leader of the NSF-sponsored workshop that recommended the NSF establish Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence, which was done in 2002.
At the University of Washington, Dr. McManus has received the Distinguished Undergraduate Teacher Award of the College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences. For two years he served as the first faculty associate in the Center for Instructional development and Research and developed a New TA Orientation Program that involved teaching workshops for new graduate students in the School of Oceanography, the first such program in an oceanography graduate program. In addition, the Mossfield Foundation established in the School of Oceanography the Dean A. McManus Excellence in Teaching Award to be given annually to an outstanding graduate teaching assistant.