Schedule Overview

Welcome (Dr. Barbi Honeycutt)

Session 1
Speaker: Dr. Victoria (Tori) Mondelli

Session Title: Unleashing Creativity with "The ALLURE of Play" for Learning Game Design, Now at Warp Speed with GenAI-Assist 

Session Description: In 2023, a groundbreaking learning game design methodology emerged: “The ALLURE of Play.” Its magic unfolded within the pages of The Educator’s Guide to Designing Games and Creative Active-Learning Exercises, penned by the duo, Drs. Joe Bisz and Victoria (Tori) Mondelli, and published by Teachers College Press.

That same year, we marveled at the power of the newly ubiquitous Generative Artificial Intelligence tools. These digital sorcerers conjured written and visual outputs at speeds that defied reality, touching every topic under the sun (or at least on the internet). Sometimes getting it so right. Other times, the hallucinations made us cringe or laugh out loud. It turns out, educators can deftly wield all Gen AI outputs as critical and creative thinking provocateurs. Oh, how Gen AI is changing the game!

For this year’s opening session, join Dr. Mondelli, the Founding Director of the University of Missouri’s Teaching for Learning Center, as she unveils the six backward design steps of the ALLURE method. ALLURE leverages research principles for deep learning, accessibility, assessment, and engagement to ensure a quality learner experience. Picture a dance where lesson objectives waltz gracefully with game mechanics, bringing playful active learning to life—whether in physical classrooms or virtual realms.

ALLURE Unveiled:

• Ask: Ask where to apply the play.
• List: List the mental moves.
• Link: Link the mental moves to the play.
• Understand: Understand how the learning principles operate.
• Run: Run the activity-game.
• Evaluate: Evaluate the learner experience.

With Gen AI-Assist as a chatty, helpful workhorse, learning game design comes into a new era. Time bends, tasks shrink, and joyous escapades await. Don your explorer’s hat, wield your AI-assisted quill, and let’s chart new territories for a wide spectrum of learning activity-games!

Break

Session 2
Speaker: Dr. James (Jim) Lang

Session Title: Supporting Student Attention in a Technological Age

Session Description: As new technologies become increasingly intertwined with our daily work as educators, we are learning disturbing lessons about the costs of attention loss in our lives and the lives of our students. Digital technologies like smart phones can hijack our attention, while artificial intelligence technologies promise to make it redundant. The most important education that students might need for the future will be focused on why and how they should take control of their attention and use it to achieve meaningful learning goals. Drawing ideas from philosophy, psychology, and educational practice, this talk will present creative strategies that teachers can use to enhance their courses, assessments, and classroom experiences with the power of attention.

Wrap-Up / Announcements (Dr. Barbi Honeycutt)

Welcome (Dr. Barbi Honeycutt)

Session 3
Speaker: Professor Terrence (Terry) Doyle

Session Title: The Ten Most Important Findings from the Last Twenty Years of Neuroscience Research about Teaching and Learning

Session Description:
It is difficult for teachers to know if their current teaching practices and strategies are the best ways to facilitate students’ learning unless they understand how the human brain takes in, processes, makes memories and retrieves those memories as well as the various factors that impact teaching and learning processes.

Neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and education research from the past twenty years dealing with the teaching and learning processes has made clear that certain teaching approaches and strategies work best to optimize students’ learning and students’ study practices. In this session I will share the ten most important findings from this twenty years of research and how these findings can guide your teaching and your students’ learning. These findings include: 

1. How brain cells (neurons) form networks that represent new learning.

2. Despite the uniqueness of each human being at the level of neurons all humans learn the same way.

3. How memories are formed, consolidated, and retained for long periods of time even years

4. The power of emotions in enhancing learning and memory

5. The important role movement, exercise, diet, and hydration play in enhancing learning

6. The extraordinary role sleep plays in learning and memory

7. How a multisensory approach to teaching and learning is needed to optimize  the learning process

8. How the brain uses patterns to learn almost everything

9. How to get and keep students attention

10. How vital a growth mindset is to a learners success

Each of these ten areas will be discussed in detail including how to apply these finding to your teaching practice. You may have other findings that you think are equally important and will have a chance to share those ideas during this presentation.

Break

Session 4
Speaker: Dr. Tracie Addy

Session Title: What My Inclusive Instructors Do

Session Description: During this session, we will explore several findings reported in our book Enhancing Inclusive Instruction: Student Perspectives and Practical Approaches for Advancing Equity in Higher Education (March 2024) which centers on the voices of learners.

Highlighted during this session will be:

1. Student perspectives on inclusive courses focusing on their design, classroom climate, and everyday teaching approaches used by their instructors;

2. Pitfalls to avoid; and

3. Meaningful ways to reflect on and advance inclusive teaching efforts through classroom observation.

Break

Session 5
Speaker: Dr. Eric Mazur

Session Title: Breaking Down Classroom Walls and Setting Learning Free

Session Description: The rapid transition to online teaching necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic has been a good opportunity to rethink my approach to teaching. Moving online laid bare the restrictions imposed by both traditional classrooms and online teaching, and demonstrated that many activities that have traditionally been synchronous and instructor-paced, can be improved by making them asynchronous and self-paced in any teaching modality. What may have seemed like a challenge at first, turned out to be a great opportunity to improve the quality of education.

Closing Announcements, Private Podcast Overview, & Thank You! (Dr. Barbi Honeycutt)

Private podcast episodes are available on-demand. You get access to these episodes plus the recordings and all resources from all of the live sessions for 30 days.

Private Podcast, Session 6
Featured Guest: Dr. Christina Moore

Title: Mobile-Mindful: Expanding Our Teaching and Learning Mindset

Description: Instead of dreading that students use phones for learning, let's explore "mobile-mindful" opportunities in our teaching that can vastly increase student learning. For all of the distractions and mindless scrolling phones offer, we can combine our pedagogical powers to wield mobile tech’s virtues. Let's start with identifying our own mobile learning experiences and walk through easy actions to be more mobile-mindful educators.

As a result of the session, participants will be able to:

1. Broadly define “mobile-mindful” learning as a way to make learning flexible to students’ various learning and life needs.

2. Reflect on themselves as mobile learners and the ways they use phones to leverage mobile learning and ways they could intentionally increase their mobile-mindful learning.

3. Take the first steps in adding mobile-mindful learning options to their courses

Private Podcast, Session 7
Featured Guest: Dr. Bonni Stachowiak

Title: Get Curious About Curiosity

Description: When was the last time you got truly curious about something? Where you lost all track of time and were entirely focused on exploration and wonder. Let’s find ways to embed curiosity at the center of the learning communities we facilitate and deepen the opportunities for connection. We will explore:

1. Curiosity and its impact on learning, including how it affects attention, memory, and motivation.

2. Strategies for creating learning environments that spark curiosity and engagement, leveraging tools and techniques to foster wonder and inquiry.

3. Practical examples of how to integrate wonder and curiosity into curriculum design, class planning, and activities.

Private Podcast, Session 8
Featured Guest: Dr. Jason Gulya

Title: Hyper-Personalizing Education with AI

Description: Using Artificial Intelligence programs like ChatGPT, professors can hyper-personalize education at scale. In this session, we’ll cover:

1. How to tailor learning experiences to students using AI,

2. What this means for the future of learning, and

3. The ethical risks of this level of personalization.

In the past, hyper-personalization for an entire class was almost impossible. A professor might be able to tailor learning experiences for 5 students or 10 students. But once the professor had 20 or 100 students, it would become impossible. Now, our students are gradually learning to expect hyper-personalized classes, in which they have a great deal of autonomy and agency. AI is making that possible.

Private Podcast, Session 9
with Dr. Barbi Honeycutt

Title: Successful Starts: 20 Ways to Start Class, Engage Students, and Improve Learning

Description: When you teach using any learning-centered or student-centered approach, class time depends on student preparation and participation. Students usually don’t just “engage" . . . they sometimes need to warm up, ease in, and prepare their thoughts before they jump into an activity or discussion. Build this “warm up” time into the beginning of your lesson when students’ energy, attention, and curiosity (and sometimes anxiety) are at their highest.

In this private podcast episode, you’ll get 20 different ways to start class so you can maximize the first few minutes of class time, create connection, encourage engagement, and assess learning.