Schedule Overview

Welcome: Dr. Barbi Honeycutt

Session 1: Dr. Derek Bruff
Session Title: Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching

The changing circumstances of higher education require a form of adaptive teaching in which technologies are used to support both on-campus and online learning. As our toolbox of technologies expands, faculty and other instructors aren’t always sure how to integrate those tools into their teaching in meaningful ways. Determining what’s possible and what’s useful can be challenging. In this session, we’ll explore several teaching principles for matching technology to pedagogy, principles that can help us make intentional, creative, and effective use of technology however we teach.

Break

Session 2: Dr. Jose Antonio Bowen
Session Title: Teaching Change with a New Rs

Learning something new—particularly something that might change your mind—is more difficult than teachers think. A new 3Rs of Relationships, Resilience and Reflection can help us lead better discussions and reach more students. Without sacrificing content, we can design courses to increase effort and motivation, provide more and better feedback, help students learn on their own and be better able to integrate new information now and after they graduate.

The case for a liberal (or liberating) education has never been stronger, but it needs to be redesigned to take into account how human thinking, behaviors, bias, and change really work. Recent and wide-ranging research from biology, economics, psychology, education, and neuroscience on the difficulty of change can guide us to redesign an education of transformation and change.

Join us for a session full of science, practical tips and stimulating questions about how we should be designing our classes.

Break

Session 3: Flower Darby
Session Title: Small Teaching Online: Practical Strategies to Increase Student Engagement and Learning

Whether you’re new or experienced online faculty you can make small but impactful adjustments that significantly boost student engagement and learning. We’ll discuss brief learning activities, minor course design modifications, and simple changes to your interactions with online students that have an outsized impact because they’re based in learning science. Those teaching blended and in-person classes will gain teach-enabled strategies that enhance the in-class experience. Together, we’ll discover how rewarding online teaching and learning can be.

Closing Announcements

Welcome: Dr. Barbi Honeycutt

Session 4: Dr. Susan Hrach
Session Title: Embodied Approaches to Learning In-Person and Online

The pandemic has led many students and faculty to develop new respect for the expense of time, energy, and resources that make learning possible. Calling together a class of learners to meet in person should mean offering them an immersive experience that can’t be provided online. Likewise, we can maximize the impact of virtual time together and leverage the flexibility of asynchronous learning by attending to physical spaces and encouraging movement. In this interactive talk, I will introduce participants to the neuroscience of embodied learning, suggesting models for physical, sensory-enhanced activities in each modality.

Break

Session 5: Dr. Stephen Chew
Session Title: Navigating the Chokepoints and Pitfalls of Student Learning

For successful learning, students and teachers need to understand and know how to negotiate the challenges posed by the human cognitive system. These challenges can be classified into chokepoints and pitfalls. Chokepoints are constraints within memory that limit how much information can be learned, such as Working Memory. Pitfalls are common traps students are susceptible to fall into, such as multitasking and using poor learning strategies, that make them feel like they are learning when in reality they are not.

In this presentation, I will describe these chokepoints and pitfalls as well as research-based ways to negotiate them so that teachers can design their pedagogy more effectively and they can instruct students in how to learn more successfully.

Break

Session 6: Dr. Newton Miller
Session Title: Keep it “Pushin”:  Continuing Your Forward March of Progress in Uncertain Times

This session is an energizing message infused with nuggets of wisdom and motivation.  The message is designed to encourage hearers to be emotionally intelligent and introspective such that they not only understand but are able to capitalize on the dynamics of time and change.  In this session, Dr. Miller shares pertinent information about mindsets, strategies, and concrete techniques that are applicable in helping individuals continually replenish so they can walk as contributing and productive members in any environment to which they belong.

Break and Announcements

Welcome: Dr. Barbi Honeycutt

Session 7: Dr. Michelle Miller
Session Title: How to Build Memory Into Your Teaching – And Why You Should

Today’s savvy teachers tend to steer clear of memory and memorization in their classrooms, preferring to focus on higher-level thinking skills and applying knowledge in realistic situations. But do these goals have to be mutually exclusive? New research suggests that teachers really can have it both ways, using research-based techniques to strengthen both what students know and their ability to use that knowledge.

This interactive presentation invites teachers to look at memory in a new light, offering tools and techniques that help students build a solid base of knowledge efficiently, quickly, and with a side order of fun. Concepts presented will draw on the presenter’s new book Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World (West Virginia University Press, 2022).

Break

Session 8: Dr. Susan D. Blum
Session Title: Practicing Ungrading: Why and How, with some Real Talk about the Challenges--and Rewards. 

Why is it that increasing numbers of educators are questioning our conventional grading practices? Can we really do things differently? In this interactive workshop, Susan D. Blum works through some of the foundations for the practices bundled together as “ungrading” and then introduces some of the practices that she and others employ. There will be time for interaction, and time to reflect on potential challenges and ways to anticipate them.

Break

Session 9: Dr. Jenae Cohn
Session Title: How to Encourage Deep Reading Online

From assignment instructions to discussion forum posts and, of course, content-based readings, students in our classes are reading all the time. Yet we can sometimes take students' reading experiences for granted. We know that many students in higher education struggle with academic reading (Smale 2020, Carillo 2019, Sweeney 2018, Schneps 2013), and this struggle can become compounded when that reading is delivered on-screen.  In hybrid and online courses in particular, students have to use a variety of techniques to switch between reading instructional content, academic content, and social content.

In this session we will consider how we design reading experiences in informed ways to create meaningful, deep, and sustained reading practices with attention to reading media. We'll consider the different ways that students might read in their classes and why that matters. 

Closing Announcements