Presentations

Breaking down classroom walls and setting learning free, at Lecture Breakers Virtual Summer Conference, Tuesday, June 4, 2024

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...

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Designing questions for student-centered learning (I), at AMISA 2024 Educators' Conference, American School of Asuncion, Asuncion, Paraguay, Thursday, March 21, 2024

Questions are the heart of evaluating and engaging students. In this workshop, we will work individually and in pairs on a case study to learn best practices for developing effective questions.

After participating in this workshop, participants will be able to
  • Evaluate questions and classify them according the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy
  • Revise questions to increase the level of Bloom’s taxonomy at which they engage students
  • Develop questions that more effectively engage students in a flipped-learning environment
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Innovating education to educate innovators, at AMISA 2024 Educators' Conference, American School of Asuncion, Asuncion, Paraguay, Wednesday, March 20, 2024
Can we teach innovation? Innovation requires whole-brain thinking — right-brain thinking for creativity and imagination, and left-brain thinking for planning and execution. Our current approach to education in science and technology, focuses on the transfer of information, developing mostly right-brain thinking by stressing copying and reproducing existing ideas rather than generating new ones. I will show how shifting the focus in lectures from delivering information to team work and creative thinking greatly improves the learning that takes place in the classroom and help develop problem-... Read more about Innovating education to educate innovators
Student-centered learning with Perusall, at AMISA 2024 Educators' Conference, American School of Asuncion, Asuncion, Paraguay, Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Learning is a social experience — it requires interactivity. Most students learn best by engaging with content, reflecting on it, and engaging with their peers. Moving pre-class reading assignments to an asynchronous and self-paced environment improves completion rates of these assignments. Perusall, a free social learning platform, permits one to move online the information-transfer that normally takes place in a lecture and make this information transfer interactive. In addition, the platform promotes intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to learn. In this workshop we will demonstrate the...

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Connecting the dots and setting learning free, at 14th Reinventing Higher Education Conference, University of Miami, Miami, FL, Thursday, March 7, 2024:
In my journey as educator, I have been connecting dots for several decades in response to various disruptions. Reflecting back on this journey, I realize the learning environment I have created in the last few years, is a world apart from the way I started my teaching career. Some of the keypoints that have emerged are the importance of pedagogy and assessment (not technology), the importance of optimizing the valuable face-to-face time we have with students, and the need to reimagine our learning spaces.
Confessions of a Converted Lecturer: From Teaching by Telling to Learning from One's Peers, at Active Learning Summit 2024, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, Thursday, February 15, 2024
I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material. Who was to blame? The students? The material? I will explain how I came to the agonizing conclusion that the culprit was neither of these. It was my teaching that caused students to fail! I will show how I have adjusted my approach to teaching and how it has improved my students' performance significantly
Confessions of a converted lecturer: From Teaching by Telling to Learning from Peers, at Active Learning Summit, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, Thursday, February 15, 2024:
Education is more than just transfer of information, yet in many classes, instructors mostly present material. Few students have the ability, motivation, and discipline to synthesize all the information presented. Yet synthesis is perhaps the most important—and most elusive—aspect of education. I will show how shifting the focus in lectures from delivering information to synthesizing information greatly improves the learning that takes place in the classroom.
Confessions of a converted lecturer: Teaching as Telling or Teaching as Questioning?, at Teaching Academy, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, Friday, February 2, 2024:
Education is more than just transfer of information, yet in many classes, instructors mostly present material. Few students have the ability, motivation, and discipline to synthesize all the information presented. Yet synthesis is perhaps the most important—and most elusive—aspect of education. I will show how shifting the focus in lectures from delivering information to synthesizing information greatly improves the learning that takes place in the classroom.

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