Keynote

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
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 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: 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: 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.
Advancing the Quality of Physics Teaching using Peer Instruction, at Long Island Physics Teachers' Association Fall Conference, Manhasset High School, Manhasset, NY, Saturday, October 28, 2023:
To improve learning — and therefore teaching — we need to pay attention to the human, social, cognitive, and aspirational sides of education. A first, key step in the process of improving learning is to shift from teaching by telling to teaching by questioning
Setting Learning Free, at 8th Unitek Learning Annual Academic Conference (online), Friday, September 15, 2023:
Teaching online during the pandemic provided a good opportunity to rethink our approach to teaching in any modality and discover that many activities that have traditionally been synchronous and instructor-paced, can be improved by making them asynchronous and self-paced. Some key points that emerged from the move to online teaching are that giving students more autonomy, emphasizing active learning, and promoting social interactions between students are key to better learning. Finally, recognizing that education is not a conveyor belt where ever student is identical, provides an opportunity... Read more about Setting Learning Free
Setting Learning Free: Lessons from Pandemic Teaching, at EDUCAMP 2023, Thursday, September 14, 2023:

Teaching online during the pandemic provided a good opportunity to rethink our approach to teaching in any modality and discover that many activities that have traditionally been synchronous and instructor-paced, can be improved by making them asynchronous and self-paced. Some key points that emerged from the move to online teaching are that giving students more autonomy, emphasizing active learning, and promoting social interactions between students are key to better learning. Finally, recognizing that education is not a conveyor belt where ever student is identical, provides an...

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Setting Learning Free: Lessons From Online Teaching, at OLC Innovate 2023, Nashville, TN, Wednesday, April 19, 2023:

The rapid transition to online teaching necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic has been a good opportunity to rethink our approach to teaching in any modality. Moving to an online format suggests that many activities that have traditionally been synchronous and instructor-paced, can be improved by making them asynchronous and self-paced. What may have seemed like a challenge at first, turned out to be a great opportunity to improve the quality of education.

Assessment and grading, at Professional Development Day, Episcopal Academy, Newtown Square, PA, Friday, March 24, 2023:

Why is it that stellar students sometimes fail in the workplace while dropouts succeed? One reason is that most, if not all, of our current assessment practices are inauthentic. Just as the lecture focuses on the delivery of information to students, so does assessment often focus on having students regurgitate that same information back to the instructor. Consequently, assessment fails to focus on the skills that are relevant in life in the 21st century. Assessment has been called the "hidden curriculum" as it is an important driver of students' study habits. Unless we rethink our...

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