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Keynote or Plenary

The Tyranny of the Lecture, at College of Pharmacy, Ohio State University (Columbus, OH), Friday, April 3, 2015:
talk_2454.pdf
Most -- if not all -- of the important skills in our life are acquired outside the traditional classroom setting. Yet we continue to teach using lectures where students passively take down information. Instead, we should really focus on the assimilation of that information and shift the focus from teaching to helping students learn. Over the past 20 years, instructors world-wide have begun to adopt Peer Instruction to get students to think in class. With the advent of new technology the process can be significantly improved. A new data-analytics driven audience response system does away with... Read more about The Tyranny of the Lecture
Assessment for and not of learning, at Ohio State Academy of Teaching Conference, Ohio State University (Columbus, OH), Friday, April 3, 2015:
talk_2453.pdf
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 approach to... Read more about Assessment for and not of learning
Turning lectures into learning, at Turning Technologies User Conference (New Orleans, LA), Monday, March 30, 2015:
talk_2445.pdf
The world is abuzz with talk about "clickers" or classroom response systems. Clicker are not just simple polling tools, but can be used to achieve significant learning gains. In this presentation we explore using clickers with Peer Instruction, a pedagogy that encourages students to interact and solve problems during class.
The Transformative Impact of Engaged Student Learning — for Students AND Instructor, at 2015 Transformative Learning Conference, University of Central Oklahoma (Oklahoma City, OK), Friday, March 27, 2015:
talk_2414.pdf
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, at Exploring Change: Innovative Ways to Create Quality Learning Opportunities -- A Day of Faculty Enrichment, Northwestern Oklahoma State University (Alva, OK), Wednesday, March 25, 2015:
talk_2443.pdf
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
Educating the Innovators of the 21st Century, at TLT Symposium, Penn State University (State College, PA), Saturday, March 21, 2015:
talk_2412.pdf
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 promotes independent... Read more about Educating the Innovators of the 21st Century
Flat space, deep learning, at Annual Meeting of the Team-based Learning Collaborative (St. Petersburg, FL), Friday, March 6, 2015:
talk_2364.pdf
The teaching of physics to engineering students has remained stagnant for close to a century. In this novel team-based, project-based approach, we break the mold by giving students ownership of their learning. This new course has no standard lectures or exams, yet students’ conceptual gains are significantly greater than those obtained in traditional courses. The course blends six best practices to deliver a learning experience that helps students develop important skills, including communication, estimation, problem solving, and team skills, in addition to a solid conceptual understanding... Read more about Flat space, deep learning
Assessment: The silent killer of learning, at Pearson Innovation Summit (Vancouver, BC, Canada), Friday, January 23, 2015:
talk_2391.pdf
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 approach to... Read more about Assessment: The silent killer of learning
Why can students pass tests but fail at life?, at SSAT National Conference 2014 (Manchester, UK), Friday, December 5, 2014:
talk_2380.pdf
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 approach to... Read more about Why can students pass tests but fail at life?
Confessions of a converted lecturer, at 25th Anniversary of Bilingual Education in the Netherlands, Europees Platform (Utrecht, Netherlands), Wednesday, November 26, 2014:
talk_2136.pdf
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

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