Topical Areas

Topical Area 1: SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING
• How to make pedagogical scholarship count at your institution
• How to start, if you’ve never done any before
• Assessment criteria — how to judge what’s good
• Alternative forms and formats beyond the refereed journal article

Topical Area 2: LEARNING
• Teacher roles when classrooms shift from teaching to learning
• Overcoming student resistance to learner-centered approaches
• Ways to make student learners more independent,
self-directed, and self-regulated
• More on what faculty need to know about learning

Topical Area 3: THE PEDAGOGIES OF ENGAGEMENT
• The mechanics of successful design and implementation of active learning, problem-based learning, cooperative learning, collaborative learning, and service learning
• Appropriate assessment methods
• Using these methods and covering content — tensions, temptations, and triumphs

Topical Area 4: TEACHING UNIQUE TYPES OF COURSES
• Teaching large classes
• Required courses
• General education courses
• Senior capstone courses
• Ways to make personal connections with and among students
• Effective ways to lobby for more and better institutional support

Topical Area 5: FACULTY GROWTH, RESILIENCE, AND CHANGE
• Effective programs for faculty renewal
• Individual activities that keep teaching fresh
• Faculty professional growth plans
• Faculty as instructional change agents and advocates for teaching
• Ways to avoid teaching ruts
• Innovative mentoring models that involve mid-career faculty
• Effective advocacy for teaching on the department, college, and institutional level

Topical Area 6: TEACHING AND LEARNING WITH TECHNOLOGY
• Technology as an instructional change agent
• New ideas and approaches that link technology to learning
• Methods that work for the technologically impaired
• Ways to assess technology based learning

Topical Area 7: UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH
• Getting started -- lessons learned in the school of hard knocks
• Reasonable and unrealistic expectations for undergraduates
• Helping undergraduates work with each other
• Creative ways to acknowledge and celebrate undergraduate success