The Teaching and Learning Symposiums provide UNL instructors opportunities to participate in conversations about teaching and learning, to hear from experts on improving student outcomes, and to network with colleagues around teaching issues. This spring’s symposium, “Motivation, Engagement, Innovation, and Evidence”, will be held on Friday March 3, 2017, at the Nebraska Innovation Campus Conference Center from 1 p.m. to 4:10 p.m.
Keynote speaker, Dr. Todd Zakrajsek, will draw on the work of cognitive, social, and psychological psychology to envisage ways to better construct meaningful learning environments for students that both motivate and engage them in the learning process. He will also consider factors that make classroom learning particularly difficult for some students and ways to mitigate those effects. Dr. Zakrajsek will facilitate a workshop immediately following the keynote so that participants can experience strategies that can be used in just about any class, better understand the research that supports the findings, and more fully understand the related learning principles that make the strategy effective.
Dr. Zakrajsek is Associate Professor in the School of Medicine and the Department of Family Medicine, Associate Director of Fellowship Programs, and teaching consultant in the Academy of Educators, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; program coordinator of the Lilly Conferences for College Teaching and Learning; and co-author of Teaching for Learning: 101 Intentionally Designed Educational Activities to Put Students on the Path to Success and The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony with Your Brain—two books that are grounding the symposium content.
The other two interactive breakout sessions also follow an expanded format that allows for more time to dive deeper into specific evidence-based teaching methods deemed of critical interest by past symposium participants (1) writing to learn and learning to write in effective, meaningful, and time effective ways in diverse disciplines and (2) best practices to meet the unique challenges inherent in teaching large-enrollment classes both in terms of classroom management and optimizing student learning.
For more information contact: Marie Barber, mbarber2@unl.edu. 402-472-4354
http://academicaffairs.unl.edu/events/teaching-learning-symposium-spring-2017