Great Lakes Conference on Teaching and Learning – Engaging Students, Teaching with Clickers

I’ll be giving the Sunday evening keynote at the Great Lakes Conference on Teaching and Learning hosted by Central Michigan University on May 23-25, 2010.  The keynote will address methods for increasing student participation and engagement in the classroom, including, but not limited to clickers.  Here’s the abstract:

Class Time Reconsidered: Motivating Student Participation and Engagement

Whether you have 20 students in your class or 200, motivating students to engage meaningfully with course material during class can be a challenge.  In fact, motivating students to come to class at all can sometimes be tough.  How can instructors make their lectures more dynamic?  What in-class activities help students grapple with tough questions-and which of these scale up well to large classes?  What out-of-class activities can prepare students to participate more intentionally during class?  In this keynote, we’ll explore some ways to rethink what you do-and what you have your students do-during class with the goal of increasing student attendance, participation, and engagement.

I’ll also be leading a concurrent session the next morning that will indeed focus entirely on teaching with clickers.  Here’s the abstract for that:

Teaching with Clickers: Engaging Students with Classroom Response Systems

Classroom response systems (“clickers”) are technologies that enable teachers to rapidly collect and analyze student responses to multiple-choice questions during class.  These systems can be used in a variety of ways to engage students in learning, particularly in large classes.  In this session, we’ll explore the kinds of questions and activities that make the most of these systems, including ways to foster small-group and classwide discussion, turn quizzes into learning experiences for students, practice more “agile” teaching, and make class time more enjoyable.

If you’re anywhere near Michigan, I encourage you to come to the conference!

Image: “Breaking Waves” by Flickr user Tom Gill / Creative Commons licensed