Faculty Focus Live

Lectures can be boring, without a doubt, but they don’t have to be. There are a variety of creative approaches for making your lecture more interactive and interesting for your students so that they stay tuned in and remember the content you want them to remember.
In this episode, we’ll talk about how you can start and end your lecture with bookends, how to incorporate lecture wrappers, and different engagement techniques you can try. We’ll also cover what a microlecture is and the process of creating one, and then we’ll go over effective Q&As to help engage students, buzz groups, and a snowball group activity.
Recommended Resources:

• Magna Online Seminar: How to Use Interactive Lecturing as Pedagogy of Engagement
• 20-Minute Mentor: How Do I Create and Implement Microlectures?
• Magna Online Seminar: Strategies for Making Lectures More Active, Engaging, and Meaningful

This episode is sponsored by the Teaching Professor Online Conference – network from the comfort of your living room.

As a STEM educator, how can you reimagine STEM education through a humanities lens? How can you use disruptive innovation to help students think more critically? And how can you teach critical reflection skills in an engineering or math course?

In this episode, you’ll consider how to make sure your perception of what students want out of their education aligns with what the student actually wants. You’ll go through speaking, writing, activities, and media modes of critical thinking. And finally, you’ll go through a disruptive innovation assignment to encourage students to think more critically and be more impactful in their design. This episode is filled with STEM-inspired information!
Recommended Resources:

• Magna Online Seminar: Reimagining STEM Education Through a Humanities Lens
• 20-Minute Mentor: How Can I Teach Critical Reflection in STEM Courses?
• 20-Minute Mentor: How Can Disruptive Innovation Impact STEM Education?

Today is all about the memory, from short-term to long-term. Do you still remember your childhood phone number? What about your high school fight song? Or the street you lived on when you were eight years old? We might remember some of these things, but sometimes we forget what we read this morning or what we ate for breakfast two days ago. Don’t worry, there are numerous proven ways to manipulate and develop our ability to remember!

So, what small changes can you integrate to help students remember your content? In this episode, we’ll start with the academic research on memory and how you can create a more successful environment so that you can apply cognitive theory in your courses. Next, we’ll go over strategies that you can incorporate to improve student learning and memory, such as semantic encoding, cueing, peer teaching, and more. And lastly, we’ll cover how microactivities are a great way to check in with students and move information closer to long-term memory.
Recommended Resources:

• Using Brief Interventions to Maximize Student Learning
• What Key Concepts Improve Student Learning and Memory?
• How Can I Use Microactivities to Engage Students and Improve Learning and Retention?

Have you ever had a student say, "Wow, this class is so hard!" or "These homework assignments are impossible!" Many students might even do their own research before taking your class, trying to determine what the workload might be or what the level of difficulty is. For this reason, it’s important to understand how you can communicate your definition of academic rigor and ensure your goals are aligned with the expectations of your students.

In this episode, we’ll go through the research on growth mindset. We’ll cover how you can foster growth mindset in your own course to improve learning and how you can make connections with your students to emphasize the task at hand, and then, we’ll cover specific strategies to inspire students to keep on trying even when it gets tough.
Recommended Resources:

• Magna Online Seminar: Aligning Student and Faculty Perceptions of Rigor
• Magna Online Seminar: Building a Tougher Student: Applying the Research on Intellectual Development
• 20-Minute Mentor: How Can I Manage the Disconnect Between Faculty and Student Perceptions of Rigor to Increase Learning?

Join us this year in New Orleans for the Teaching Professor Annual Conference from June 9 - 11. Give yourself something to look forward to at the end of your school year: a conference to network, learn, and refocus on why you got into teaching in the first place!

When it comes to public speaking and the constant butterflies your students may get from presenting, "it's all about trying to get the butterflies to fly in formation," David Sandler says.
We practice public speaking as a waiter at a restaurant, in a Teams meeting for a job, on a podcast, and yes, in front of a podium, which is what we may associate most with the word "public speaking," but every day we perform different acts of public speaking. Sandler says this is one reason why teaching public speaking skills to students is so vital. “The world loses out on whatever good ideas students may have to share. The ability to articulate what’s going on in your unique mind—it’s a life skill and that’s the paradigm I use to have people think about my course.”
From working on eye contact while reciting the ABCs to practicing walking up to the podium to a Q&A session, Sandler offers advice on how you can help students find their voice. Additionally, Sandler talks about how people tend to think they’re either an extrovert or introvert and the impact that may have on their speaking abilities, but there's been research on another category called an ambivert. An ambivert lands in the middle but leans toward a side of being an extrovert or introvert. Sandler reminds us that wherever you are on that "timeline," you can still be a good public speaker.
Recommended resources:

• NCSL On-Demand: Communication (for students)
• How Can I Extend My Research to the Public with a Podcast
• How Do I Include Introverts in Class Discussions?
• How Can I Improve My PowerPoint Presentation Skills?
• How Can I Teach Routine Courses with Energy and Enthusiasm?