Dr. Nilson’s keynote and workshop repertoire spans a wide range of faculty development topics. Most of the workshops listed below are half-day (three hours) unless otherwise indicated, but the length can be adjusted and the topic adapted to a keynote speech.
General Teaching/Overview
Top 10 best and top 10 worst teaching practices I have seen
Preparing to Teach
- Formulating assessable student learning outcomes and sequencing them to create an outcomes map
- Matching student learning outcomes with appropriate teaching methods and assessments
- Designing and developing a course around student learning outcomes
- Developing a graphic syllabus
Teaching and Learning
- Engaging student with interactive lecturing
- Engaging students in their classroom learning/basic active learning
- Engaging students in their out-of-class learning (reading)
- Integrating critical thinking into a course
- Preventing and troubleshooting problems in small-group learning
- Discussion management and questioning techniques
- Communicating with international students
- Enhancing long classes with activity and interactivity
- Motivating and teaching students to take good lecture notes
- The truth about learning styles (multimodal learning)
- Powerful learning techniques to share with students
- Pedagogically sound ways to use laptops in class
- Valuable websites for teaching and learning
- Choosing instructional technologies that help rather than hinder student learning
- Flipping your classroom
- Teaching students to be self-regulated learners (based on my 2013 book)
- Teaching students to defer gratification and avoid procrastination (90 minutes)
- Teaching and reaching today’s young students
- Teaching with the case method and problem-based learning (PBL) – for all disciplines or for STEM disciplines specifically
- Teaching students how to make concept maps, mind maps, and concept circle diagrams
- Teaching to how the mind works
- Teaching and managing large classes
- Getting students to do and comprehend the readings
Classroom Management
- Getting students to do the readings/prepare for class
- Reducing student/classroom incivility by projecting a commanding persona
- Responding wisely to student/classroom incivility
Assessment
- Writing objective test items that assess thinking skills
- Designing writing assignments and essay questions that assess thinking skills
- Improving student-peer feedback and student self-assessment
- Assessing/grading student work quickly and objectively with rubrics
- Setting and assessing program learning outcomes (best for departments or department chairs)
- Specifications grading (based on my 2015 book)
- Assessing experiential learning (simulations, role plays, service-learning/community engagement; internships, field work)
Career, Research, and Teaching Evaluation
- Quick-starting and managing the early stages of an academic career (for new/junior faculty in research-oriented institutions)
- Writing a teaching philosophy (including as a basis of a teaching portfolio)
- Measuring student learning in a course as evidence of teaching effectiveness (suitable to besubmitted for faculty review as a counterbalance to student ratings)
- Peer assessment of teaching for promotion and tenure (best for departments or department chairs)
- Becoming a more prolific scholar (best practices in scholarly writing and publishing)
- What student ratings do and do not evaluate about faculty members’ teaching