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The following abstracts provide descriptions of my most recent keynotes and workshops. Of course, they would be modified to fit the specific needs of your faculty. Every presentation is executed in PowerPoint®with custom animation, music, videos, props, costumes, and lighting variations, as appropriate to the content. However, don’t let my theatrical approach mislead you into thinking the presentations are just for entertainment. (Actually they are, but I can’t say that here. Kidding!) They are far from that. The substance is the same as though they were delivered in a boring, monotone, coma-inducing, traditional lecture format by one of your colleagues. The presentations also contain a variety of interactive exercises using active and cooperative learning techniques. This combination of teaching strategies mirrors what I did in the classroom.
Hold on to your chair and fasten your seatbelt if it is so equipped. Also, if you’re smoking, STOP! This is a NO SMOKING Web page. (Disclaimer: In the pic to the left, Oscar isn’t really smoking the cigar.) Here are 14 abstracts to ponder:
HUMOR AND MULTIMEDIA AS TEACHING TOOLS FOR
THE NET GENERATION
This Net Generation of students (aka “digital natives”) eschew “talking head,” lecture, textbook-based teaching methods. How can we transform these traditional methods into a Broadway-type production with which your students will connect? They are super-savvy with technology and are experiential, participatory, visual, kinesthetic learners who crave interaction with other students and you. Their world evolves around music, movies, music videos, PC and video games, and TV programs. They function at “twitch” speed.
We need to leverage these multimedia sources as teaching tools in a learner-centered environment. This presentation will illustrate how to use music, movie clips, parodies of TV programs, games, and humor as systematic teaching strategies. These strategies can activate the students’ prior knowledge of the cultural elements in their world to generate motivation, interest, and attention to learn new material from our world. They draw on the theories of multiple intelligences by Gardner and Goleman, tapping 4–6 intelligences and a variety of learning styles, so EVERY student can learn in ANY subject. This approach can increase student success and retention dramatically. The use of humor and multimedia is based on research from neuropsychology, education, commercial advertising, humor, music, and communications. The results of 70+ studies over 45 years of research will be reviewed. Whether you’re a newbie or veteran, you will find new ideas to apply to your content to connect with your students and bring what students’ perceive as dead, boring content to life. As the lyrics to the hit song from Aladdin tell us, we are entering “A Whole New World.”
LENGTH: 1.5–2 hour keynote or 3-hour workshop.
HUMOR AS AN INSTRUCTIONAL DEFIBRILLATOR
Grab those paddles. Charge 300. Clear! “Ouch!” Now how do you feel? “Great!” Humor used as a systematic teaching tool in your classroom can bring students and deadly, boring course content to life. Since some students in every course have the attention span of goat cheese, we need to find creative techniques to hook them, engage their emotions, and focus their minds and eyeballs on learning. This Net Generation of students eschew traditional lecture, textbook-based teaching methods. New and innovative strategies for connecting with these students are needed. Humor can provide that connection. The strategies presented draw on the theory of multiple intelligences and the research from neuropsychology, education, commercial advertising, humor, music, and communications. The results of 70+ studies over 45 years of research on humor and laughter will be reviewed.
Ten evidence-based humor methods, divided into low-, moderate-, and high-risk categories, are described through verbal examples, music, video clips, and your participation. You will be able to easily integrate print humor into syllabi, handouts, examples, problems, case studies, discussion questions, project outlines, tests, course Web sites, wedding invitations, and parking tickets. Examples of live delivery humor include twisted proverbs, cartoons, multiple-choice items, top 10 lists, anecdotes, skits/dramatizations with music (TV, movie, and Broadway parodies), and “Jeopardy!” type reviews. Whether you’re a newbie or veteran of humor in the classroom, you will find new ideas to apply to your course. This presentation “boldly goes where no academician has gone before, maybe.” It will change your teaching life as you now know it.
LENGTH: 1–1.5 hour keynote or 3-hour workshop.
TOP 14 STRATEGIES TO EVALUATE TEACHING
Yup, that’s what I typed: 14. A virtual smorgasbord of data sources awaits you in this session. Student ratings are a necessary, but not sufficient, source to measure teaching effectiveness. As a professor or administrator, how many other sources can you name? How many are being used in your department? That’s what I thought. Well, this is your lucky afternoon.
This state-of the-art session will be a fun-filled, but critical, romp through 14 potential sources of evidence that are described in the faculty evaluation literature: (1) student ratings, (2) peer ratings, (3) external expert ratings, (4) self-ratings, (5) videos, (6) student interviews, (7) alumni ratings, (8) employer ratings, (9) mentor’s advice, (10) administrator ratings, (11) teaching scholarship, (12) teaching awards, (13) learning outcome measures, (14) and teaching portfolio. We’ll review the research, your experiences, and “best practices” with these sources.
These sources will then be configured into the form of the 360° multisource assessment model used in management and industry for more than 50 years (a.k.a. “whirling dervish” approach to faculty evaluation) and most recently in medicine and healthcare. Multiple sources of evidence are used to provide a more accurate, reliable, fair, and equitable base for decision making than any single source. This model can be used as part of your evaluation plan for an accreditation self-study.
You will work individually and in small groups to pick the best sources for formative decisions (teaching improvement) in your institution. You will then repeat that process for summative decisions (annual contract renewal, merit pay, promotion, and tenure). You will produce 360° models for those decisions. An overview of the next steps to develop the instruments and to solicit the total commitment of your faculty and administrators will be presented. You will exit this session armed with the tools to revise, build, or extend your current faculty evaluation system.
LENGTH: 1–1.5 hour keynote or 3-hour workshop.
DESIGNING RATING SCALES TO EVALUATE
TEACHING EFFECTIVENESS
What is the quality of the instruments you are now using in your college to evaluate teaching? You’re not alone. The problem is that flawed, inappropriate, and insensitive items or incorrectly structured scales measuring an instructor’s classroom behaviors are all too common in academia. They can result in poor and biased ratings of faculty and unfair and inequitable decisions about contract renewal, merit pay, and promotion. Faculty careers are on the line. Whether you need to select, adapt, critique, or write items for a rating scale, you should know the criteria for quality items.
This workshop will cover the following: (1) briefly review the step-by-step procedures for constructing rating scales; (2) examine the most common mistakes in item writing; (3) apply those rules to the scales you are now using; (4) survey the different anchor structures you could use and present the rules to determine the number and format of anchors; (5) apply those anchor options to your scales; (6) list the steps for assembling a scale into a form ready for administration; and (7) apply those steps to your scales so they are ready to blast off.
The scales you brought into the workshop should exit significantly improved so they can be brought before the entire faculty. Further, those of you who attend this workshop will have the scale construction skills necessary to spearhead other evaluation projects, such as peer observation, self-ratings, alumni ratings, and student interviews. There will also be time devoted to technical issues, including reliability, validity, and scale score interpretation. This is a workshop you can’t afford to miss.
LENGTH: 3-hour workshop.
PAPER-BASED VERSUS ONLINE
ADMINISTRATION OF STUDENT
RATING SCALES
Online administration of student rating forms has been considered and often rejected by institutions of higher education because of faculty’s preconceived notions of decreased response rates, increased rating bias, and lower ratings than paper-based administration. Research and practice over the past five years have addressed these concerns and other deterrents to adoption of online administration.
This workshop critically compares the two modalities according to 15 key factors. Special attention is devoted to online issues, such as response rates, administration time, standardization, accessibility, convenience, turnaround time, anonymity/confidentiality, and costs. The comparability of paper-based and online ratings is also examined in terms of the threats of response and nonresponse biases and the structured and unstructured item formats.
You will be able to assess the feasibility of addressing these issues at your own institutions. A variety of available software, such as WebCT, TestPilot, and Snap, will also be reviewed. After weighing all of the pluses and minuses, conclusions will be discussed regarding your institution’s conversion to an online system to administer student ratings.
LENGTH: 1-hour workshop.
HUMOR AS A COPING STRATEGY FOR
THE STRESSORS OF ACADEME
As a newbie or veteran professor, do you ever experience stress? “Nope!” You’re kidding. “Yup.” There seem to be multiple stressors in our academic careers, such as teaching load, hours of advising, student e-mails, student requests, publication demands, pressure to obtain external funding, a quadrillion meetings, an endless barrage of tasks, and a frantic pace. You will pinpoint your specific professional and personal stressors. Although the major ones cannot be eliminated, you have choices in how you respond to them.
Among the many “standard” techniques recommended in the research for managing or reducing stress, you will identify the five most effective. However, the simplest solution is (Are you ready? Isn’t this exciting?): Thorazine®. Kidding. Short of controlled substances, consider: humor and laughter. You will assess your own use of humor in stressful situations on the Coping Humor Scale.
Nearly 50 years of research on the psychological and physiological effects of humor and laughter on stress reduction and stress hormones will be summarized and then applied to your life. Several systematic humor strategies will be described that you can use daily to cope with your stressors. You will walk out of this session with concrete methods to “deal” with whatever or whoever is driving you nuts!!!
LENGTH: 1-hour keynote or workshop.
TOP 15 COMPLAINTS BY STUDENTS
ABOUT TAKING TESTS
(with suggested solutions)
After 75 years of research and experience in testing, why are there still so many complaints by students about test quality and the conditions under which they’re administered? A decade of course surveys by more than college 1500 students from all over the country has produced 15 most frequent complaints about course paper-based and online tests. These complaints continue to bubble up to the surface in just about every course. You will be able to propose your own solutions to these complaints.
Complaints include: “Some content on the test was not taught,” “Test content doesn’t reflect what I really know,” “Tests are too long,” and “Not enough time to finish.” Students raise issues that get to the heart of trust and respect of their instructors and the validity and reliability of the test scores. This session will scrutinize these complaints with your input and suggest strategies you can use to resolve them. WARNING: This interactive session could change your testing practices forever.
LENGTH: 1–1.5 hour workshop.
TOP 10 FLAWS IN CONSTRUCTING
MULTIPLE-CHOICE ITEMS
This session is designed to bring novice as well as senior faculty up to speed on 10 critical multiple-choice item writing rules (out of 43) used over the past 2000 years, give or take a month. It will begin with a Pretest of Testwiseness to determine your skill level in picking out item flaws. Then a top 10 list of multiple-choice test-item flaws is described and illustrated with semi-amusing items.
I bet you’re thinking, “Why are these 10 so important?” Great question! Answer: If these flaws are not corrected, testwise students can use them as clues to the correct answer, which can inflate their scores. While this practice may delight the students, it is psychometrically evil because it can decrease the reliability and validity of the scores.
At the end of the session, you will be given time to correct your Pretest answers before they’re scored. By the time you leave this fun-filled session, your mind and eyeballs will be able to detect even the most subtle and sneaky flaws in MC items. You will not only be able to write better items for your own tests, but you will also have the skills to write and review items for publishers of textbooks in your field and standardized tests. This session will benefit both you and your students. It’s not to be missed.
LENGTH: 1-hour workshop.
INJECTING JEST INTO YOUR COURSE
TESTS TO REDUCE TEST ANXIETY
Are you currently using humor in your tests? “NO!” What’s wrong with you? You should be ashamed of yourself. Not really. Most other instructors aren’t using humor either. The challenge is using it appropriately to reduce test anxiety to improve test performance; not to distract or annoy your students or to decrease the validity and reliability of the scores.
The research on this topic will be reviewed to provide a perspective on humor effects. It is clear from the inverse correlations between test anxiety and performance that students with high test anxiety perform more poorly on all exams than their low-anxiety counterparts. How can humor in the test reduce test anxiety in order to improve overall performance? We will brainstorm your answers to this question before surveying the techniques reported in the literature.
Four major topics will then be addressed: (1) incongruous descriptors under test title, (2) jocular inserts in test directions, (3) humorous note on last page, and (4) humor in the test items. The bulk of the time will be devoted to 8 strategies for using humor in multiple-choice, matching, and constructed-response items. Both content-irrelevant and content-relevant methods will be covered. You will be generating humorous distractors and items for your tests. Issues related to paper-based versus online administration are examined as they pertain to the various humor techniques. This session can make your tests “user friendly” and significantly change your students’ test anxiety and performance. It will be well worth your time.
LENGTH: 1–1.5 hour workshop.
CREATING TV, MOVIE, AND BROADWAY
PARODIES TO HOOK STUDENTS ON
NEW TOPICS
When you teach on any topic, how do you segue into the next topic? Do your students sit on the edges of their seats in anticipation of your introduction to that topic? That’s what I thought. Me too. Do you need a hook to grab their attention? Have I got a technique for you.
Drawing on your students’ multiple intelligences, even emotional intelligence, and individual learning styles, you can create a humorous visual image of a verbal or quantitative concept by performing a parody of a TV program, such as CSI, Masterpiece Theatre, or Scrubs; a movie, such as Lord of the Rings, Mission: Impossible, or Titanic; or a Broadway show, such as The Odd Couple, Evita, or Les Misérable. You can activate students’ prior knowledge of these cultural elements in their world to generate motivation, interest, and attention to learn new information. Basic topic concepts can be brought to life with simple demonstrations that will be deeply embedded in their memories.
This session will survey your experiences with these three sources, present pertinent theories and research evidence for the technique, and then describe a six-step process for creating a parody. A few parodies will be illustrated with participants, after which you will have the opportunity in small groups to develop your own parody and then perform it in the session. Now is your chance to become a star!
LENGTH: 1–1.5 hour workshop.
DETERMINING YOUR PURPOSE
IN AN ACADEMIC CAREER
Whether you are a graduate student thinking about an academic career or a senior professor still searching for just the right “position,” this session will provide a perspective and suggestions to help you answer your career questions. If you’re on a quest to tilt that academic windmill, your dream may not be as impossible as it now appears.
The process of determining your unique purpose begins with a self-assessment. Pinpoint your attributes beyond the knowledge and skills necessary to execute your job, including your special gifts and talents, imagination and creativity, and passion. Next, you have to conduct a career assessment. How can you use all of your attributes in a teaching, research, and/or clinical position? Why did you pick an academic position? Scrutinize your motivation.
Six suggestions are given to guide these decisions, including: use your gifts and imagination to separate you from the rest of the pack; put your whole heart into everything you do; and be resilient and persevere in spite of setbacks. An interactive segment on the commitment, sacrifices, rejection, and satisfaction of an academic career permits you to air your specific professional issues. Ultimately, the degree of match between your attributes and the job characteristics will determine your success at spearing academic windmills.
LENGTH: 1–1.5 keynote.
MUSIC AS A TEACHING TOOL:
FROM CLASSICAL TO HIP-HOP
ACROSS THE CURRICULUM
Can music improve learning in college courses? For nearly 40 years, music has been an extremely effective strategy to teach preschoolers academic content and life skills on Sesame Street. What lessons can we learn from that experience and the research that has been conducted?
The research evidence on music and the brain and the effects of music on learning is reviewed and critiqued. From that foundation, concrete guidelines are given for using available technology in the classroom, selecting appropriate music for any class, and applying music as a systematic teaching tool to improve learning.
Music is a best fit to the characteristics of this Net Generation of students and a valid approach to tap their multiple intelligences and learning styles. A dozen generic techniques to integrate music into teaching across the college curriculum are described, including the following: prelude to class; topic introductions; content grabbers; class demonstrations; collaborative learning productions; and class breaker.
These techniques measure 20 specific learning outcomes. Numerous examples are provided with step-by-step procedures for planning and executing the various techniques. The finale presents a challenge to all instructors to seriously consider music in their teaching.
LENGTH: 1–2 hour workshop.
TEACHING WITH VIDEO CLIPS:
TV, MOVIES, YouTube, AND mtvU
IN THE CLASSROOM
How can video clips be used to improve learning in college courses? To answer this question, a review of the theoretical and research evidence on videos and the brain is presented first. That is followed by an extensive literature survey of the uses of videos over the past four decades in college courses. Those reviews revealed a glaring scarcity of solid evidence on the effectiveness of video clips.
However, despite this lack of evidence, potentially they provide a best fit to the characteristics of this Net Generation of students and a valid approach to tap their multiple intelligences and learning styles. Concrete guidelines are given for using available video technology in the classroom, selecting appropriate video clips for any class, and applying those clips as a systematic teaching tool.
The use of clips can also attain 16 specific learning outcomes. Toward that end, 12 generic techniques with examples to integrate video clips into teaching across the college curriculum are described, such as the following: content and information; illustration of a concept or principle; presentation of alternative viewpoints; real-world applications; insert in collaborative learning activities; and motivation and inspiration. These techniques provide a wide open opportunity to test the technology for video clips in your teaching to furnish memorable learning experiences for your students. Your application of the technology is limited only by your imagination. This session will suggest a whole new world of strategies and challenges to your imagination.
LENGTH: 1–2 hour workshop.
MUSIC AND ANIMATION
AS A DEFIBRILLATOR FOR
DEAD POWERPOINT® WORDS
PowerPoint® “lecture” slides are really nothing more than an outline of text material with fancy bullet points flashed on a screen. Professors can then either read that material to their students and induce a coma or amplify upon those words to give them life. An easier strategy is to resuscitate the dead words by using music and animation as the defibrillator. Those words won’t know what hit them. They’ll be as surprised as you. Your students will definitely appreciate those moving musical titles, text, background music, etc.
This session will take you step by step through Sony Sound Forge Audio Studio 8 software to extract a music clip from any CD or file, convert it to wav format, and insert it into your PowerPoint® slides. I will demonstrate how the clip is synched with a variety of animation options for titles, lists, text, and slide transitions. If you have a lot of time on your hands AND you want to separate yourself from the rest of the academic pack, this strategy will jumpstart your PowerPoint® presentations and also add a theatrical touch. You will leave this session with the tools to transform your current slides into a production beyond your wildest imagination and turbo-charge your classes.
LENGTH: 1–2 hour workshop.
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